[Nettime-bold] Re: the ass between two chairs

[bc <human@electronetwork.org>]

  appreciate the focus on the current educational system, its
  dynamics, and possible ways to approach its change. yet i
  confess to getting lost halfway upon the Marxist rationale.

  a few thought-feelings on the existing educational system:

  - inherited (a-priori) empiricism which is often outdated.
  - more accurately, higher 'training' than education/learning.
  - open questioning does not exist, nor does the risk of failure.
  - conducive to factory/machine-intelligence, standardized testing.
  - the University is a closed system, being 'education'-in-itself.
  - the privatization is based on body-labor, and mental divisioning.
  - to argue/reason based on the material body limits the outcomes.
  - freedom is not based on the body of private property, also mind.
  - mental IP, intellectual property, is formatted and owned by .edu.
  - students give up their individual rights to participate in the whole.
  - the herd is thinned by failures, the succeeders goto top of pyramid.
  - the private property of the mind precedes that of the body proper
  - individuals being privatized is a function of language/logic/identity
  - the subject, the person, can be personified away by specificities
  - the universality of education, learning, questioning remain in ruins
  - disciplines divide and conquer knowledge through political-economics.
  - grand inefficiencies exist in monopolistic data hoards, to reduce risk.
  - Enronomics applies to government & educational accounting systems.
  - closed-system 'free markets', based on corruption, maintain order.
  - freedom to think and question are limited, e.g. draw inside the lines.
  - there is an upper-limit to bureaucracies where no innovation occurs.
  - certain 'jobs' and 'careers' require certain skills, training, beliefs.
  - open questions/conclusions does not an educational handmaiden make.
  - in both mundane and extreme edges, facist system of authority breed.
  - public debate, outside academic cloisters, is a rare-bird phenomenon.

  question:

  is it possible to have a 'free' university, for learning/questioning,
  where career is secondary to wondering about the world's mysteries?


  1. myself, i am not certain. there seems to be an imperative that has
  become the reason for the university to exist, and in the USA, it is
  propped up economically by corporate funding allowing it to continue
  in its ways (without which, it may fold due to being UN-economic).
  meaning to say, the current university system, world-wide if one
  can assume so, is meant to 'train' within certain limits, assuring
  with some certainty that those with skills and resources will be
  able to succeed and recover their indentured monetary status, and
  join the larger economic systems, to then compete in the free market,
  absurdly sic as that is. in terms of authority and control, the system
  is more militaristic and theological, true-believerism, than  it is of
  a traditional philosophical ideology. capital does not describe it all,
  it lacks certain dimensions, the social capital. it could be, at least.
  what about the mind, and then, the machinery it relates to. and what
  about the group mind, noosphere and all the subjectivities that lead
  so many into religion and some form of organized belief systems of
  one sort or another. a way of knowing, a way of seeing, understand-
  ing, or believing. perceiving. what if people are needed by industry
  to go to college to plug-into the megamachine of bureademocracies,
  and in turn, the standardized training and testing of the modernist
  machinary is, under the illusion of Origional Equipment Manufacturers,
  that is, the proprietization of micro and macro knowledge-economics.

  2. to know, to imagine, to consider, to question, to think, is a mental
  and-or mental-physical activity. to communicate takes physiology to
  some extent, but also processing, and learning, and adaptation to a
  new idea of how to perceive. but what if, at the core of this process,
  before ever setting foot on that slippery night-shift factory floor, a
  mental privatization has already put up the fencing, boxing one inside
  of the social capitalization of the economic-political world-internation?
  is it possible that to say, I believe, differs from, i believe? in English,
  a proper or distinct noun (person), versus an indistinct, decoded ID
  of the individual person as common person, not unique individualista?
  moreso, what does freedom mean to a private mind, versus a public
  one that is already many in its means and its ends? does this public
  mind, people, humans, not men or women even, at the macro-level,
  do these people need a free university, and can this place of freedom
  ever bring them into a recontextualized university, which is about
  learning for learning's sake, questioning with the risk of failure in
  order to learn's sake? or is this the antithesis of the University as
  a fast-track to a livable worklife? personal satisfaction at being a
  public individual, with no economic future pre-engineered by the
  rote statisticians of industrial mindsetting and edu.stage coaches.

  3. still, before knowing, there is that creepy indoctrinated INTEL,
  intellectualism, 'being smart' like Bill Gates or any of the Industry
  Leaders, Ken-Lay-like, Enronesque, real-smart, to make profit,
  money, have power, and then to control what is known to be true.
  what is it to be an idiot, in this globally-warmed village, when
  the smart people are corrupt and going to jail, where the people
  who may win, succeed, take the easy route, and make judgements
  on a person's abilities based on their credentialism, encrustified.
  fools, hunchbacks of damn-notorious visions, terrorizes smart-
  people, change does, risk, open societies, and freedoms to dream.
  it is worse than knowing one does not know, as one can then give
  themselves to the reassurance of the ultimate deities, that some
  things are beyond-question. the only problem with it being that
  the question was never asked, but preceded thought with action.

  [one guess is that it may not be possible, in situ, to remake the
  idea of the university, recontextualizing it in the manner stated.
  as the state of affairs, exo- and internal, are a-prior privatized
  through language, (he said this, mankind is this, history is that),
  logic (either this or that, to know with certainty there can be no
  paradox, ie, Objectivism), and identity (i am woman, i am man,
  i am gender, i am sex, i am race/creed/color/ethnicity/belief,
  we are private, they are not us, our futures divide us in autumn].


  bc

  automadness // terrors of electromagnetic research
  http://www.electronetwork.org/works/automadness/

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold