hi frances,
"Frances Bolton (PHI)" wrote:
I tend to be a bit suspicious when I hear leftist academics insisting that teaching makes them a part of the working class. I wonder if they are perhaps making this claim simply to deny their own privileged position.
i'm suspicious too - best to be suspcious of most things, especially our own presentations in a context where to be working class is often defined as a mark of authenticity, immediate access to the truth of the matter, etc.....
i wouldn't say teaching makes anyone anything for sure, in the same way that the distinction b/n manual and intellectual work doesn't necessarily - or just doesn't - parallel a distinction between classes.
anyone remember where in 'theories of surplus value' marx talks about teaching and whether or not the teacher is a productive labourer?
angela ------------------
Didn't Yoshie start this business about teachers are workers too?
Do academics really not understand why they are completely rejected from the ranks of the working class? The hint is in here:
"part of the reason there is a real hostility to academics, one that is taken up gleefully by the right, is perhaps a resonance of a history in wherein the division between manual and intellectual labour did actually conform more closely to a class distinction (here class in marxian rather than weberian terms). but that resonance cuts both ways, me thinks. there is a real sense in which many academics immediately begin their thinking from the prspective of a surpervisory or managerial position. and, this managerialism is i think not particulalry in evidence amongst less 'traditional' disciplines or theoretical adventures- economists tend to do it, sociologists.... . it does pervade a certain kind of marxism though, one where the masses are seen as 'over there' and something to be manipulated, steered, led, etc." (angela)
The whole purpose of the academic spectrum is to reproduce the socio-economic and cultural spectrum of the society at large. From the elites and managerial classes at the top, with small business, public sector and civil service in the middle and then on downward to the laid off, the immigrant, and the pregnant teenager trying to finish her GED. The reproduction is complete and completely horizontal with all the cultural, political, social, economic, and psychic lives of power retained and then certified. What's the mystery?
>From a working class sensibility teachers and schools are the
establishment and are at least during school years the primary means
of institutional oppression.
Here (US, SF Bay Area), there is a whole system of tiny little steps and nuances that incrementally ascend and define the academic system. Let us recount the steps and ways.
At the absolute bottom are arts and recreation, English as a second language, the GED, basic literacy, job related office and trade apprenticeship programs. Some of these are run at the high schools at night and some are part of the city or community college system. Just barely above that tier come the community college para-legal, para-medical, para-technical and para-professional certificates. Then above that are the various city college academic lower division certificates in humanities and sciences. These are supposedly transferable to the state college and university systems. Then again an entire state college system is erected that produces the lower professional and civil service castes: teachers, police, social workers, general lower management ranks. On the next tier up but not quite the very top, is the public university system. Of course the university system is an entire world in its own right. It has so many shades of difference in rank and privilege only the resourcefulness of an entire monastic system of feudal scribes can enumerate them all. And, of course they are kept very busy doing just that. These are the hundreds upon hundreds of administrators and their incomprehensively complex and interlocking webs of authority which seem to outgrow their ever expanding facilities and budgets in ever tighter and tighter cycles of endless renewal. Within this inner castle, a academic fortress within the academic fortress, the entire lower orders of power are replicated a new in yet further nuances of difference with the arts and humanities at the very bottom and the professional and scientific elites at the top. On a completely different track are all the privately funded systems which echo all previous systems and culminate in the extreme reaches of elite where the nuances of difference and rank are so finely articulated that merely a gesture or wrong turn of phrase is sufficient to cast one out, and presumably downward bound.
This vast imperial service complex and its inscrutable systems of castes and hierarchies presents a completely unbreachable facade of absolute power and privilege. It is Byzantium or the Forbidden City incarnate. Beyond its walls, in the vast open plazas before its gates and raised promenades, all scum crawl on their bloody knees, heads bowed low, hands clasp in utter supplication, subservience, and terror. Just within the first gates, really nothing more than a reception area--these outer courtyards are filled with small, nervous clutches of eunuchs and tutors who gossip and whine about their lowly stature in the courts within courts within, and wonder why they are universally despised whenever they venture from the protection of the imperial gates.
Isn't it obvious that the entire caste system of race, gender, class, power and privilege is reproduced in the academy in perfect harmony and sycronicity to match all the tiny niches and nuances of the society beyond? Students do not travel up these hierarchies, they travel through them horizontally remaining at their levels, and with sufficient doses of humiliation, shame, and failure, their ordeals are acknowledged in certificates of passage, which assure all, that they are certain to never breach the levels above.
This system isn't about liberation through learning and acquisition of skills, and knowledge. It is about generating and maintaining the castes, classes, and vassalage systems of power that comprises this entire civilization. The purpose of the academy is to fill these finely shaded levels and niches of hierarchy with suitable replacements, all finished, well tailored and ready to their take up their positions of homage for life.
And y'all wonder how come the working class laugh at you? Get a grip.
Chuck Grimes