We tend to believe that our society promote sex. It certainly rubs it in our eyes, in our minds; but like anything human, society can say one thing and do another. Is sex promoted? No... it is used. Sex has always been used. It has been used most often for a consistent reason: power. Whether it is the power to begin wars (Troy) or end them; the power to control your population; or today, the power to get people's money, the source of power today.
So sex is still used. It is used more blatantly than ever, one could say. Certainly, the standards by which we hold each other have never been more relaxed. Bill Hicks once described the ideal advertisement as a naked woman spreading her legs for you, accompanied with the words "drink coke." I'm sure I will see it before the inevitable reaction occurs. People can get away with all manners of dress, deportment and discussion without repercussion, though this may now be changing, as can be seen in the re-adoption of school uniforms which is now going on.
Sex, however, remains suppressed. Despite the best attempts of artists for many decades, sex is still largely taboo. You can speak of it with your adult friends, but certainly not with children, you pervert. It is certainly not something to be done in public, and obviously not for money. All of these restrictions are debatable, as are their effects, for good or ill. What is perhaps not examined, however, are the effects of the disconnect caused by this affair of promotion and suppression.
Sex is pervasive in the culture. However, are we talking about "real" sex? Not usually. Often our first exposures to sex (the cinema), are "Hollywood." Much as we ridiculed "Hollywood" displays of war, so we should with sex. First of all, our cultural activities make it seem that sex is easy. This is not new - kids are forced to study Romeo and Juliet, a play about young love over 400 years old. The formula remains unchanged: two people meet, they fall in love, and consummate their relationship, either within a few minutes or hours or pages. Even a film which is honest enough to try to show the progression of a relationship over the course of "years" can only do so in a matter of minutes. It is the minutes that count, especially to people with an undeveloped sense of time, not to mention an undeveloped capacity to understand consequence.
People think it is common for people to hook up. They even believe it is common for some people to hook up frequently, as though they were macho or slutty. The reality when confronting the good old hook-up story is that these stories are all culled from a period of years, and when those handful of stories are put in the context of thousands of days, an interesting thing happens. You realize that these stories are not so often told because they are "awesome," as the first impression would have you believe, but that their rarity makes them more "awesome."
The most obvious critique of "Hollywood" love is its apparent display of the perfect relationship. The gullible are left to believe in the prince charming, or the princess. The fear is that when people encounter strife, strife being a centre of the human condition, they are trained to run away, to seek out that perfect relationship. There is likely some credence to this, but I doubt it is as common as people believe. Certainly people are averse to risk and strife - but that is a by-product of success more than cowardice, though they can go hand-n-hand. Divorce rates are as much a symptom of strife-aversion as it is a plague of choice. Choice does not come from the movies, it is an ideology of the culture at large.
Maybe I will finish this later. I doubt it.
Tuesday, 21 January 2014
Tuesday, 14 January 2014
Marxist Historiography of Education
Now having entered my last semester of an education degree, I have finally discovered an underlying Marxist strain towards the historiography of education. Now, a very right wing, or moderately right wing individual within our programme would never have had any problem identifying the bias of the programme. However, it takes a while before one realizes just where this bias comes from. It is not necessarily from the social justice aspect of the programme, and the teachers themselves. Indeed, social justice is an issue embraced across the political spectrum (it is a matter of individuals and leaders as to whether they support it, and of course the manner of this support can often differ greatly). Rather, the basis of this bias lies in history.
We are repeatedly told that our current pedagogy is an update and improvement on the old "Industrial" model of education. People were all taught the same thing in the same manner, with the idea that this way was best. When defined in this manner, the term "Industrial" is rather fitting, and variably true. However, what is the origin of the term historically?
Public education really began during the beginning of the Industrial period - and hence another reason why the term could be fitting. A professor recently exposed that education was promoted because it was realized that a more educated workforce, be it literate or numerate, could produce more wealth. Therefore, the nature of the education system throughout the Western World was based around the promotion of Capitalism. Such an interpretation could only be viewed as Marxist.
This is only more true because of all the facts that such an interpretation overlooks in pursuit of this line of argument. It ignores, first of all, that the basis of education in the West had nothing to do with economics. It had everything to do with Nationalism, that Napoleonic bastard. Before industrialization had taken hold of even most of Europe, no less the world, nationalism had taken over.
