Teaching, ISA’s and the Pedagogy of Alienation
A really wonderfully insightful post over at Larval Subjects. I highly suggest anyone reading this blog to check it out. While the particular contents discussed deal with the issue of pedagogy, I think there is definitely a universal quality to the post. Here’s a short excerpt:
Back in 2002 when I was still a graduate student, I won a teaching fellowship that provided a healthy stipend and gave me additional teaching experience. Among the requirements of this fellowship, I had to attend a weekly seminar with other recipients where we discussed issues pertaining to pedagogy and the aims of teaching. We had endless discussions about the humanist tradition, the liberal arts tradition, and the aim of cultivating the person intellectually, civically, ethically, artistically, and spiritually.
Among the things I found most frustrating about these discussions was the way they seemed to disavow the institutional structure of contemporary universities, failing to acknowledge the place of the university in the contemporary capitalist world. It seemed to me that these discussions functioned as a sort of alibi, a certain willful blindness, a certain disavowal of the role universities serve vis a vis capitalism. And in being willfully blind this way, in telling ourselves nice, narcissistic stories about our aims, we perhaps end up reinforcing these very structures.