1. No category

Module 1
Workshop 2
The production of
The conception of self The construction of
schooling
knowledge
(1453) 1492
Breaking
Anti-intellectualism
Identity
Missionaries
The academy
Authenticity
Militaries
Communicating
Authority
Warfare (hostages) Language
Coloniality
Making
Mapping
Empire
Professional training Theories of Self
Maps
Labour/employment Place, Space, Being
Modernism (post(economy)
racial)
Mending the World ...
Law, Finance, Money
Equalities
How we want to be with each other
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10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss
80% of what we experience
95% of what we teach others...
Previous Priorities
1 Listen to Guy Giard’s “Interaction Theories” Workshop & create a cognitive map for it
2 Enquire as to the specifics of your birth
3 Check out this prank 1:30-3:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZjlDtUWVOI
4 Read as much of this piece on Pedagogy (LINK: http://infed.org/mobi/what-is-pedagogy/)
5 learn or read up on how score A Boxing Match
6 Listen to selected chapters from “For Giving” Genevieve Vaughan
1 Read chapter IV of “Towards the Destruction of schooling”
2 Record a racist joke ready to bring and share with the group
3 Listen to selected chapters from Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt,
4 Check out this token nonwhite lady, writing on pedagogy, who has been included for the sake of gender
balance Link: www.edocere.org/articles/marva_collins.htm
5 Bring in a poster or promotional material showcasing ‘anti-blackness’
1 Read the introduction of Huey Newton’s PHD
2 Read a review of Linda Smith’s book on Decolonising Methodologies
2 Read sections 44-48 of Dubois’ “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom”
4 Watch The “Not Out of Africa” debate ft Henrik Clarke
5 Listen to selected chapters from The Ascent of Humanity, Charles Eisenstein
Teaching as a conserving activity
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Bughatti
Credibility
10 year time line
Quotes
Boxing Knockout
Frank Mir
Bow
Bullet
Mind
Annoyance
Giard / Wynter Mapping
Ending the World
Jerome’s Niece
WORLD
Lil Wayne: “I wish I could fuck every girl in the world” (Every Girl)
Future: “Tell me, what you think we hustle for? I just wanna buy the world, Do the impossible Sing it with me
now, na na na, What you think we out here working' for? I just wanna buy the world Do the impossible
Lil Wayne: “I got ice in my veins, blood in my eyes/ Hate in my heart, love in my mind
I seen nights full of pain, days of the same/ You keep the sunshine, save me the rain
I search but never find, hurt but never cry/ I work and forever try, but I'm cursed so never mind/ And it's
worse but better times seem further and beyond
The top gets higher, the more that I climb/ The spot gets smaller and I get bigger
Tryna get into where I fit in, no room for a nigga/ But soon for a nigga it be on motherfucker/ 'Cause all
this bullshit, it made me strong motherfucker
Dinah Washington: “This bitter earth, Well, What a fruit it bears/ What good is love, That no one shares/ And if
my life, is like the dust / That hides the glow of a rose, What good am I Heaven only knows/ No, this bitter
Earth Yes, can be so cold/ Today you're young, Too soon you're old/But while a voice, Within me cries/ I'm
sure someone, may answer my call/ And this bitter earth, May not be ohhhh, so bitter after all
Kool G Rap: “It seems like only yesterday, my moms was on my back
"Get your butt up out the sack and find a job or hit the road Jack"
Black, I don't disown her, I'm just a kid from Corona
With a G.E.D. diploma, with more ribs showin' than Tony Roma's
In order to get straight, I gots ta to make a muscle
Learned to hustle and bustle and I gave the streets a tussle
Standin' down on the corner slangin' fat rocks to bottles
With the black tops, for cops got my shorty watchin' my back Hobbes
Makin' mad lucci, bought up Louis Vuitton & gucci
Hoochies callin' me boochi, while they smooch me, givin' up the coochie
EARTH
Kurtis Blow: “My first day in office, the King on the throne/ I spent my first three hours on the telephone
You know with newsmen reporters, and votes too/I had so many calls, I didn't know what to do
You know out that office I continued to work/I signed so many papers, my fingers started to hurt
Then I shook off the pain, say this ain't no thing/ there's nothing in the world like being #1 king!
Nas: “Life, I wonder, Will it take me under, I don't know / Imagine smoking weed in the streets without cops harassin'
Imagine going to court with no trial / Lifestyle cruising blue behind my waters
No welfare supporters, more conscious of the way we raise our daughters
Tupac: “Now if I choose to ride, thuggin' till the day I die/They don't give a fuck about us
While I'm kickin rhymes, getting to their children's minds /Now they give a fuck about us
They wanna see us die, they kick us every time we try /They don't give a fuck about us
So while I'm getting high, I'm watching as the world goes by /Cause they don't give a fuck about us
Tupac: “The world, the world is behind us/Once a motherfucker get an understanding on the game
and what the levels and the rules of the game is/ Then the world ain't no trick no more
The world is a game to be played / So now we lookin at the world, from like, behind us
Niggaz know what we gotta do, just gotta put our mind to it and do it /
It's all about the papers, money rule the world/ Bitches make the world go round
Real niggaz do what they wanna do, bitch niggaz do what they can
Starin at the world through my rearview / Go on baby scream to God, he can't hear you
I can feel your heart beatin fast cause it's time to die / Gettin high, watchin time fly, ya know
Rakim: "You got ambition?" Shorty said, "Man listen/ I got demands for livin, can't stand division
Make grands on my mission, till everything glisten/ Women in the Expedition, no plans for prison
In a vision the city get, 2 milleni G/Sittin in my embassy sippin Hennesy / Gettin high, and watch life pass me by“
So I asked him why, wit a fast reply He said "I'm livin just to die without any feelings
So I wait here for my Maker till it's time to go Wit this dime I know/
Wit all of her girls and all of my mens / Waitin for the world to end“
Module 0: How the world was made
References (Cognitive Map)
Nas (p 323) “I want to talk to you” (1996) “My country” (2001)
Bateson
Carmichael
Baraka
Woodson (p 324) 1933 – Korzykski
Cesaire (Le Congres des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, 16/09/56): Wright (April 1955)
Fanon
Sarte
Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom Towards the Human
After Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument
On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned
Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies
Toward the Human Project, Sylvia Wynter
Vous (Yours) x Nous (Ours)
Blowing Up In The World
Blowing Up On The Earth
The limits of my language mean the limit of my world
• territories of social exclusion located at the bottom of their
respective urban hierarchies, the American ghetto and the
French banlieue nevertheless differ in their social makeup,
institutional texture, and position in the metropolitan system. In
particular, the mechanisms of segregation and aggregation from
which they result are also quite distinct. To sum it up, exclusion
operates mostly on a centuries-old caste basis that is tolerated
or reinforced by the state and by national ideology on the
American side, and primarily on grounds of class partly mitigated
by public policies on the French side. The result is that, unlike
the urban Bantustans of the United States, the deteriorated
banlieues of France are not ethnically homogeneous ensembles
backed by a dualist racial division endorsed by the state, and
they do not have an advanced division of labor or the measure
of institutional autonomy that would support a unified cultural
identity. ~ LoIc J. D. Wacquant, (America as Social Dystopia)
They Don’t Give a FUNK about us
Denied participation in the higher things of life, the
“educated” Negro himself joins, too, with ill-designing
persons to handicap his people by systematised
exploitation. Feeling that the case of the Negro is
hopeless, the “educated” Negro decides upon the course
of personally profiting by whatever he can do in using
these people as a means to an end. He grins in their faces
while “extracting money” from them, but his heart shows
no fond attachment to their despised cause. With a little
larger income than they receive he can make himself
somewhat comfortable in the ghetto; and he forgets
those who have no way of escape. (104, 105)
that ‘American ghettos, those abandoned sites that are fundamentally
defined by an absence - basically, that of the state and of everything that
comes with it, police, schools, health care institutions, associations, etc.’
• [the] ghetcolony tradition [is] a pervasive episode of hopelessness and
poverty. What was true yesterday is more than likely to be true today. There
are the same decrepit structures basking under the sun … the dispossessed
men who mill in front of taverns waiting to quench their hunger with anything
that can help them escape their pain and frustration… the hustlers, pimps,
street men and other social outcasts who serve as models for the young…
always the dirty streets where “ghetcolony” children make their home. A home
that has an asphalt floor, tenements for its walls and a door which locks them
in from the rest of the world. The streets constitute an institution in the same
way that the church, school and family are conceived as institutions. They all
have a set of values and norms to govern and reinforce their existence… it is an
institution because it helps to shape and control behaviour. And it is on the
streets where the Black child receives his basic orientation in life. The streets
become primary reference because other institutions have failed to provide
him with the essential skills he needs to survive in the “ghetcolony.” And for a
child to survive the “ghetcolony” he must undergo a rigorous apprenticeship
that will enable him to compensate for the lack of guidance from other
institutions and adults. He becomes a student of the “asphalt jungle” because
that is where he can learn the skills he needs. (p17)
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in
which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let
me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the
heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute
with my country. You were born where you were born
and faced the future that you faced because you were
black and for no other reason. The limits to your
ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were
born into a society which spelled out with brutal
clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were
a worthless human being. You were not expected to
aspire to excellence. You were expected to make
peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned,
James, in your short time on this earth, you have been
told where you could go and what you could do and
how you could do it, where you could live and whom
you could marry.
