Well, Im definitely thinking again...

We forget that as white people we also have traditional ecological knowledge. We forget that it isn't the race that's the problem, its industrialisation, living indoors, advertising, and capitalism thats the problem. We look to other cultures to solve our problems and we end up bastardizing and co-opting the same things that we mean to preserve and cherish. Its a western problem, there has to be western solutions, otherwise we just end up polluting other cultures with our collective fucked up colonial attitudes and colonizing decolonization. How can someone want to deschool? As a freakin graduate student? Really? Well then, quit school. That'll deschool you pretty well. How can you dictate for others what you yourself have already gone through and benefited from? Where does that come from? What does that do? And do you realize the grave responsibility you wield when you say that? My daughter grows up in a materialistic, gendered, clearly consumerist capitalist world. She does that because she HAS TO. If she grows up in the bubble of deschooling/homeschooling/selfschooling, she lacks the skills to deal with the “real world”. We forget that we are first social animals. If we don't make sense to our social groupings especially as children, we are maladapted to life on this planet. It creates grief and unhappiness. We are creatures of conforming. People who don't end up like Levi, shot by OPP for being unable to live in society. Someone who just wanted to be left alone.

Its astonishing how much grief has been racked up over the years. Grief of incarceration, grief of clear cut, grief of concussion and brain damage, maiming and dismemberment, grief of death in Chiapas, grief of squats evicted, losing people, losing touch, child abuse, seams coming apart on already tenuous experiences of life, vulnerability, susceptibility, anxiety that seemed so prevalent in that clan. Grief of loss of enthusiasm, wonder, life, energy, creation, creativity, all going up in smoke and flames and molotov cocktails, percussion bombs and tear gas canisters and beatings. Grief of brutal, brutal beatings sustained by gentle, gentle people. And grief caused by the realization that we experience so little of what so many other people experience that we think we are justified in a moral and righteous outrage when it happens to us. Grief of privilege.

Deschooling can only exist in relation to schooling. Otherwise all you create is a less educated person. A less educated person has less power to change things because they must necessarily spend more time surviving. To learn is to thrive.

Now for my bi-yearly contribution...

A stream of consciousness writing that was spurred by a class in Environmental Education. It's a challenging space for me to be in. It'll be good eventually, but its definitely me rubbing up against some former boundaries...

...This strange and fascinating experience of being on the other side. once told to quit school to avoid the hegemony of higher education, by people who then went on to do their masters and doctorates and law school, now I am facing these same people in their privileged ivory towers and claiming myself the same title of privilege that I once eschewed. You live long enough and you do play all the parts but Bookchin was someone I thought was long dead in my past (I hated the old bastard anyways). The anger that comes up when looking at a 6 page article infused with crap language that makes it inaccessible and therefore irrelevant to so many people and seeing for the first time that it was a pride of understanding and not an elitist attitude that I encountered so many times. Counter hegemony. I still don't understand exactly what that word means, and I wonder what happened to that guy that formed my first embryonic class analysis by making fun of the cop for not understanding his chalk graffiti in Kingston. My experience is steeped in, well, experience. I am a natural story teller, it is how I negotiate the world. I get it from my father who always, for every situation, “had a friend” when I was growing up, usually to convey precautionary tales of what I should and should not do. I believe in the concrete and the ordinary, things I can touch, I can see, smell, taste and hear. The privilege of directional hearing, being so easily able to identify and label sounds as if it were nothing, because it is nothing, absolutely nothing to us, something that takes the entirety of his concentration and fatigues him greatly we can do without thinking twice about. My cyborg, my man machine my reason to finally come to terms with technology and embrace rather than despise it. The reason why in my mind the answer to a technocratic society has to be a rather sheepish but emphatic yes. We need the computer, the phone, the screen to interface. The texting must go on, our relationship would be non existent but for IM. There is a reason to embrace or at least make peace with it.