#Ranciere18 - Part of Your World - A Guest Post by Nick Dressler

It’s kind of fun to do the impossible

-Walt Disney

I’m not the kind of teacher who works for the summer, but don’t get me wrong: I like a good vacation.  Two weeks is about right.  Just enough time to take the family somewhere nice, see some sights, try some new food, maybe—procure a little inspiration.  Then it’s back home for summer school, a couple enrichment camps, and a little gardening before the term starts back up again in August.  Perfect.

This year, my wife and I found ourselves a little antsier than usual, so after school let out for the summer, we jetted off to the UK.  That’s right, reader: London, England.  The capitol of Western culture.  We hit the streets as soon as we landed and enjoyed a quick drink on top of some Yorkshire fish and chips.  Delicious.  When we finished, though, my imploring glance toward my wife was met with a silent riposte and furrowed brow that said it all: “This isn’t up to snuff; let’s get out of here.”  I’m not one to say no to my wife, so we moved on to France, straight away.  Paris, more specifically.  The capitol of Western culture.  Enchantee, Paris.  Immediately, we did the Paris café thing.  Dark coffee, magnifique.  The crème brulee, tres bonne.   Absolute paradise, it was; my little family seated under an umbrella beside some old-looking red brick streets, my little children wiping their cute little mouths of croissant crumbs with cute little napkins, not a care in the world; me—as we speak—drawing my laptop from my backpack for a hasty blog about education.  On my left wrist: a handy, ironic eighties calculator watch that most people think is a Walter White thing, or maybe an homage to that kid from Stranger Things, but the truth is it’s the same watch Ryan Gosling wears in Half Nelson; I bought it immediately after I saw that movie, when Bryan Cranston supported Frankie Muniz and those Stranger Things kids’ parents were seeing off the very decade the show would reference some two decades later.  That’s right: I out hipster the hipster, everyone.  I was there first.  On the other hand, literally, on my right wrist, I sport a blue, rubber Micky Mouse Magic Band with which I can purchase anything at any of the parks, eyes blinded to the bloody cataracts of capital streaming from my wallet.  It drips quietly, the money.  Gone without a whimper.  It also opens my hotel room door.  I am quite the contradiction, nowadays.

Oh, did I forget to mention?  By London and Paris, I meant their miniature, Mouse-sanctioned simulations, as featured at Epcot Center—my family and I are in Disney World, of course; we didn’t even need to cross the Atlantic and we were hand-delivered the highlights of Europe right to our faces, right to our eyes, right down our distended gullets.  Eliminated are the inconveniences of international travel: no extra flight, no unnecessary walking, no dirt or grime in the streets, no pesky foreigners, and no awkward fumbling through un petit peu de francais.  I don’t even need to crane my neck to view the top of the Eiffel Tower as the good people at Disney have condensed it down to just a third of its actual size. What we have is all we want, just a distilled version of England and France right here in the culturally comfortable humidity-hug of sun kissed Florida, USA.  Disney has even shipped in some incredibly qualified English and French citizens to work as waiters in these countries.  Anything for authenticity at Disney World; anything in the name of fun.

All disingenuity aside, I have to admit this Disney World is, if anything, creative, even if it triggers night sweats in Baudrillard.  I consider the different rides and shows and architecture examples of some very innovative people bringing worlds of fiction to life, which is, for me as an English teacher, part of the daily challenge of my job.  These guys, though, they’ve got it down.  Every single detail. Before we left for the park this morning, for instance, we took a dip in our hotel’s Finding Nemo themed pool where my six-year-old son heard audio from the movie piped into the water itself only to be heard when a swimmer dips his head beneath the surface.  Incredulous, he returned to my pool chair.  “You were right dad; Disney world is awesome!”  Just wait, my son, you haven’t even seen the parks yet.  It was like Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” all over again: I can try to describe it for him, but until he experiences it, he will not—he cannot—fathom my description. 

And here is where my two current ventures—Disney vacations and Ranciere texts—intersect (I’m the only one reading Ranciere at mini-France, believe it or not).  Disney world, with all its creative magnificence, stupefies us, which, as Kristen Ross explains, “implies a sense of wonderment or amazement” (7) to the point of inaction.  Disney is attractive, sure, and to the right audience, it can be inspirational.  I imagine, for example, a select group of young visitors go on to lead creative lives after sampling the Disney wares and might even offer their trip to Disney World as a formative experience.  But for the vast majority, Disney World is the goal in-and-of itself.  It’s not a starting point; it’s the end—save up enough money to get the family to Disney, swallow the oily spoonfuls of their fully ripened creative juices, return home, repeat.  For these, Disney world is not creative emancipation from the shackles of possibility that it might be for some.  No, Disney World is the illusion itself—that fetishized social opium that keeps the masses content, quiet, and, more importantly, homogenous.  The people at Disney don’t want my kids, their customers, to go on to lead creative lives, they want my kids to come back to Disney World, to watch their programming, to develop a sense of brand loyalty so my kids buy into the product Disney offers.  Going to Disney World alone becomes a sort of American Dream—a carrot just large enough to galvanize we languid mules through the drudgery of our quotidian lives, be it school or that inhuman rat-race known as the working world.