The Afro-American, Oct 9, 1982
No institution is teaching us to understand money, economics or
credit [...] We are taught to get a job and do what we’re told. Our
orientation makes us passive followers. We don’t take initiative.
This is antithetical to the business person; he doesn’t listen to the
crowds. We come into a situation assuming someone else is the
boss. We assume he’s white. When he’s black , we rebel. When one
of our own makes it, we criticise. It’s a crabs in the basket mentality
where we claw each other . When we see a black person moving up
we think, “who does he think he is - he cant do that” [...] We’re
conditioned to go to school, get a degree, and then get a good job
with lots of benefits. I’d like to see an many people as possible get
out of the employee-situation and go be in our own business and
do their own thing
Identity – Trust – Collaboration
• “if you tell a child to get an education if you don’t deal with racism
it won’t do any good… and I got blacks all over the country telling
me Dr Anderson its time for blacks to put racism behind them…
[but] you don’t have the power to put anything behind and the
most dangerous thing you can do is to start talking about cutting
yourself away from history and the fact of racism … somebody’s
been playing games and social engineering… [yet] the dominant
white society… used the churches to say that blacks are inferior…
those are tales… peoples have been playing games with you socially
engineering you manipulating circumstances controlling you… the
only way you’re going to get out is by somebody socially
engineering you out … we’re trying to go back and understand
everything that has happened to black folk…to turn the thing
upside down to make you come out of it as a winner
Decolonising the economic mind
• How different our education would be if we sent our children
to schools to create jobs for themselves to create their own
economic and political systems. To see themselves as the major
sources of their employment… how many jobs are created today
by black music? Look at the whole structure of the music
industry; from promoters to manufacturers of the records and
the tapes… we’re begging for what we are making already. We
cannot use our own creations as a source of our own wealth …
the creator could not have intended for us as African people to
be a poor people if the creator implanted in our soils all the
wealth that was planted there …. It seems as if the creator
blessed us form the very beginning with wealth and possibility …
The wealth of a people is ultimately… in their minds
The Shadow of the Panther
I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was
passed for white people, not for black people. For
example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while
I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the
right to go into any public place. White people didn't
know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they
stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell
that white man, "He’s a human being; don’t stop him."
That bill was for that white man, not for me. I knew it
all the time. I knew it all the time.
1492 – 1962 (470)
Dialectics of Liberation, July 1967, 15-30
• Ronald Laing
• Gregory Bateson
• Herbert Marcuse
• Irving Goffman
• Stokely Carmeichal
• Paul Sweeney
• David Cooper
• Paul Goodman
Philosophy, Psychology (Programming) & Psychiatry
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Derek Hood in Critical Psychology, 1994
Erving Goffman, Asylums, 1968
David Cooper, Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry 1967, (used Bateson et al 1956)
Ronald Laing, The Divided Self 1959, Sanity, Madness and the Family 1964
Thomas J. Scheff. Being mentally ill: A sociology theory. 1966.
Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry 1973,
Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis, 2010
Robert Guthrie, Even The Rat Was White, 1976
Robert Thouless, Control Of The Mind, 1929
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Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 1961
Steve Biko, I Write What I Like, 1967
Albert Memi, The Colonizer and the Colonised, 1965
Kazimierz Dabrowski, Positive Disintegration, 1964
Penguin Education Specials
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36 children / Herbert R. Kohl (1967)
A hundred of the best / Nicholas Tucker (1968)
A last resort?: corporal punishment in schools/ Peter Newell (1972)
Celebration of awareness: A call for institutional revolution / Ivan Illich (1973)
Children in distress / Alec Clegg & Barbara Megson(1968)
Compulsory miseducation / Paul Goodman (1964)
Teaching as a subversive activity / Neil Postman, Charles Weitenger (1971)
The relevance of education / Jerome Seymour Bruner (1974)
The multi-racial school: a professional perspective / Julia McNeal (1971)
The Hornsey affair: Students and Staff of Hornsey College of Art (1969)
Free way to learning: educational alternatives in action. / David Head (1974)
Dear Lord James: a Critique of Teacher Education / Tyrrell Burgess (1971)
Paul Goodman, p 217 (named as a critic) cf Growing Up Absurd
Wendell Johnson, Do You Know How To Listen & Verbal Man the Enchantment of Words (1965)
Carl Rogers, On Becoming A Person, p 194
Edmund Carpenter, p 160DVD Oh What a Blow The Phantom Gave Me [cf McLuhan]
Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass (p 132) (1872)
Alan Watt, The Way of Zen, 1957
Karl Menninger, The Vital Balance: The Life Process in Mental Health and Illness (1964) [also
author of “The Crime Of Punishment”, 1964, 66]]
Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1926, quoted by McLuhan, cf p 167
George Orwell, 1984 (The Last Man in Europe) 1948
John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding [line] (1689)
Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality (p 127) (1970)
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Form and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical
and Civil [line] (1651)
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thoughts and Reality: Selected Writings ed by J. B. Carroll (1964)
Aldous Huxley, “Educational on the Nonverbal level” Daedalus, Spring 1963
Jurgen Ruesch, disturbed communication: : The clinical assessment of normal and pathological
communicative behavior, New York, W. W. Norton, 1957, (cf ... Ruesch, J.;
G., Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. 1951 W.W. Norton)
John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and The Known, 1949)
Bateson,
An the list goes on
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Godwin Woodson
John Holt
Paul Goodman
Jan Matthews
Ivan Illich
Neil Postman
Paulo Freire
Jeff Schmidt
Michael Porter
Marva Collins
•John Gatto
•Marimba Ani
•Erica Carle
•Charlotte Iserbyt
•Bel Hooks
•Amos Wilson
•Jerry Farben
•James Loewen
•James Webb
•Jonathan Kozol
The Underground History of
American Education (2000)
“... a perspective can be revolutionary only if it identifies”
• Chapter 1. The Role of
Schooling in Society
• Chapter 2. The History
of Schooling
• Chapter 3. Theories of
Schooling
• Chapter 4. Notes on the
Poverty of Student Life
In-Quiz-itision Time
• 1. Who were the ancient Greeks? Where did they
come from? How did the Geography affect them?
• 2. Why was Athens the leading city in Greece?
What is a city-state?
• 3. How many languages were spoken in Greece?
How did this affect Greek life?
• 4. What sort of religion did the ancient Greeks
have? How does this compare to that of the
Egyptians?
From Athens to Memphis
• How were the Egyptians affected by climate
and geography of their country? Discuss the
following in your answer:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
An oasis
Living in a desert area
Irrigation
Delta
Safety from warring tribes
From Athens to Tennessee
• What were some of the ways of earning a
living in ancient Egypt? Include the following
in your answer :
1)
2)
3)
4)
agriculture
Manufacturing
Education
Government jobs]any others you find in your
reading
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speech at Stanford on April 14, 1967. "The other America".
Now there is another myth and that is the notion that legislation can't solve the
problem that you've got to change the heart and naturally I believe in changing the
heart. ...[I] feel that that is the half truth involved here, that there is some truth in the
whole question of changing the heart. We are not going to have the kind of society
that we should have until the white person treats the negro right - not because the
law says it but because it's natural, because it's right and because the black man is the
white man's brother
It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It
may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It
may be true that the law can't make a man love me, but it can restrain him from
lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also.
And so while legislation may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits
of men when it's vigorously enforced and when you change the habits of people
pretty soon attitudes begin to be changed and people begin to see that they can do
things that fears caused them to feel that they could never do. And I say that there's a
need still for strong civil rights legislation in various areas
Gatto Critiqued...
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The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. They are hardly curious at
all about what grown up people really do. The children I teach in fact have little
curiosity about anything. They can’t even concentrate for very long on activities of
their own choice.
The children I teach have a poor sense of the future; of how today is connected to
tomorrow. They live in a continuous present the exact moment they are in being
the boundary of their consciousness.
The children I teach have an equally poor sympathy with the past with no
apparent understanding of how the past created their present, their values; their
surroundings and limited their choices.
The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune
even for the misfortune of their own friends. They laugh at weakness; they have
contempt for people who need help.
