Hey Love,
This is going to be a short post. I am very busy and stretched pretty thin: this quarter at college was not necessarily my toughest but it definitely required an extensive amount of dedication and heading to the office every day to jam out work. Luckily this is the last week, finals week, and I get to go home for vacation after this!
What I wanted to share today was a part of a submission that I did for the final for one of the classes which I’m taking which to me seemed important to make known to others. These are feelings which I have in response to a rather expansive and difficult to answer prompt, and we should see if they turn out to be more or less accurate aspirations which predict the future.
Anyway, hope you like it!
Bye,
Tate
| Describe the promised futures orienting your school’s design. What are you trying to do and how would you know that you achieved it? Include an argument for the public importance of your promised futures “why should the public pay for any efforts to fulfill your promised future(s)?”. What is there about your chosen futures that would be especially well-served by compelling everyone to gather together to learn? |
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| The guiding north star is democracy: the most desirable promised future isa calculus, always growing infinitely more close to a limit never reached. That limit? It’s a future where every single human is born with zero expectations placed on them, other than the wholly equitable (universal) cultural expectation to fulfill their own roles within society by existing rather than not existing. It is contingent on two things, one of which is very nearly a reality today andthe other that is not close to a reality today: sustainable, global basic need subsistence with close to zero human labour involved (almost autonomously), and an obliteration of the human maladaptation of contempt. Animals can’t contempt for things, they don’t have the capacity to feel such focused and irrational malice, nor target it at a single concept or construct quite like some humans can. It’s a maladaptation that came with our development of episodic memory: we began to remember the sun leaving us at sundown and from then on could only forgive its betrayal once we remembered that it came back last time; we learned contempt when Pandora’s box opened up and all things came out. If we can restore the liberty needed to free oneself of one’s own chains of contempt which narrows one’s world view and renders oneself a pragmatist, then we can free people from the way things are now. I firmly believe that we can, and that this is possible, and that liberty exists in material form which can be dispersed. It exists in measurable quantities in spoken word, proliferated art, mass publications, and everything else which humans breathe in and out (like contempt) in order to facilitate the passing of centuries. It is simply obscured by the overwhelming power which contempt possesses, to author our overall narrative as a species, given that it ordains oppression. But, we can overhaul this entire world if we continue Paulo Freire’s work of finding the lowest bar (those with the least educational privilege) of knowledge and knowing and raising it. I would know that we achieved the promised future I’ve outlined when children conceptualize school as 1) a place that everyone wants to go, and 2) a place made for them. Those sound like simple asks but the way we operate in schooling now is prioritizing that value second, only directly after the first priority which is the implicit disproportionate hoarding of privilege, power, and authority through the societal and generational restriction of educational access. We need to build our schools at the very least with those value priorities reversed, so that school is first and foremost designed with the intentionality of creating 1) a place where children want to go, and 2) a place made for children. This would result instead in a promised future where the value of school is a tautology because it creates value for children by creating value for children. That value is having a place to want to go, and place which is for you, so in many ways the manifestation of schooling as a practice we would want to continue would only be because we acknowledge that we as a society value giving value to people’s lives, so much so that we want to create a compulsory and universal institution which primarily serves that purpose. The public should want to pay for a global/society-wide institution which fulfills primarily this purpose because it solidifies the largest public importance, which is for every human being to feel worthy and belonging (if you were to ask Tate he would be of the opinion that this is not the only ends, but what these create, then, the means which fuel self-determination, which leads to creativity, self-expression, spirituality, and most importantly motivation to make things better); in the world where subsistence is no longer a threat to anyone, this is the only thing that would matter, and if we were to simply keep schools as they are, moving into that future, then a lot of Americans would be very confused in terms of desiring global subsistence if and when it became a matter of discussion (they might even be against it because they interpret it as a threat to the health of constantly expanding industrialization and exponential growth), because their values would be so obstructed by the implicit morals instilled in them by their schools which endorsed contempt and meritocracy and not globalisation. This is a dangerous potential that we should not try to meet. It would be more keen if American schools raised children guided by the north star of democracy and democratic learning, so that when the time comes they embrace the value of the diversity of other humans and urge forwards with globalization, when we (I’m not implying it is American developments which will bring it about) can guarantee basic needs globally. |
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