Hi everyone
This is a blog in which Paul Rennie shares resources to help and support you in the work of U8.
BAGCD U8 provides an opportunity for you to reflect on the platform project work that you are completing in U7. This year, the platform projects begin with a shared theme of Education and the consideration of how we learn…That’s huge, but it is also something that we are all familiar with at a personal level.
This theme can be used to frame your project in terms of local conditions (micro) or in relation to a general consideration of institutionalised systems of learning in formal education (macro).
The institutional critique of education systems developed as part of the 1960s counter-culture, and since. A good starting-point for thinking about the scale and scope of this issue is Deschooling Society (Illich 1972).
Here is a link to this important text, in PDF format, available on the monoskop website
https://monoskop.org/images/1/17/Illich_Ivan_Deschooling_Society.pdf
Obviously, Illich wasn’t the first, nor the last, to consider this problem. You could go back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and his radical belief in the child-centred potential of natural learning.
The Anti-University of London was a short-lived experiment in free education. Here is a poster for the Anti-University. I really like the idea of there being no formal requirements…
Check out the faculty list if you have time. These were interesting personalities. The Anti-University was almost immediately superseded by the Open University, which provided access to higher-education via distance learning and TV lectures.
Paul and Sakis each gave slide presentations about the historical background of this debate about education, and described some of the many ways in which this has manifest itself.
One of the points Sakis made was that education is, in its institutionalised and systemic forms a powerful expression fo ideology.
Reading
Here is a short text by Stuart Hall, in which he describes various the ways in which language provides for various systems of representation. This is an important text and you should use it as a foundation text for your reflections about systems of practice associated with platforms.
Hall is writing about language. But what he says, can be applied to systems of image making and cultural formation generally…
One of the issues that Hall identifies is that our systems of representation are intrinsically unequal…and this suggests that a highly developed cultural hierarchy exists – a spectrum between high and low cultures – The status of these various forms of knowledge has been described by Pierre Bourdieu, as cultural capital…This is a elaboration of the semiotic distinction between what things look like, and what they mean. We introduced you to that in stage one.
Task
Illich, Hall and Bourdieu provide a platform from which you can explore the ideas in your platform projects. Please start to identify and collect further useful resources…these can be books, but they can also be images and films. Anything you think is useful and interesting.
We want you to begin putting together a bookshelf of resources to share with you platform colleagues…As Rousseau suggested, natural learning is an exciting adventure of discovery. U8 is just an opportunity for you to share your excitement with us.