© BANKSY - photomontage of Napalm Girl by Nick Ut 

This is the problem with capitalism.  Not only are there winners and losers, but these positions are entirely liquid.  Winners don’t have to stay there de jure as they did by virtue of being born into the upper classes during feudalism.  Winners in a capitalism must necessarily become conservative to protect their spots at the top.  Generation upon generation legally exploit the lower classes of their product—their economic capital, their social capital, their creative capital—sometimes stupefying but always stultifying the ambitious proletarian to inaction, failure, and conviction of personal futility.

As part of the capitalistic superstructure, then, our schools must do the exact same thing, only we the teachers take on the role of Disney World and our stakeholders the park-goers.  Our job is to make the content stand on its head.  We’re supposed to interpret it, jazz it up, decorate our rooms with it, relate it to the lives or our students, to contemporary events—we spoon-feed material to our students the same way Disney stuffs our faces with their productions, and, trust me, they learn to eat it, and ask for more if need be.  And although some of our students go on to use what we have taught them to enhance their lives morally and materially, the vast majority learn to play our game simply to graduate to the next grade until they are eventually finished with the ordeal altogether, school being nothing more than a necessary obstruction to the commencement of their actual lives when they graduate from the university. 

I don’t think we teachers do this consciously, so don’t take this as an accusation, as such; however—and Ranciere is clear here—teachers who explicate, despite positive intentions, do nothing to raise their students and, in fact, create a stultifying gap between their intelligence and their students’ the same way Disney World does between their “cast-members” and their fans.  Disney claims only to show, to entertain, to present, not to encourage or improve.  They don’t want you to match their levels of creativity, they want you to hemorrhage bucketfuls of capital into their mouse-eared buckets because you cannot and never will be able to do what they do.  And you know it.  And after you spend your year regenerating your capital, they want you to do it again.  Same goes for schools.  Pay us to enrich you.  Take a break.  Go to Disney World, for crying out loud.  See France and England while you’re there.  See Morocco.  But after that, you come back and do it again and again.  Always come back to school, the unending circle of power from which there is no messiah and no redemptive nirvana.

From Sir Ken Robinson's Changing Education Paradigms

So what do we do?  Even if Ranciere provides what proves to be the perfect recipe for success, it’s not like our school system is in any shape even to absorb such a teaching philosophy—not when grade point averages, standardized test scores, and college scholarships rule the roost.  After all, Ranciere admits that, while Jacotot’s method proves students can and will learn anything they want to, what they want to learn might be nothing at all.  I don’t know about you, but if my students learn “nothing at all,” I am out of a job, and my progressive philosophy of teaching statement will do nothing to hinder the executioner’s ax.  So, again, what do we do?

I recommend starting small.  Winston Smith small.  We can’t expect a total overhaul of the school system at once; it’s the little rebellions that lead to reform.  Change what we can in our classrooms.  Pick one assignment if we have to—one activity, one policy, one discussion.  If we really believe what Ranciere says, we need to get the momentum moving in the right direction, and change will come.  Organic food hasn’t always been available at local chain grocery stores, has it?  But it is now.  Something changed for the better, and the results are there for all to benefit.

This has been a post by Nick Dressler (@nick_dressler) for the #Ranciere18 reading project. Go here to see the google doc, and go here to join the hypothes.is group.

#Ranciere18 - Week One: "Translator's Introduction" from The Ignorant Schoolmaster

Starting this week several of us are reading together (at a leisurely pace) a very important book for me as an educator. In many ways Jacques Rancière's 1987 polemic, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, has become a kind of motivational manifesto for me - a mantra of sorts that keeps me focused on what matters most in my role as teacher. My loyalty to its message, at times, has inspired mockery and disbelief in others: You can't possibly believe that all students are equally capable of being intelligent? After all, this is the book's central thesis: "ALL people are equally intelligent" (xix).

So what's your gut response to such a statement? Does one wince with disbelief? What do we mean when we say "intelligence"? What does it look like when it's being demonstrated? How can we measure it or should we even ask that question? 

Which of the following images, for instance, showcases a greater display of intelligence?

"The hierarchical division of head and hand" (xviii).