The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. The outer personality
they develop is borrowed from television shows and other superficial fashions. It
was not earned by commitment or by time spent alone in the realm of spirit form
which all human uniqueness derives I think.
Gatto Critiqued...
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My children are imitations; their personalities fabricated from artificial bits and
pieces of actors pretending to be somebody that they are not. This patch work
disguise is used as a face to present to the world and to manipulate teachers and
adults but the secret inner self remains poorly formed, incomplete, inadequate to
the common stresses of daily living. Because these children are not who they
represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so
intimate relationships have to be avoided or terminated quickly when they
happen… they don’t like their own parents so much and they don’t really have any
close friends. They learn to prefer imitation friendships in the form of people they
can hang out with and in that way they avoid the obligation of truthfulness that
intimacy imposes. The children I teach are strikingly materialistic. They follow the
lead I think of school teachers who materialistically grade everything and TV shows
which offer everything in the world for sale. When everything has a price nothing
can be priceless by definition. The children I teach are desperately dependent.
They really don’t know how to do anything at all. They will probably reach adult
hood unable to participate as workers, as citizens, or as effective persons in
marriage, parenthood or community relationships (the Seven Lesson
Schoolteacher)
Disciplined Minds
The Curriculum of Necessity or What
Must an Educated Person Know?
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Here’s Harvard University’s list of skills that make an educated person
The ability to define problems without a guide.
The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
The ability to quickly assimilate needed data from masses of irrelevant
information.
The ability to work in teams without guidance.
The ability to work absolutely alone.
The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new
patterns.
The ability to discuss ideas with an eye toward application.
The ability to think inductively, deductively and dialectically.
The ability to attack problems heuristically.
Towards The Destruction of Schooling (2004)
6 basic functions of school
1) The adjustive or adaptive function.
Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of
course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much
destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught,
because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know
whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function.
This might well be called "the conformity function," because its
intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who
conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to
harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function.
School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This
is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on
cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have
one.
Towards The Destruction of Schooling (2004)
6 basic functions of school
4) The differentiating function.
Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by
role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits
- and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function.
This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural
selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea
is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding
stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial
placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will
accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive
sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade
onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function.
The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of
caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught
how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a
population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that
government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never
want for obedient labor.
Scientific Dictatorship
The Progressive movement (1890–1930) was philosophically concerned with
tailoring education to the needs of the child. Practically, this meant
categorizing, observing, testing, and controlling the child to smooth the
transition to corporate capitalism.
A [.] Purpose or object of ‘Scientific Management.’
1. To increase the efficiency of the laborer, i.e., the pupil.
2. To increase quality of the product, i.e., the pupil.
3. Thereby to increase the amount of output and the value to the capitalist...[
Schools were designed… to be instruments of a scientific management of a mass population…
intended to produce, through the application of formulae, human beings whose behaviour can be
predicted and controlled. Because community life, which protects the dependent and weak, is
dead, and only networks remain, the only successful people in our national order are,
independent [and] individualistic [whereas] well schooled people are simply irrelevant… as
human beings they are useless…
Staying In The Hold of the Ship
The true goal has always been to increase sociological power . The schools are used to prepare
children for this increased sociological dependence If their training is effective, it will accomplish
some of the following purposes:
1 . To develop emotional rather than intellectual responses to what are called
`social problems
2. To direct emotions toward collective rather than individual or family
relationships .
3. To train students toward self-sacrifice rather than self-respect.
4. To convince students that as individuals they are ineffective - that
worthwhile goals must be pursued through group effort or under group control .
5 . To idealize distant, long-range and even impossible achievements so people
can be bound together in common effort for indefinite periods of time
6. To alienate children from parental influence and Christian moral teaching.
The first step in an elementary sociology text, as it is with any seducer, is to build up trust and
confidence . Within the first few chapters most of them will attempt to convince their readers
that sociology is a science . Few children will question the claim or attempt to look behind the
mask . They do not expect to be deceived. Hardly knowing what is meant by science, they accept
without thinking. Once they have accepted sociology's scientific mask, they become less likely to
question and more likely to accept its teachings as scientific truth
•banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through
the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a
whole:
•(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
•(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
•(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
•(d) the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;
•(e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
•(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
•(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the
action of the teacher;
•(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not
consulted) adapt to it;
•(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own
professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of
the students;
•(j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere
objects.
Europeans not only colonized the world, they colonized information about the world"
• "Decolonizing the Academy“ (Africa World Press, 2003,
ed, Carole Davies et al) asserts that the academy is
perhaps the most colonized space. As we enter the
twenty-first century, this has become even clearer now
that the academy is one of the primary sites for the
production and re-production of ideas that serve the
interests of colonizing powers. Operating at the macro
level in terms of the state and at the micro level in
various applications, these interests include the
organization of the disciplines, the marginalization of
interdisciplinary studies, the re-assertion of
masculinities, and the operations of class, privilege, and
hierarchy.
Critical Scholarship Decolonises Academia
[Blyden’s 1880] commencement address [Liberia
College] grapples with many of the abiding issues
currently debated by critical scholars regarding
knowledge, power and coloniality. Blyden the
Pan-Africanist discussed how to decolonise
knowledge with colonial tools; how to relate the
knowledge systems of an elite academy to the
living knowledge traditions of the indigenous
peoples; and how to build ethical and practical
relationships between the academy and the
communities that surround it. Blyden's context
and his concerns are in many ways a microcosm
of the global challenges that face those of us who
wish to decolonise the Western academy in the
here and now. What can we learn from Blyden?
And what has (fundamentally) changed?
1492 – 1612 – 1834 – 1915 - 1945
1492 – 1612 – 1834 – 1915 – 1945
... to distract from a larger picture with far reaching and wider consequences. An
article from The Whirlwind, (Issue 4) the Maafa: Afrika’s 500 years of European
Terror) revealed:
‘The term ‘slavery’ does not adequately express what Afrikans have suffered
at the hands of Europeans, for the past 5000 years, of which slavery was just
one stage in this unparalleled, protracted process. ‘[…] [The Maafa] includes
6 stages:
Invasion: military onslaught and village raids
Conquest: subjugation of Afrikans to the European will
Slavery: chattel enslavement
Colonialism: colonial (or national) enslavement
Neo-colonialism: colonial enslavement by proxy
Globalisation: Pan-European global domination (‘New World Order’).
The characteristics (of the Maafa), permeating each stage, are: political
oppression, economic exploitation, social degradation, cultural annihilation, miseducation, religious falsification, psychological retardation and physical
extermination.
Thinking Inside The Box
Too Little Too Late
“Our advanced teachers, like "most highly educated" Negroes,
pay little attention to the things about them except when the shoe begins
to pinch on one or the other side. Unless they happen to become naked
they never think of the production of cotton or wool; unless they get
hungry they never give any thought to the output of wheat or corn; unless
their friends lose their jobs they never inquire about the outlook for coal
or steel, or how these things affect the children whom they are trying to
teach. In other words, they live in a world, but they are not of it. How can
such persons guide the youth without knowing how these things affect
the Negro community?
“For centuries such literature has been circulated among the
children of the modern world; and they have, therefore, come to regard
the Negro as inferior. Now that some of our similarly mis-educated
Negroes are seeing how they have been deceived they are awakening to
address themselves to a long neglected work. They should have been
thinking about this generations ago, for they have a tremendous task
before them today in dispelling this error and counteracting the results of
such bias in our literature
The Miseducation of the Negro (1933)
 the same educational process which inspires and stimulates the
oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished
everything worthwhile, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of
genius in the Negro by making feel that his race does not amount to much
and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The “educated
Negro” is compelled to live and move among his own people whom he has
been taught to despise. As a rule, therefore, the “educated Negro” prefers to
buy his food from a white grocer because he has been taught that the Negro
is not clean. It does not matter how often a Negro washes his hands, he
cannot clean them, and it does not matter how often a white man uses his
hands he cannot soil them... this has been his education, and nothing else
can be expected of him ( xvii, xix)
 The Negro trained in the advanced phases of literature, philosophy, and
politics has been unable to develop far in using his knowledge because of
having to function in the lower spheres of the social order. Advanced
knowledge of science, mathematics and languages, moreover, has not been
much useful except for mental discipline because of the dearth of
opportunity to apply such knowledge among people who were largely
common labourers in towns or peons on the plantations. (p 14)
The Pedagogy of Huey P. Newton: Critical Reflections on Education in
His Writings and Speeches by MATTHEW W. HUGHEY University of
Virginia
As Newton (1995) wrote in his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide,
During those long years in the Oakland public schools, I did not have one
teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience.
Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or question
or explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was
try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the
process they nearly killed my urge to inquire. (p. 22)
Everything that was “White” became in the imagination of Newton,
attractive, while everything “Black” became instantly appalling. Jeffries
(2002) explains that Newton’s “experiences in school were characterized
by assaults on his self-esteem and led him to believe that being black
meant being stupid” and therefore he felt ashamed
The Pedagogy of Huey P. Newton: Critical Reflections on Education in His
Writings and Speeches by MATTHEW W. HUGHEY University of Virginia
First, both Newton’s theory and his style of presentation were at times too
advanced and overly abstract. Newton’s oration was usually overly theoretical
and figurative. Hilliard and Cole (1993) wrote of Newton, “Huey’s great in small
sessions, enthusiastic, intense, funny. But before large groups he freezes; his
voice gets high . . . his style stiffens; he sounds academic, goes on incessantly,
and becomes increasingly abstract, spinning out one dialectical contradiction
after another” (p. 302)
Similar to Illich’s (1971) notion of “deschooling,” Newton felt that students had
to relinquish the fetish of the schooling process in which they were immersed.
Newton wrote, I don’t think students are taught to think dialectically, and one of
the reasons they are not is that it would be detrimental to the bourgeois
educational system to do so. I think it is a fair statement that the schools are
agencies of the status quo: the bourgeoisie needs to train technicians and to
give students a conglomeration of facts, but it would be detrimental for them to
give students the tools to show that the status quo cannot stand and so to
analyze them out of existence.
“The language and logic of the oppressor cannot
be the language and logic of the oppressed.”

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Fair
Bright
Smart
Light
Mud
Bleak
Kinky
Black
Dark

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Tar
Buck
White Lie
Black Ball
Black Mail
Murky
Niggardly
Mad
Hate
Nothing Personal
 Ten Little Niggers (1939)
 The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1884)
 The Dambusters (1954 film)
 The Nigger of the Narcissus
(1897)
 A Nigger in Eton (1972)
 The Student As Nigger (1967)
 The Nigger Factory (1972)
 Nigger, Randy Kennedy (2003)
 Nigger, Dick Gregory (1964)
 Capitalist Nigger (2000)
 The Nigger Bible (1967)
that British education actually makes black children become educationally subnormal making
them feel ‘inferior in every way’. He says of the black child, ‘In addition to being told [they are]
dirty and ugly and “sexually unreliable” [they are] told by a variety of means that [they] are
intellectually inferior. When [they] prepare to leave school, and even before, [they are] told [they
are] made to realize that [their] …”kind” are only fit for manual, menial jobs’. Coard goes on to
explain some of the ways in which this takes place:
1. West Indian children are told that their way of speaking is second rate and unacceptable, the
implication being that they find [that they] themselves are second rate as human beings.
2. the word ‘white’ is associated with good, the word ‘black’ with evil. Coard gives an example
of a children’s book in which he ‘white unicorn’ and the ‘white boys’ are able to repeal an
attack by the violent and evil ‘black pirates’.
3. the content of the education that children receive tends to ignore black people. Reading
books often contain only white people, and when blacks do feature they are normally shown
in subservient social roles such as servants. Coard claims that the people whose lives are
studied and acclaimed (the heroes and figures from history and the present days) are white.
Black culture, music and are all conspicuously by their absence from the curriculum.
4. the attitudes to race covered in the classroom are reinforced by the pupils outside it. In
playground arguments white children may describe West Indian children as ‘black bastards.
Coard believes that these experiences have important consequences for the child. He believes
that black children develop an ‘inferiority complex’ a ‘low self-image’, and ‘low expectations in
life’… they themselves expect to fail, and as a result they do so (p 293/294)
From Jordan to Maxwell
• When we see lots of frame timbers, different portions
of which we know have been gotten out at different
times and places, by different workmen – Stephen,
Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance – and when we
see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly
make the frame of a house or a mill… or if a single
piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly
fitted and prepared to bring a piece in – in such a case
we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and
Franklin and Roger and James all understood one
another from the beginning, and all worked upon a
common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick
was struck
Black Power, Black Identity
• [I]n order to understand white supremacy we must
dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give
anybody their freedom. No man can give anybody his
freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man
after he is born free, and that is in fact what this
country does. It enslaves black people after they’re
born, so that the only acts that white people can do is
to stop denying black people their freedom; that is,
they must stop denying freedom. They never give it to
anyone. Now we want to take that to its logical
extension, so that we could understand, then, what its
relevancy would be in terms of new civil rights bills
John Henrik Clarke. Who Betrayed The African World Revolution
and Other Speeches. “The Historical Basis of Africancentricity,”
Speech given April 3, 1992.
I do not have a fight with Molefi Asante. I have a fight with his generation. His
generation has failed to see the latitude and the longitude of the subject that
was already old when Professor Asante’s parents were born…
My argument is about latitude and longitude. We haven’t kicked what we call
“Afrocentricity” back far enough. We haven’t dealt with its historical roots.
Introduction: This paper presents a framework
for discussing the psychology of African liberation by
using the political terms "colonialism," "colonization" and
"decolonization" as vantage points for contextualizing
African American oppression. Over the past 500 years,
European ruling elites perfected a method of
psychological manipulation and control first discussed
from an African perspective by the Nigerian scholar
Chinweizu (1987) in his classic Decolonising the African
Mind.
The central objective in decolonising the African
mind is to overthrow the authority which alien traditions
exercise over the African. This demands the dismantling
of white supremacist beliefs, and the structures which
uphold them, in every area of African life. It must be
stressed, however, that decolonisation does not mean
ignorance of foreign traditions; it simply means denial of
their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them.
– Chinweizu
http://whgbetc.com/ifbm/decolonizing.html
Head, Heart and Hands
[language] enables us to communicate with one another in
our struggle to find the means for survival… [and is] a carrier
of the history and the culture built into the process of that
communication … The oppressor nation uses language as a
means of entrenching itself in the oppressed nation [...] It
was language which held captive [the] cultures [of colonised
people] their values, and hence their minds
[…] A large portion of [a] vast knowledge is locked up in the
linguistic prison of English [libraries]… language fortresses
inaccessible to the majority. Moving the Centre: The
Struggle for Cultural Freedom by Wa Thiong'o Ngugi
published by James Currey 1993, Chapter 4 - Imperialism of
language. English, a language for the world?
Ruling Rules
Every dominating[colonial] class needs to develop from among its very
young, the cadres it will need to guarantee the preservation of its
privileges. Furthermore, it has to instil in them the ideological beliefs
which give legitimisation to its position of power. In other words, the
children of the dominator must learn to live and behave as dominators
themselves. No doubt, the internalisation of the roles of “masters” is
generated and grows during early socialisation ...a necessary vehicle for
reinforcing, among others, the prevailing conception that the dominating
group has an almost divine responsibility to lead the dominated in order
to ensure their welfare, to protect them against their own inferior nature,
and to ensure a proper division of labour and an adequate destruction of
the material benefits generated by the exploited.These responsibilities of
the dominating classes are portrayed as a necessary burden, a proof of
their enormous generosity. The Slant of the Pen:The Oppressive Function of Values, Concepts
and Images in Children’s Books, Luis Nieves Falcon, p 5
From Cradle to Career (The Life of Life)
The Fear of Freedom, Eclipse of Reason
the majority of politicians ... are interested ... in power
and ... to maintain that power it is essential that
people... live in ignorance ... even ... of their own lives.”
“If I am [an oppressor] and I have you in a certain
place and I need you there then it is important not to
let you have any suspicion that you don’t belong in
that place; that is essentially the reason, that’s the root
reason, there are reasons on top of it but that is the
root reason at the bottom.”
… [the] major philosophical idea… of ideological hegemony as
articulated by Antonio Gramsci. When Barthes saw myth as being
flooded through with ideological information, Gramsci envisaged a
similar process on a grander scale. He maintained that in Western
society the dominant class ensured that their ideology not only
seeped down to the masses but also won them over and gave at
least the appearance of representing them…. An ‘ensemble of
relations’ existed… which enabled a certain world view to be
disseminated and made acceptable to a broad spectrum within that
society, even if it was not in their interest. Hegemony worked, in the
words of Carl Boggs, ‘to induce the oppressed to accept or ‘consent’ to
their own exploitation and daily misery.’ Echoing a point made by
Barthes, the power of ideological hegemony lay in its ability to give
value-ridden concepts the feelings of being ‘natural’ or ‘common
sense’. History has many examples which show that physical coercion
alone cannot maintain indefinite control. But a system which
combined physical coercion (or the threat of it) with a sense of
‘belonging; to that system – this was infinitely more subtle, complex
and difficult to replace. The Media and television in particular, have a
vital role to play in the dialectic between force and persuasion… (p 85)
The Doors of Perception
“today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called
the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the
mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on
human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has
generally been of a violent nature. The Techniques of terrorism have been
known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or
less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal
of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of
using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds… [but] If you are going
to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure
of consent; it's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function
indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you
have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to
consent to what is happening to them.”
