...I will only say that I learnt African 'primitives' much more than they learnt from me, much that I was never taught at school, something more of courage, endurance, patience, resignation and forbearance that I had no great understanding of before. Just to give one example: I would say that I learnt more about the nature of God and our human predicament from the Nuer than I ever learnt at home.
-E.E. Evans-Pritchard 1973 Journal for the Anthropological Society of Oxford
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Sunday, August 2, 2015
James Baldwin - A Talk to Teachers
“Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself,
and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave
that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education
in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if
I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize
that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A
society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that
society takes for granted. Now the
crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of
education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate
the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and
girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to
the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians.
“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”
read the rest here
source
“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”
read the rest here
source
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)