Mar 8, 2011 0
This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award. http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/
For more information on Sir Ken’s work visit: http://www.sirkenrobinson.com
Apr 13, 2010 0
Translated by Aileen Derieg
“Welcome to the Machine!” This was the way the university welcomed students in a satiric drawing by the German artist and writer Gerhard Seyfried in the 1970s.[1] Taking a closer look at the drawing, however, the “machine” turns out to be more of a factory, because it arranges the automated mass production of the specific commodity of knowledge in the universities. Seyfried’s knowledge factory also has elements of a ghost train (with all kinds of horrifying surprises for those riding it), a flipper device (the students as flipper balls being launched and propelled), a three-tier Nuremberg funnel (although knowledge here is funneled in – as it should be in a factory – in masses and anonymized). These kinds of illustrative transfers of central components of the factory as fordist core institution to other institutions have always been widespread. Yet what does it mean, when even at the transition to post-fordist modes of production the metaphor of the factory still continues to be applied to the university? Read the rest of this entry »
Feb 9, 2010 0
The phenomenon of the “tusovka” as a local form of being for the artistic and intellectual community may seem unique, but it appears exceptionally limited in the context of its epoch, especially if one understands “epoch” as the specific disposition of significance or significances whose sharing makes A and B into contemporaries. In reality, each “epoch” gives rise to its own models of communication, its own models for socializing creative labor, using the failures that discredit the experiences of the past as its point of departure.
The phenomenon of the “tusovka”[1] as a local form of being for the artistic and intellectual community may seem unique, but it appears exceptionally limited in the context of its epoch, especially if one understands “epoch” as the specific disposition of significance or significances whose sharing makes A and B into contemporaries. In reality, each “epoch” gives rise to its own models of communication, its own models for socializing creative labor, using the failures that discredit the experiences of the past as its point of departure.
Dec 28, 2009 0
This history lesson comprises two texts proposed to be read together: “Education After Auschwitz” by Theodor Adorno and “What Might Education Mean After Abu Ghraib: Revisiting Adorno’s Politics of Education” by Henry A. Giroux.
Adorno’s text was firstly presented as a radio lecture on 18 April 1966, under the title “Padagogik nack Auschwitz.” The first published version appeared in 1967. The English translation appears in Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Giroux’ text was firstly published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 24 no. 1, 2004. The article submitted here is a revised and expanded version of an article that appeared in Cultural Studies vol. 18 no. 6, 2005. It is available online at: http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/
You can find PDFs of the texts here:
adorno-education_after_auschwitz
giroux-education-after-abu-ghraib
Nov 23, 2009 0
Among the many didactic and pedagogic demands from ‘art’ was the role performed by ‘verbal’, ‘visual’, ‘acoustic’ or ’scenic’ in upbringing, education and, certainly, entertainment of the free citizen of Europe from the Renaissance to the late Enlightenment and early Romanticism. Nevertheless, the XVIII century age of Enlightenment was fixated on devising complex practices of upbringing, education and entertainment addressing the young and the aging by way of models which are, naturally, liable to Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘biotechnology’[1]. Rationalization of practices of management – namely, of shaping human lives – was effective in converging upbringing (discipline), education (appropriation of knowledge and identification with particular lores or skills), and entertainment (regulation of life in regimes of leisure by way of anticipated, desired or sanctioned freedom). For instance, the XVIII century visual didactics (upbringing, education, entertainment) was not aimed at exclusive tutoring of artists or intellectuals, but at upbringing, education and entertainment of the common citizen who found himself in between contradictions of the private and public ‘employment’[2] of reason. In other words, during the age of Enlightenment ‘education through art’, or education in aesthetic regimes of representation of optimal social reality, had become a means of effective instruction on modes of human life in its ordinary form, as a new and fundamental cosmogony of modernity. Various ‘visual products’ (paintings, engravings) efficiently (this is the rhetorical component of the archi-matrix of mass media education) mediated different aesthetic situations: human dialog, dress codes, difference in public and private behavior, private closeness or public distance, age divides, casting of gender roles in private and public, or sexual modes of behavior etc. In fact, ethical and political rhetoric – rendered as spiritual and institutional visuality – lead the ‘exodus’ of mankind[3] from its ‘immaturity’. But this ‘exodus’ was devised on cunning instruction to follow orders obediently (‘Don’t think, just follow the orders’ – coming from family, father, master, teacher, commander, employer), emerging as aesthetized practice of education for the sake of tutoring through entertainment in leisure time – during the ‘empty intervals’ reserved for relaxation from the ‘full intervals’ of public deeds.
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