'the communication of knowledge is always positive. yet, as the events of may (68) showed convincingly, it functions as a double repression: in terms of those it excludes from the process and in terms of the model and the standard it imposes on those receiving this knowledge.'
meanwhile horsemouth has been following a trail trying to connect deschool-er ivan illich and subjectification guru michel foucault. he wanted to find foucault talking explicitly about schools (rather than merely tagging it on the end of a list of disciplinary institutions said to be producing a particular kind of power and knowledge). there are bits in the foucault reader (ed. paul rabinow) and an interview with some post-68 school activists in language, counter-memory, practice (quoted above). in j.g. merquior's foucault it is pointed out that there is no history of pedagological thought in discipline and punish because the key texts would probably have been rousseau's emile and pestalozzi, the new 'natural' teaching of the enlightenment replacing (or failing to replace) the 'pedagogy of surveillance' of the 17th century (as discussed by gary snyders's book that foucault quotes).
wheras rousseau is not much taught on teacher training courses (horsemouth is thinking of nursery school teachers here) pestalozzi is (it's where horsemouth first heard of him). (further up it is taught as a variety of approaches, functionalism versus humanism perhaps). but this rousseau/ pestalozzi is very much what teacher's think they do - the 'real' thing they do when they are not taking registers, making sure everyone is sitting quietly, leading structured activities, preventing allegedly 'unstructured' activities from drifting into chaos, marking etc. practically in the aftermath of may 68 discussing education directly might have dragged foucault into a dead issue, wheras by displacing these concerns in both time and space might have allowed him the distance to think about them properly. kids always complain about school as being like a prison - in this they are right - later, at college, the disciplinary effect is more in terms of the kind of knowledge produced, the kind that is useful to power.
jacotot does not make the list of enlightenment educational thinkers - his 'each-one-teach-one'' practice is everywhere but his legacy (officially) only survives in language teaching (where students are resistant to it, demanding to be taught by the teacher). teachers either see it minimally as a call for more groupwork etc. or they recognise the full egalitarian demand of it (as resurrected by ranciere) for the end of teaching the activity.
of course, as you would expect from a child of the middle class, horsemouth is an enthusiastic promoter of education, regarding it as a way up and out for the ghetto youth (or indeed suburban youth, or indeed just about everybody,'social mobility' as it was posthumously named). yet it seems it is increasingly failing to serve this function and the state is backing away from supplying it (or perhaps only monetising its supply). perhaps illich's diagnosis of the failure of education in latin american countries to lift up the poor is returning home to the first world, perhaps his diagnosis of education as the superstition of the industrial age is an idea whose time has come. perhaps educationnever did lift people up, perhaps horsemouth was/is just well enculturated.
horsemouth never quite knows what to do with long and sunny days. it's one week to the solstice and thereafter the machinery of the heavens goes into reverse (summer iz y goin' out as a friend once put it) and yet we will still be in the bright quarter of the year for another seven and a half weeks, not until 15 weeks will we be back at the equinox (and at that time horsemouth should be returning to work and whatever conditions may be under the new dispensation). then he will work through the darkness til the next spring equinox.
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