The Doors of Perception
In BNWR Huxley wrote that sexual obsessions are promoted to
maintain domination: “…the other characteristic features of that happier and
more stable world--the equivalents of soma and hypnopaedia and the scientific
caste system--are probably not more than three or four generations away. Nor
does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. There
are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to
the number of marriages. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be
sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against
changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As political and
economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to
increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with
which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that
freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of
dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects ato the
servitude which is their fate.”
Controlling Oligarchy, Ruling Elite
‘I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is
mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically speaking,
not a very advanced study... This study is immensely useful to
practical men, whether they wish to become rich or to acquire
the government. It is, of course, as a science, founded
upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has employed
rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a kind of
intuitive common sense. Its importance has been enormously
increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of
these the most influential is what is called 'education'. Religion
plays a part, though a diminishing one; the Press, the cinema
and the radio play an increasing part.’ Russell noted that ‘what is
essential in mass psychology is the art of persuasion’, and it is
this persuasion which has seduced many oppressed people into
loving their servitude.
the process of accompanying learners; caring for and about them; and
bringing learning into life...to educate is, in short, to set out to create and
sustain informed, hopeful and respectful environments where learning can
flourish. It is concerned not just with knowing about things, but also with
changing ourselves and the world we live in. As such education is a deeply
practical activity – something that we can do for ourselves (what we could call
self-education), and with others. This is a process carried out by parents and
carers, friends and colleagues, and specialist educators.
Kant’ successors in the Chair of Philosophy at Königsberg University: Johann
Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). As Hamilton (1999: 143) has put it, Herbart
sought to devise, from first principles, an educational system and thus worked
towards a general theory of pedagogics (see, for example, Allgemeine
pädagogik – General Pedagogics, 1806 and Umriss Pädagogischer
Vorlesungen, 1835 – Plan of Lectures on Pedagogy and included in Herbart
1908). At the centre of his theory were the ideas that
‘Education’ means shaping the development of character with a view to the
improvement of man. ‘Teaching’ represents the world, conveys fresh
knowledge, develops existing aptitudes and imparts useful skills
On Pedagogy
One of the important landmarks here was the publication of John Amos
Comenius’s book The Great Didactic [Didactica Magna] (first published in
Czech in 1648, Latin in 1657 and in English in 1896) He developed sets of rules
for teaching and set out basic principles. His fundamental conclusions,
according to Gundem 1992: 54) remain valid:
Teaching must be in accordance with the student’s stage of development…
All learning happens through the senses…
One should proceed from the specific to the general, from what is easy to
the more difficult, from what is known to the unknown.
Teaching should not cover too many subjects or themes at the same time.
Teaching should proceed slowly and systematically. Nature makes no jumps.
(op. cit.)
The distinction between teachers and pedagogues, instruction and guidance,
and education for school or life was a feature of discussions around education
for many centuries. It was still around when Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
explored education in On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik) 1803
Towards Destruction
• The Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire knows this from experience.
He discovered that any adult can begin to read in a matter of
forty hours if the first words he deciphers are charged with
political meaning. Freire trains his teachers to move into a village
and to discover the words which designate current important
issues, such as the access to a well or the compound interest on
the debts owed to the patron. In the evening the villagers meet
for the discussion of these key words. They begin to realize that
each word stays on the blackboard even after its sound has
faded. The letters continue to unlock reality and to make it
manageable as a problem. I have frequently witnessed how
discussants grow in social awareness and how they are impelled
to take political action as fast as they learn to read. They seem to
take reality into their hands as they write it down.
Adult Learners
The motivations to learn evolve as you become older; and
for an adult educator, teaching can be even more difficult
without a basic understanding of adult learning theory.
Malcolm Knowles, a pioneer in adult education, popularized
the concept of five teaching strategies for adults, which
states that students learn best when:
 Adults understand why something is important to know or do
Adults have the freedom to learn in their own way
Learning is experiential
The time is right for them to learn
The process is positive and encouraging
...each principle outlined above... [is] an important method
to teaching adults effectively.
Some ideas or theories on education
Education implies a growth of an independent sense of life and a
relatedness which go hand in hand with increased access to, and use of,
memories stored in the human community. The educational institution
provided the focus for this process...the university itself, if it is to be
worthy of tradition, must be an institution whose purposes are
identified with the exercise of liberty...
Education is a deliberate process of drawing out learning (educere), of
encouraging and giving time to discovery. It is an intentional act. At the
same time it is, as John Dewey (1963) put it, a social process – ‘a
process of living and not a preparation for future living’. As well being
concerned with learning that we set out to encourage – a process of
inviting truth and possibility – it is also based in certain values and
commitments such as a respect for others and for truth. Education is
born, it could be argued, of the hope and desire that all may share in
life and ‘be more’.
Bertrand Russell Education and the Good life (1926)
P98 children learn at their own pace, and it is a mistake to try to force them… from birth
to death, this is a fundamental principle. It is by what we do ourselves that we learn...
what others do is merely a stimulus to ambition; it is never in itself an education…
I have sometimes thought that belief in the uniformity of nature, which is said to be a
postulate of science, is entirely derived form the wish for safety.
P143 Men read Plato’s “Republic”, but they do not attach it to current politics at any
point.
P158 it does not at first occur to a young child that it is possible to lie. The possibility of
lying is a discovery, due to observation of grown-ups quickened by terror. The child
discovers that grown-ups lie to him, and that it is dangerous to tell them the truth; under
these circumstances he takes to lying. Avoid these incentives, and he will not think of
lying… Children’s memories are very faulty, and they often do not know the answer to a
question when grown- people think they do. Their sense of time is very vague; a child
under four will hardly distinguish between yesterday and a week ago, or between
yesterday and six hours ago. When they do not know the answer to a question, they
tend to say yes or no according to the suggestion in your tone of voice.
The American public schools achieve successfully a task never before attempted on a
large scale: the task of transforming a heterogeneous selection of mankind into a
homogenous nation … actual immigrants, as a rule, retain dual patriotism; in European
struggles they continue to take passionately the side of the nation to which the originally
belonged. Their children, on the contrary, lose all loyalty to the country from which their
parents have come, and become merely and simply Americans.
The Horrors of Public Education
 Public schools initiated adolescents into a world of trivial rules. ... And — in addition to
canalising competitiveness and ensuring discipline — because progress up the public school
hierarchical ladder was in many cases automatic, it taught all its pupils their places in the
social hierarchy: at the top. They were expected to lead. This was quite explicit. When Dr.
Vaughan [headmaster of Harrow] replied to Palmerstone, who had expressed doubts about
the fagging system, he explained that it was not just a method of keeping discipline, but also
of “inculcating a system of organised rank” and was therefore essential as a “memento of
monitorial authority”. Every headmaster would have agreed.
 Public schools are indefensible. ... [S]eparating young children from their parents is a
dereliction of parental responsibility. Perhaps there is a case, when children enter their late
teens, for their going away from home [...] But this is very different from separating boys from
their mothers at the age of seven (as happened to me and thousands of other screwed-up
middle-class men). No one can avoid being scarred for life by such separation, but it does
seem gratuitous for the parents and teachers to conspire to create these scars. ... The
difference between an old public school and one of the new ones might be the difference
between Parkhurst and an open prison. But both are still prison-houses of the soul. Teachers
might try to be caring, responsible individuals instead of the pederasts and sado-maniacs who
used to swell the ranks of their profession. It does not stop the idea of boarding schools being
grotesque and cruel.
(The Times 24/02/1903)
‘compulsory military training
in schools was required in
order to lay the foundations
of military spirit in the nation’
"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after
pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout
the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as
their school masters would have wished ... The social
psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of
school children on whom they will try different methods of
producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black.
Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of
the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and
repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for the future
scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly
how much it costs per head to make children believe that
snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every
government that has been in charge of education for more
than one generation will be able to control its subjects
securely without the need of armies or policemen.“
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte
David Riviera Prophecy Club
Napoleon’s Force
Philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder [1744-1803 who was Johann
Fichte’s (1762 – 1814) contemporary, resented the Germans adopting
French language and losing their own way, which was something
contrary to God’s nature. According to George Fredrickson, his work
“was an important source of nineteenth century cultural
nationalism” whilst his idea of the Volksgeist, (‘the unifying principle
of a people’s life and culture, the basic strength of a people’) was taken
up by Fichte, who identified it with a political programme in his
Addresses to the German Nation, after the French armies had defeated
Prussia in 1806-7. Fichte propagated the idea that the German people
were archetypal and endowed with …a special mission on behalf of
mankind, namely that of leading a cultural struggle against Western,
primarily French, influence [...] Fichte advocated the expansion of the
German State to its ‘natural boundaries’ [...] By the mid nineteenth
concept of racial superiority was established in European thought
largely through works of German thinkers animated by the task of
national unification.