One of Rancière's targets is the myth that there are different types of intelligences that can be arranged spatially/directionally in terms of hierarchies (low to high). Such space reifies (or makes natural) the gap between the knowing and the ignorant; the explicators and the listeners; the capable and the incapable; the ones who must be heard (subject groups) and the ones who need not be heard (subjugated groups). But common sense says this is the case, right? I mean, some of us simply know things that others don't, and it's on us to tell them what they need to know. Right? If teaching were defined as the act of transmitting knowledge, then yes, perhaps this is just "how things are" and teachers are tasked with leading the ignorant out of the cave by showing them/explaining to them the Truth of things. But perhaps the task of the teacher needs to be re-conceptualized, not as "a kind of muscular theoretical heroism" to enlighten the masses, but as an authority who demands the equally intelligent to chart their own truth:

The problem is not to create scholars. It is to raise up those who believe themselves inferior in intelligence, to make them leave the swamp where they are stagnating – not the swamp of ignorance, but the swamp of self-contempt (101-102).

It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such (6).

There aren’t 2 sorts of minds. There is inequality in the manifestations of intelligence, according to the greater or lesser energy communicated to the intelligence or by the will for discovering and combining new relations; but there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacity (27).

Whoever teaches w/o emancipation stultifies. Whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated person learns (18).

Emancipation is the idea that every common person might conceive his human dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it (17).

Our problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition (46).

The last quote here brings up some questions for me: Does R posit the equality of intelligences for strategic purposes alone? In other words, is he trolling/provoking us in some way? OR Is he simply stating upfront that one cannot prove nor disprove his thesis, therefore why not make Pascal's wager? 

A few more thoughts...

The Lesson of Althusser

Both Rancière's teacher and mentor, Louis Althusser may be France's most influential Marxist thinker from the 20th century. Rancière, however, turned his back on Althusser's anti-humanist, structuralist program, which can be seen in R's student-centered, agency-focused approach to pedagogy. Althusser was a big believer in the master-student relationship: "'The function of teaching,' Althusser wrote in 1964, 'is to transmit a determinate knowledge to subjects who do not possess this knowledge. The teaching situation thus rests on the absolute condition of an inequality between a knowledge and a nonknowledge'" (xvi). 

For Althusser, emancipatory education was only possible if we recognize the present impossibility for students to be equal (with each other or with the master) and instead focus our reformist energies toward distributing more equally the same quality of instruction (by well-trained, enlightened masters) among all students of all classes. I want to suggest that Rancière reverses this claim: It is impossible to make the distribution of instruction equal, but we can assert axiomatically that all students (and teachers) are naturally, equally intelligent. The hard work of pedagogy is ac/counting for this. If schools are unequal spaces for equal intelligences, the task of pedagogy becomes political, namely demanding those who are not "counted" in the unequal space of schools to assert their equal right to be counted. 

The image above does not make a case for unequal intelligences: each animal has the equal, verifiable capacity, but the learning space or environment created by the administration of the "same exam" does not equally verify or account for each animal's natural capacity. The space (and method of verification) is unequal, not the students.

The Practice of Equality: Our problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition.

Rancière speaks of his thesis as being an axiomatic starting point, a pure concept in Kantian terms that orders the way we experience the landscape of learning. Even if one thinks his claim is strategic or performative, and less a statement about capital "T" truth, there's still something of value to be investigated - namely, how the pure concept of equality reshapes the space-time continuum of our learning landscapes.

We as educators have a lot to say about the hard work of "closing achievement gaps," but the space-time continuum of a world occupied by unequal intelligences is one where the gaps can never be fully overcome. According to Rancière, the grim-visaged war of unequal intelligences will never completely smooth its wrinkled fronts. By starting with the pure concept of equal intelligences we begin to close the spatial and temporal distances between the learned and the learner, between the master and the student. 

Ultimately, we need to rethink starting points, instead of outcomes, which can make us sound reckless in the ears of certain administrators. I think of the example of the Hubble Telescope. No one knew what was out there or what would be the outcome of pointing the world's most expensive observation device into a void of complete darkness. I'm sure some people thought the original scientists were reckless for proposing it, but here we are years later still discovering the infinite wonders of a universe that proved to be much larger than anyone could initially have imagined. What can we do if we start with equality of all intellects? What have we mistaken for darkness that on second look could reveal an infinite amount of wonders beyond our imaginations?

This has been a post for the #Ranciere18 Reading Project. Please feel free to comment and join the conversation.

If you want to get more involved, our google doc is here and our hypothes.is group is here. Email me at jcolley@theoakridgeschool.org if you want editing access to the Google Doc.