``..Programming is getting to be more and more of an industrial process; what you describe is one result of that. But really, what they're keeping back is not concepts, it is the implementation. The concepts can be found in any text book. Believe me, few of these companies are inventing anything. What they want to own is the accumulated labor of programmers...'' Joanna
I used the idea of a black box to set up an idea about teaching math as a proceedure. I glossed over the detail that yes, you're right most companies are not inventing anything---and what's actually inside the box is probably very disappointing. But the more important point was about teaching. And in the case of math, sometimes, what's in the box is spectacular.
``How men and boys in particular?''
Just a personal annoyance. Working class or lower middle class and especially minority boys are just assumed to be born stupid. And after awhile they seem to relish it, in a kind of sick little dance---since I am stupid, I don't have to think. It sets up a complex internal dialectic that feeds all sorts of defensive and aggressive conflicts that get mixed in with masculinity. If you are smart, there is probably something wrong with you---maybe you're queer. Whatever is wrong, it is not admirable. So there seems to be a self-inflicted re-enforcement or complicity in oppression.
``..one of the great tasks of teaching is to enable the student to put away all that judgemental stuff and to realize the extent to which self-knowledge and taking himself seriously as a subject is the foundation upon which any real learning is built...''
Without doubt. But who is used to taking themselves seriously? That is what class, what gender, what race? These valuations are internalized so early and so profoundly that they become comingled with identity and character, with the construction of subject.
So, hopefully that helps explain or point to an answer for this:
``...But what bothers me is the issue of "educating yourself out of the working class." There's education, which is one thing, and there's "self interest," which is another. Why should these be tied to each other? Is this how truth liberates us? By making it possible to consume more? Live in fancier houses?...''
It seems to me the construction of working class has to be over thrown from within, because it so comingled with self-subjugation of the kind I was addressing above.
Butler tries to make a related point in Pyschic Lives, but she is so obtuse about it that you have to have understood the process in advance of reading her rendition.
On the other hand, I think the revolt leads to a curious nomansland, between the hand and the mind or slave and master in Hegel and Butler's lexicon, between the material and ideal. So that the haute bourgeois world with its aesthete professionalism is seen as quite hollow. It commands nothing but a kind of overwrought chimera of privilages. There is no substance, no there, there. Then looking in the other direction, everything is substance with no qualities, no articulation, raw and miss-shapen stuff. In my utopia, it is the struggle itself caught in this dialectic that produces the best of all worlds---and that has nothing to do with either consumption or truth.
The arts are the best examples. Most of them arise out the inarticulated mire of the material, without ever really quite escaping, since they also remain as images, words, motion, sounds, and so forth.
Chuck Grimes