The Rise of Prussia
Forming nation-states also entailed the task of creating internal stability and
consolidation. National education systems were built to inculcate national
loyalty, and economic policy was used to build political alliances [...]
[Fichte] perceived the German nation as a natural whole united by descent,
language and culture. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Fichte
propagated the belief that, though disunited and militarily humiliated by
France, the Germans would triumph eventually through their natural
superiority. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1807 – 8) he portrayed the
Germans as an archetypal people, endowed with a special mission on behalf
of mankind, namely that of leading a cultural struggle against Western,
primarily French, influence.
France was regarded in Europe as one of the strongest military powers, and
it came as a tremendous shock when Prussia easily defeated her in seven
months. The final and humiliating blow came at Sedan when Napoleon III
surrendered with his army. [...] Germany had established herself as the most
powerful nation in Europe after her victory over the French in the FrancoPrussian War. Not only did she field the most powerful and trained army on
the continent she was also the most industrially advanced nation… Germany
had what it took to dominate Europe
• The first modern nation… to put effective, deliberate organisational
restraint in the general development of the intellect was England under the
Tudors. The subsequent intellectual holocaust the English have inflicted
through time, across the whole planet, was quite purposeful it did not
happen by accident. Wherever the English language has gone a strategy of
mass stupidification moved in its train. Wherever the British flag sailed,
calculated stupidity followed. England became the world capital of all justified
programmes of dumbing the commons down. Only England could produce on
demand a dazzling rainbow of arguments [religious, mathematical, scientific,
philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic] to explain why … a palliative
strategy to prevent the common classes from thinking and from having any
independent conscience that mattered. England remains the Nanny state
rampant but accepted its first true rival in the early 19th century with the rise
of Prussian, forced government schooling; the worlds first effective true mass
compulsion schooling scheme, under the direct management of a political
state. The secrets of deliberate mind minimalisation now belonged to two
close blood cousins, neither of whom was shy about practicing their
application.
Democracy In America (1830)
• “[Administration] covers the surface of society with a
network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform,
through which the most original minds and the most
energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the
crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent,
guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are
constantly restrained from acting; such a power does not
destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but
it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each
nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid
and industrious animals, of which government is the
shepherd.”
The Decline of Friendship
• “Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be
formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to
institutional planning of every sort. ‘Instruction’ smothers the
horizon of their imaginations. They cannot be betrayed, but only
short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute
expectations for hope.” (p 131)
• “The school system today performs the threefold function
common to powerful churches throughout history. It is
simultaneously the repository of society’s myth, the
institutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of
the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between
myth and reality.” (p 132)
Rise of the Machines
• Our own lives are mechanical and our own thoughts well controlled by the
thoughts of machinery. Have you ever noticed that machines don’t ever
surprise you after you know their habits; the purpose of market research is to
remove surprise from human behaviour too. When we lose the power to
surprise each other, we loose a chunk of what it means to be human… [we
are] talking to machines when we should be talking to people in the natural
world… many things that really matter, like getting hugged a lot, are
overlooked.
• It’s easy to see how a global economy would matter to the spirit of mass
production machinery or to international banking with all the urgencies of
those twin mechanisms but none clear about what the point of it is to flesh
and blood…machines can be stored anywhere; can function anywhere and
are indifferent to other machines they must associate with, but men and
woman have to build the meanings of their lives around a few a very few
people to touch and love and care for. ..it doesn’t matter at all… how many
machines you own; you’ll still be lonely in the middle of crowds.
Fragments of an unknown teaching
People are turning into machines,” I said “And no doubt sometimes they
become perfect machines. But I do not believe they can think. If they tried to
think, they could not have been such fine machines.” [...] “There is another
kind of mechanization which is much more dangerous: being a machine
oneself. Have you ever thought about the fact that all peoples themselves are
machines?”
“All the people you see, all the people you know… are machines, actual
machines working solely under the power of external influences, as you
yourself said. Machines they are and machines they die… but there is a
possibility of ceasing to be a machine… Psychology refers to people, to men,
to human beings…. Mechanics, not psychology, is necessary for the study of
machines… it is possible to stop being a machine, but for that it is necessary
first of all to know the machine. A machine, a real machine, does not know
itself and cannot know itself. When a machine knows itself it is then no longer
a machine, at least, not such a machine as it was before. It already begins to
be responsible for its action.”
Brave New World Revisited
...political principles and plans for specific action have come to loose most of
their importance; the personality of the candidate and the way he is
projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter... he
must be an entertainer that never bores his audience…[and] the nature of
oratory… [is] to oversimplify complex issues.
Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press the propagandists has
been able for many years pass to convey his message to virtually every adult
in every civilised country. Today, thanks to radio and television he’s in the
happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults
and not yet matured children. Children as might be expected are highly
susceptible to propaganda. They are ignorant of the world and its ways and
therefore completely unsuspecting. Their critical faculties are
underdeveloped. The youngest of them have not yet reached the age of
reason and the older of them lack experience on which their new found
rationality can effectively work. In Europe conscripts used to be playfully
referred to as cannon fodder; the little brothers and sisters have now become
radio fodder and television fodder
Moonshine
36 Chambers
"In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of
education for ordinary men and women, and another for those
who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men
and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual,
thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably
contentment will be considered the most important. In order to
produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism,
and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and
girls will learn from an early age to be what is called 'cooperative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative
will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination,
without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of
them.“
-- Bertrand Russell, "The Scientific Outlook", 1931
36 Chambers
"Except for the one matter of loyalty to the World State and to their
own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be
adventurous and full of initiative...."
"On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at
which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability
as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will
arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to
abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot wholeheartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted,
but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates,
the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done
with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his illdisciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a
painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from
performing it."
-- Bertrand Russell, "The Scientific Outlook", 1931
Principles of Social Reconstruction
Those who wish to gain the world by thought must be
content to lose it as support in the present… Most men
go though life without much questioning, accepting the
beliefs and practices which they find current, feeling
that the world will be their ally if they do not put
themselves in opposition to it. New thought in this
world is incompatible with this comfortable
acquiescence: it requires a certain intellectual
detachment… without some willingness to be lonely
new thought cannot be achieved. And it will not be
achieved to any purpose if the loneliness is
accompanied by aloofness … the state of mind
required is subtle and difficult
Contextualising Power
“We’re dealing with a global power, the global European power and a
global economy which is under the control of Europeans and works to the
benefit of Europeans and its in the context of that global economic power…
that the African personality is shaped… so hardly any…significant African
group… escapes that shaping process… we see the same game being played…
all classes of black people are servants to Europeans … the white system…
produces a set of characters… that serve different functions… [with] some
relationship to their geographical background, their historical experience and
to other kinds of things that go on in the world… if it needs for instance a
certain number of blacks to indicate to the world that it is liberal it will create
a small middle class that gives it the image of being a liberal country… and
these people then will be used to deceive other black people into thinking that
their lack of achievement is the result of some individual deficiency in their
personality… it often so needs a group that sees to its interest among the
oppressed masses and it often than must create class such as the neo-colonial
class, the ruling government classes, to see to its interest whilst creating the
impression again that these people are free and independent; it will even
create criminals to justify its repression… its existence…”
The Coming of the Lord
“it has to be deliberate because it is necessary to maintain the economicsocial system and of course it is thought out and worked through very deliberately…
things change to remain the same… you create apparent change to keep situations the
same…the European learned of course that they did not have to maintain a direct
military presence say on the African continent or in other area where Africans live to
protect their political and economic interests… it’s important we look at the constants
and not the superficial changes… and what happens is that first the European makes
superficial the African intellect… so the African can be deceived by superficial changes
whilst the basic and fundamental relationships are not changed at all… producing
even letting
them be President of the united states will
maintain that constant relationship, that change will occur
profits for your European masters and so if at some point…
and so then often people will respond to that apparent change and miss the fact that
the fundamental relationships have not changed at all… in order for this system to
maintain itself it is a political necessity for black people to be out of their minds… we
cannot be within our basic, natural personality when you have a minority group of
people that exploits a vast majority of people … without being directly put under a
gun… those people can only be… off centre…”
Controlling Space, Controlling Thought
• Africans come to be possessed by a racist spirit which evokes in
them, self-doubt and fear of the idealised oppressors who they feel
they can never surmount. At the same time, unable to express their
anger ‘against its White instigators for fear of annihilation’ the feat
they have, must ‘of necessity be redirected towards other objects’
which itself may still lead to incarceration. Rage is therefore
sublimated, or, in a volcanic atmosphere, provocation is diligently
avoided, to the point of cowardice; an acceptance of being
emasculated and devalued, and “feminized.” Trying to rescue his
insulted “manhood” is even more sorrowful, form ‘he can feel the
effect of his frustration but not fathom their sources’ with the result
being, his anger is misdirected, and his aggression, misplaced, and with
plausible reason: ‘threatened by backlash should he attack Whites for
their obvious misdeeds, the enraged Black-on-Black criminal often
turns away from his original White supremacist instigators to assuage
his anger on his fellow Black victims.’ (p 119)
At your service
The Choice Between Two Cultures
Drugs have been placed in Black
communities at a time when blue collar
jobs dried up, making the drug economy
a powerful hostile force sapping the
strength of African American cultural
values. with the weakening of the Black
family peer grouse have begun to
supplant the extended family community
as a socialization force for our youth.