It is worth remembering that most of Europe's states were formed during the 19th century. The issue they had to confront was the fact that simply living within a geographical expression didn't make you a German, or Italian, or French, or British. People spoke different dialects and languages, and observed different religions, and had often experienced different histories and economic experience. The issue was to unify the country. One could do it through force (as was often done in the South of Italy), but it was seen as a much better long term fix to educate the next generation.
A conspicuous example of this process is outlined in the book, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Romania was a largely agrarian, pre-industrial state (even more so than its neighbours). Nonetheless, Romania pursued an extensive educational policy as a means of unifying a country that had been turned into an empire following the First World War. Here, teaching one way meant teaching all people in Romanian, teaching them Romanian history, and so forth. If you were Ukrainian, you lost your schools. If Jewish, you gradually began to lose your civil rights.
To do thing one way in education can be seen as "Industrial" but it is in reality a policy of assimilation. Schools were the first step in forging a great, strong state. If industry came as the result of these practices, perhaps all the better. However, it is to be remembered that in Interbellum Europe, many popular movements, in spite of such educations, emphasized a return to the land and promotion of the peasantry, be they the Nazis (in pursuit of a pure, untainted Germany), the Fascists, the Estado Novo, Franco's Spain, or the Legion of the Archangel Michael.
Indeed, it should be viewed either with irony (or is it too appropriate) that the only state that actively tried to force industrialization in Europe was also the state to name the Industrial model as a critique of its enemies. The Soviet Union, hypocritically as it so often was, lambasted its foes for a system it not only embraced, but adhered to more than almost anybody else.
We are repeatedly told that our current pedagogy is an update and improvement on the old "Industrial" model of education. People were all taught the same thing in the same manner, with the idea that this way was best. When defined in this manner, the term "Industrial" is rather fitting, and variably true. However, what is the origin of the term historically?
Public education really began during the beginning of the Industrial period - and hence another reason why the term could be fitting. A professor recently exposed that education was promoted because it was realized that a more educated workforce, be it literate or numerate, could produce more wealth. Therefore, the nature of the education system throughout the Western World was based around the promotion of Capitalism. Such an interpretation could only be viewed as Marxist.
This is only more true because of all the facts that such an interpretation overlooks in pursuit of this line of argument. It ignores, first of all, that the basis of education in the West had nothing to do with economics. It had everything to do with Nationalism, that Napoleonic bastard. Before industrialization had taken hold of even most of Europe, no less the world, nationalism had taken over.
It is worth remembering that most of Europe's states were formed during the 19th century. The issue they had to confront was the fact that simply living within a geographical expression didn't make you a German, or Italian, or French, or British. People spoke different dialects and languages, and observed different religions, and had often experienced different histories and economic experience. The issue was to unify the country. One could do it through force (as was often done in the South of Italy), but it was seen as a much better long term fix to educate the next generation.
A conspicuous example of this process is outlined in the book, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Romania was a largely agrarian, pre-industrial state (even more so than its neighbours). Nonetheless, Romania pursued an extensive educational policy as a means of unifying a country that had been turned into an empire following the First World War. Here, teaching one way meant teaching all people in Romanian, teaching them Romanian history, and so forth. If you were Ukrainian, you lost your schools. If Jewish, you gradually began to lose your civil rights.
To do thing one way in education can be seen as "Industrial" but it is in reality a policy of assimilation. Schools were the first step in forging a great, strong state. If industry came as the result of these practices, perhaps all the better. However, it is to be remembered that in Interbellum Europe, many popular movements, in spite of such educations, emphasized a return to the land and promotion of the peasantry, be they the Nazis (in pursuit of a pure, untainted Germany), the Fascists, the Estado Novo, Franco's Spain, or the Legion of the Archangel Michael.
Indeed, it should be viewed either with irony (or is it too appropriate) that the only state that actively tried to force industrialization in Europe was also the state to name the Industrial model as a critique of its enemies. The Soviet Union, hypocritically as it so often was, lambasted its foes for a system it not only embraced, but adhered to more than almost anybody else.
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