Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

although i sympathize with the desire to start your own alternative university or just “open uni” where it’s just about offering course work, there is something that’s skeeving me out about the whole idea as it’s being discussed.

i mean, I love JF, but I’m troubled by the desire to fire up coursework for the express purpose of easing your own troubled conscience. Really? This is about basically reproducing the same kind of schooling offered now, lecturer as font of wisdom, blahblah blah like an adult in Charlie Brown cartoon? Because, really, that’s not it.

There’s something missing. I’m not hearing a tone or attitude or something. Missing is an actual interest in students, the focus entirely on the content, the imparting of important knowledge is the focus. Students are empty vessels to be filled.

The idea that students have an ongoing life of the mind – knowledges and passions and experiences – seems absent.

Consider the story I just told in that post, about my question, “What is Culture?” In a traditional university setting, my question wouldn’t have been greeted with exasperation. It wouldn’t have been answered, not usually. It would have been sidestepped. Rarely would anyone expose to a frosh that the question they ask isn’t stupid or ignorant or even frustrating. What normally happens is a teacher is greeted with the question and doesn’t see it as a legitimate one but rather as an excuse , a diversion. They teacher will push you to work with the definition offered or used or will simply say, Here’s the course’s definition of culture.

But what a course that begins with the academic article problematizing the diversity of meanings of the word across different disciplines and lines of intellectual inquiry, nevermind competing marxist, weberian, durkheimian, etc. strands of thought. that is an approach that refuses to say, “this is settled. right answer; wrong. get it? got it? good? capiche?”

anyway, many errands to do today. i was just wondering if anyone else was troubled by the motivations behind teaching courses that seems to be about the instructors and not students. i guess there’s no way around that. to devote your voluntary time to something is to necessarily do so because you are getting something out of it for yourself. but i guess maybe it’s just that i feel that the concept of “student” hasn’t been interrogated, let alone “teacher”.