The corporatization of the United States
and of the world has promoted a shift in
thinking away from highly moral values,
to a vulgar, individualistic, materialist
culture, where bling-bling has come to
mean more than human life for too
many people. Powerful external forces
have worked to produce " A Choice
Who Needs The Negro
•
In his 1970 book entitled “The Technetronic Era,” Brzezinski envisioned the coming
networks of total control “It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous
control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the
most personal details about health and personal behavior of every citizen in
addition to the more customary data. These files will be subject to instantaneous
retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who
control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis
management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely
social crises and to develop programs to cope with them. This will encourage
tendencies through the next several decades toward a Technotronic Era, a
Dictatorship leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them.
Finally, looking ahead to the end of the century, the possibility of biochemical
mind control and genetic tinkering with man, including beings which will function
like men and reason like them as well, could give rise to some difficult questions.”
Also stating “… In the technetronic society the trend seems to be toward
…effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate
emotions and control reason. Human beings become increasingly manipulated
and malleable …”
Group Anonymity
• French Sociologist Le Bon wrote, “a group
scarcely distinguishes between the subjected
and the objective. It accepts as real the
images evoked in it’s mind, though they must
often have only a very distant relation with
the observed fact… whoever can supply [the
group] with illusions is clearly their master;
whoever attempts to destroy illusions is
always their victim”. (1895)
From Propaganda to Brain-trashing
Give Us The Young: Hate Factory
Ideas of world domination are not new. It has always been a favourite
pastime of brainy individuals who have no taste for physical labour, trade, natural
science or mechanical innovation to play the game of human engineering: speculating
on and experimenting with methods of ordering and controlling other human beings.
From the Greek philosopher, Plato, who compiled the ground rules, and gave many
helpful hints, through all the lesser lights, up to and including our 20th Century
fireflies, the `noble' goal has been the same : a perfectly ordered, eternally obedient
`society.' Only the name and characters have changed with sociology. The lust is the
same, and Power is the name of the game
Comte was a patient master-planner. He realized, above all, that before free
people could again be brought under control, their minds had to be trained to be
willing to comply He realized also, as Plato had, that such training could not be
accomplished in one or two generations. He knew that a long range plan was
necessary so each new generation could be trained to accept the loss of freedom and
knowledge of the preceding generation as the normal state of affairs
Carle E., Give us the young, 1981
University - Machine of Judeo Masonic Indoctrination (06/09/14)
How Universities Betray Students (29/08/04)
 Students encounter "The Cult of Great Men" the pantheon of modern
pretenders who have usurped God's place.
Their every utterance is treated as Holy Writ. Scholarly articles are
devoted to words that later turn out to be typos. In a graduate seminar, I
witnessed a student read filthy obscenities that had been censored from
William Faulkner's novel "Sanctuary." After each expletive, the other
students gasped with horror as though a religious artifact had been
desecrated.
Professors are the overpaid priests of this secular cult. They have a vested
interest in maintaining its shibboleths. They initiate students into a lifelong
habit of mental servility. All knowledge comes from Great Men. Students
can only aspire to analyze their meaning. A professor told me I had failed
an exam because "only great men can say things like that."
University - Machine of Judeo Masonic Indoctrination (06/09/14)
How Universities Betray Students (29/08/04)
The students' state-of-mind becomes passive and disoriented. He struggles to
reconcile contradictory world-views.
One day I had an awakening. Don't these "great men" live in the same world?
Isn't it the one I live in?
Dare I think for myself?
Dislocation takes place in time as well as space. By continually studying the
past, the student thinks nothing remains to be done. No manifestos remain to
be written, no Bastilles need to be stormed.
While the world cries out for leadership, the new generation is buried in
musty manuscripts writing footnotes to dead men.
Schools of
Thought
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Determinism
Positivism
Empiricism
Historicism
Kantianism
Logicism
Logical Positivism
Marxism
Structuralism
Functionalism
Modernism
Dialectics…ism
Existentialism
• Frankfurt School
• Marshall McLuhan
• Analytic Philosophy
• British Empiricism
• Continental Philosophy
• Deconstructionism
• German Idealism
• Hegelianism
• Humanism
• Ordinary Language Philosophy
• Phenomenology
• Positivism
• Post-Modernism
• Post-Structuralism
• Pragmatism
• Rationalism
• Romanticism
• Transcendentalism
• Utilitarianism
Stand Aside For the GODS (DWG’s)


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Ferdinand de Saussure
Sigmund [Fraud] Freud
Emile [Emily]Durkheim
Karl Marx [Ticks]
Jean Paul [Van
Damme] Sarte
 Michael Foucault
 Calude Levi [Jeans]
Strauss
 Jaques Lacan
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Jean Piaget [Pigeon]
Burrhus Skinner [Skinny]
Ivan[ovic] Pavlov
Edward Thorndike
Albert Bandura
John Bowlby Basil Bernstein
Roland [Fabian] Barthes
• Insert other Dead White Guy
Here
• We are now so alienated from each other that it is difficult to conceive of a
world in which our energies and desires are not systematically controlled and
manipulated — a world in which meaningful communication is commonplace.
Our capacity for self-regulation and autonomy has been schooled out of us; we
are left with a character armor (the colonization of Capital) which protects us
from expressing ourselves freely
• Throughout the first years of our lives we were forced not just to internalize
a few aspects of capital, but to build up a structure of internalizations. As our
capacity for coherent natural self-regulation was systematically broken down, a
new system of self regulation took its place, a coherent system, incorporating all
the aspects of self-repression. We participated in capital’s ongoing project of
colonization by colonizing ourselves, by continually working at the construction
of a unitary character-structure (character armor), a unitary defense against all
drives, feelings, and desires which we learned were dangerous to express. In the
place of our original transparent relations to our world, we created a structure
of barriers to our self-expression which hides us from ourselves and others.”
• Representation is at the heart of the logic of
modern politics, and its so-called enemies uphold
this logic better than anyone. Such thinking is
institutionalized among the academic Left, who are
proud of their broad curriculum which includes all
sorts of women’s studies, queer studies, AfricanAmerican studies, etc. As long as students learn to
demand “justice” for everyone, the possibility of
revolutionary change can be ignored. Through
appeals for justice or equal rights within the
system, the academic Left perpetuates the system
and its moralistic logic. And since academia is
virtually defined by the dissociation of thought and
action, no revolutionary theory could possibly
thrive in this context; conversely, it is here that
revolutionary ideology is at home, an object of
passive consideration.
• The student often finds more meaningful forms
of escapism — ideological escapism. Students are
for justice, Che Guevara t-shirts, and affirmative
action. And the socialist organizations are waiting
to recruit. The student’s “rent-a-crowd militance for
the latest good cause is an aspect of his real
impotence.”The student serves the cause and the
cause serves to justify the student’s subservience.
The student activist consciously aligns their
thinking with what they perceive to be that of an
oppressed group (which they may or may not be a
member of). Now they can speak for that group
and articulate the desires of that group, usually
phrased as demands made of the authorities. Every
person, every group, must be represented.
The Technological Society (1954)
[technology] is but an
expression and by-product
of the underlying reliance
[of society] on technique,
on the proceduralization
whereby everything is
organized and managed to
function most efficiently,
and directed toward the
most expedient end of the
highest productivity
White Supremacy or European Superiority or American
Exceptionalism or Fragmentation Violence
• Decolonising
• Pedagogy
 Deschooling
 Society
White Supremacy or European Superiority or American
Exceptionalism or Fragmentation Violence
• Education
• Training
 Studying
 Learning
My Name Is Nobody
• All my life I had been looking for something and
everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it
was. I accepted their answers too, though they were
often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I
was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking
everyone except myself questions which I, and only I,
could answer. It took me a long time and much
painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve
a realization everyone else appears to have been
born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I
had to discover that I am an invisible man!
