Cambridge

Back in Cambridge for another workshop. Funding cuts threaten the future of these writing visits. There is talk that if workshops go ahead again they may be in Kent on a campus site.

The beauty and the success of these trips is because they are held away from the normal goings on of University life. I fear for any future workshops held back in Kent.

This workshop could be the last of its kind and it will become just legend rather than reality.

Education for Change - Left Perspectives

Can education and the teaching of literacy change society? Gramsci and Freire believed that that it could. Giroux believes that forms of critical pedagogy can make a difference to students' consciousness and so seed a 'revolutionary ferment' within society - that people can begin to reflect upon their own lot and that of others and realise the need for the transformation of society.

Researching my book 'Literacy on the Left' has led me to read about pre and post-revolutionary Russia and how the leaders of that transformation of society saw the role of education. Was schooling and education part of the way forward for change for leaders like Lenin and Trotsky (pictured) in their building for the revolution?

Here is historian Sheila Fitzpatrick (1979)

As a revolutionary opponent of the Tsarist regime, Lenin invariably chose the course of political activism rather than that of gradual enlightenment of the people. He showed comparatively little interest in the efforts of Social-Democrat intellectuals to educate the workers in the 1890s and expressed contempt for the liberal enlighteners of the Committee on Illiteracy who were prepared to settle for gradual change within the existing political framework. (p.8)

This to me indicates Lenin's belief that 'events' were worth more than theory and a commitment to a materialist conception of history as contended by Marx.

Fitzpatrick goes on in her book to describe that after the revolution, Lenin was insistent that education was crucial and fought against what he called 'Communist conceit' that resented that workers had things to learn from the bourgeoisie. Lenin believed that people with education were more cultured than people without it. Workers and Communists who pretended that 'bourgeois' culture was inferior to 'proletarian' were simply confusing the issue: the basic cultural task of the Soviet state was to raise the educational level of the masses, and the basic task for communists was to raise their own cultural level by learning the skills of the bourgeoisie' (p9)

So Lenin saw education and culture as autonomous. When I discuss left approaches to literacy and education in the book, there is a clear distinction to made between more post-modern approaches which sees knowledge and culture as ideological and the views of Marxists like Lenin who took the culture and learning in the hands of the ruling class as being a reflection of the developments of humanity and knowledge - now to be shared with all.

Power, Postmodernism and Education

My paper called 'Class Consciousness, Power, Identity and the Motivation to Teach' has just been accepted in the Journal 'Power and Education'. I have not published in this journal before. It's good to see an end result to the research process.

I'm writing about postmodernism for my book 'Literacy on the Left' and the bitter disputes between those on the left who take a postmodern position to resistance and the Marxists. Of course Marxism is thought to be an over-simplistic deterministic metanarrative to the PMs.

Marxists perceive Postmodernist thought to have links to the doctines of the free market.

McLaren in a discussion (2001:36) says of postmodernists: ' They are embarrased by the language of Marxism and label you as hopelessly old-fashioned and naive. They wonder why, for instance, I would want to limit my reading audience by using Marxist analysis. Their revolution is basically an aesthetic one, and their revolutionary activity consists largely of going shopping' Phew!

Dave Hill (2001:40), in the same transcribed discussion says:

'Postmodernist analysis, it seems to me, with its stress on segmentation, differentiation, collective disempowerment and its telos of individuated desire, justifies the current marketised, neo-liberal project of capital'

I'm reading a good book at the moment to look at the issues in education that the Bolsheviks faced after the Russion revolution concerning 'left' education policy: Sheila Fitzpatrick's (1979) 'Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union'. I may blog about this in the future.

'

Conceptions of Childhood

I've been debating blogging about the two children who tragically killed a smaller boy in Liverpool, one of whom is in the news at the moment. I considered posting the two 'mug-shot' images of the boys on this blog which I saw again on the television. However, when I did, I recognised that it would be completely unethical to post them on this blog.

They are shocking images that are a stark reflection of British society's conception of childhood at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st Century. In the images they are clearly two young children being treated as if they are adult criminals being prepared for prison and the criminal justice system - thought of and represented as being equally culpable and responsible as any other adults going through that system.

Signs of Spring and Storytelling

Dare I say that spring is beginning to emerge from a weekend of rain and gloom?

Next week (Tuesday 9th March) June Peters will be telling stories and offering ideas for the use of storytelling in the classroom here at the University from 6pm. Ticket are on sale at the door in the Old Sessions House (Og46) or from me. There will also be an UKLA bookshop full of 'ideas' books from 5.30pm.

Do come along if you can

It is now coming up to a year since I started to write this blog. The first one was 23rd April 2009