Universities should be free for students. Teachers should be paid a living wage and their jobs and safety should be protected. Universities should not be hierarchized as better or worse. Reading history, and the history of ideas and talking about social difference and differences of practice between people, cultures, thought, disciplines, eras, being (and so on) should be given more space, not less. Education is a right, not a privilege. The time and a special space to talk about how to make a more human, generous, habitable, livable world, ie one that is not murderous, disciplinary, controlling, violent in the name of profit or anything else, is a right not a privilege.
Were we to have an actual education system, one that did not require individual funds, one that enabled accountability, empathy and mutual transformation rather than superficial displays, it would not be possible to monetize the sub-standard grades of rich people.
For many reasons the collapse of the current education system as any kind of generator of thinking or learning is intensifying. I invite especially those of us who have worked and lived as adjuncts, or have multiple degrees but now, or at some other protracted time, no job, or who felt trapped by material and immaterial cycles of violence in the University, to think about what kind of place of learning we might want to create and build.
If there is to be a different world, learning itself will need a new shape, not one patterned from moving up in ranks, being evaluated, or being valued as rich and successful, or accumulating without giving empathy via being watched as a spectacle in some form of “fame.”
I want to ask: What didn’t we get? How can we help each other get it now?
(Photo Credit: Verso)
About Dora Bleu