My Name Is Nobody
 “It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All
my life I had been looking for something, and
everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it
was. I accepted their answers too, though they were
often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I
was naive. I was looking for myself and asking
everyone except myself questions which I, and only I,
could answer. It took me a long time and much
painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve
a realization everyone else appears to have been
born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I
had to discover that I am an invisible man!”
The Ghost/Machine In The Machine
• Anyone who recognizes them, praises them, and makes
them emotionally comfortable and feeling good about
themselves can easily take charge Real people are not liars
or role players. They live and deal with others according to
the truth
• Those who lack the sense of identity and significance and
who believe others, or the world around them, can provide
it-or deprive them of it-will also lack a sense of control over
themselves and their lives. They await signals from others
telling them what to do and how to feel about themselves.
They desperately need stimulation and approval
Why Things Are The Way They Are (1996)
Hundreds of thousands of young people today are in more identity . He
was literally trying to find his `self' in drugs or less the same situation..
Their problem is a great deal more serious than their parents realize,
have ever experienced, or possibly could even understand These lost
souls are wandering around seeking, but never finding, that elusive
something called `self.' They seek it in their relationships with other
people. They seek it in travel . They seek it in outlandish dress and hair
styles . They seek it in sexual activity . They seek it in drugs or
debauchery They seek it in service and self-sacrifice .They seek it in
crime - perhaps hoping that someone somewhere will make it clear to
them who they really are. How could it be? How could so many be
similarly afflicted? Is there some common cause to which all of them
have been exposed? How could anyone doubt his own identity? We all
have minds . We have bodies. What is it we perceive when we look in
the mirror? It is a reflection of something) Do we not see ourselves?
Content to merely survive
Fanon’s three basic questions:
•who am I,
•am I, really who I am and
•am I who I ought to be?”
‘…he, the worth of his possessions, and the modish
arrangements of his attire, are one [and whilst]
ownership of land, resources, production and distribution
facilities, a brain trust, an army [demonstrate power] a
nation of individual consumers…is doomed to continued
subordination, exploitation and ultimate annihilation.’
In the words of John Henrik Clarke
“You keep on telling me what you have not read …”
•
•
•
•
What do we need to know
How are you blocked from asking these questions
At what point do we know anything
At what point do we go from hearing to knowing
• How do we relate to ourselves and others
• What are the essentials of being and becoming a whole
person
• What is my conception of dignity and independence …
• How do we make sense out of the phrase, education
• What is the culmination of enquiry…
The Too Much Information Age
• “[Information] distracts us from thinking
through the problems of our time [bits]
inundate and confuse us … while knowledge is
orderly and cumulative information is rampant
and miscellaneous… the triumph of our
information media is their scoop … they deal
with the might happen, the theoretical… but
books are cumulative, a new novel by
Pirandello makes us want to read his earlier
knowledge”.
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
The master’s map
•
People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of
it (p 302) [...] The emergent men of the new time will consider sterile gratification a moral and legitimate thing…
they will stifle no spread of knowledge that will diminish the swarming misery of childhood in the slums, they
will regard the disinclination of the witless “Society” woman to become a mother as a most amiable trait in her
folly…[while] most of the human types, that by civilised standards are undesirable, are quite willing to die out
through such suppressions if the world will only encourage them a little. They will multiply in sheer
ignorance, but they do not desire multiplication even now, and they can easily be made to dread it. Sensuality
aims not at life, but at itself.
•
I believe that the men of the New Republic will deliberately shape their policy along these lines. They will
rout out and [eliminate] urban rookeries and all places where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive
a land regulation that will keep the black, or yellow, or mean-white squatter on the move; they will see to it
that no parent can make a profit out of a child, so that childbearing shall cease to be a hopeful speculation
for the unemployed poor; and they will make the maintenance of a child the first charges upon the parents who
have brought it into the world.[...] I believe that the next hundred years will see this new phase of the human
history beginning; there will recommence a process of physical and mental improvement in mankind (p 307)
•
[for] those swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the
new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to
go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to
develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die
out and disappear. The world has a purpose greater than happiness (p 316) Anticipations of the reaction of
mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought, Herbert George Wells, 4th edition, London:
Chapman and Hall, L.D, 1902,
Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what
we call the reality-based community,'' which
he defined as people who ''believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured
something about enlightenment principles
and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the
way the world really works anymore,'' he
continued. ''We're an empire now, and when
we act, we create our own reality. And while
you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as
you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's
how things will sort out. We're history's actors
. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study
what we do.'‘
Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty, Oct 17 2004
GOVERNMENT
Gossinian Structuralistic-Cybernetic Race Theory
In 1989, the Los Angeles Times carried an article in which The World
Future Society’s [made it’s] “Top Ten Forecasts” for the coming decade
were listed. These forecasts included:
 Cash becoming illegal, with paper money being largely removed from
circulation
 The emergence of “electronic immigrants”, a global workforce who
telecommute via computers
 Robots (artificial intelligence) possessing levels of intelligence greater
than humans
 Smarter furniture able to communicate with householders
 Medical practice commonly replacing defective genes with healthy
substitutes
 Smart Cars with built in computers and navigation systems
póg mo thóin (Muddy Waters)
 Sex education as a tool of world government, being encouraged through
entertainment and Sport being used as a tool of social change
 The world food supply being controlled & home ownership disappearing
 Increased inflation and financial control, with higher tax on savings
 Families to diminish in importance through easier divorce and better
travel options
 The elimination of private doctors and The reduction of provisions of
affordable healthcare to older peoples
 Limitations and restrictions being imposed on travel/ID card tracking
 Technology enabling reproduction without sex, and laboratory baby
engineering and Euthanasia and the “demise” pill
 The encouragement of same-sex practices
 Populations needing permission to have children
 Contraception being made universally available to all
 The arrival of a totalitarian global system as nations yielded national
sovereignty
 implants and television watching people through electronic surveillance
Conspiracism...a flawed worldview
James
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Barry Smith (1988)
William Guy Carr (1958)
David Rivera (1994)
Myron Fagan (1958)
John Robinson (1797)
David Icke (1998)
Alan Watt
Jordan Maxwell
Farmer
•
•
•
•
•
•
The Learned Elders of Zion
Quiet Weapons for Silent Wars
The Willie Lynch Letter
The Report from Iron Mountain
Majesty Twelve
The Straw Man and Admiralty
Law
• The Abraham Zapruder Tape
• New Order of Barbarians
I teach the unrelating of things
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The emphasis on obsolete, useless “data”
Working to tests that are arbitrary in value
Training people into docility and subordination
Encouraging attitudes of competition
Encouraging compliance and conformity
Disconnecting pupils from the wider world
Fragmenting consciousness to produce servants
Producing habits conducive to capital
Manufacturing consumers and docile workers
Changing China
'My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese
settlements of Africa a part of our national policy, in the
belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only
maintain their position, but that they would multiply and
their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race,' wrote
Galton. 'I should expect that the African seaboard, now
sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages, might in a
few years be tenanted by industrious, order-loving
Chinese, living either as a semidetached dependency of
China, or else in perfect freedom under their own law.'
How China's taking over Africa, and why the
West should be VERY worried ,18.07.08
I live therefore I spend
…[in a] remarkable book called “The Philosophy Of
Money” … [Georg] Simmel said that … money contained
within itself a powerful internal contradiction ... [that] was
built into the foundation of its abstract existence. This
contradiction it could not be gotten rid of. He said that
money robs things of their innate identity and replaces that
core identity with a money identity. By making everything
interchangeable with money often cheapens things and
removes their significance
‘adornment is the egoistic element as such… but at
the same time, adornment is altruistic; its pleasure is
designed for others, since its owner can enjoy it only in so
far as he mirrors himself in them’, and adds that adornment
indicates ‘the arena of man’s being for himself and being forthe-other.’
From Adorno to Adornment
The relationship which the fascist follower beats to the leader, a
relationship which Adorno see as definitive of fascism, is
fundamentally masochistic. However, the leader permits, and
sometimes requires, the follower to give vent to sadistic impulses.
A review of three issues associated with this relationship can
structure this account of Adorno’s theory of the psychodynamics
of fascism. First, the question arises of how individuals come to be
in a position where masochistic surrender to a fascist leader
appears attractive. Second, the nature of the libidinal bond
between the leader and follower requires explanation. Third,
those issues bear on the murderous aggression associated with
fascism. Adorno links the problem of susceptability to fascist
propaganda to the doctrine of the “end of the individual” which
the [Frankfurt] instituted had begun to develop in the 1930’s.
From Adorno to Adornment
Individual decision and reflection give way in more and more
spheres of life to corporatize policy-making and the repetitive
formulae of mass-culture. For Adorno there is a fundamental
symmetry between mass-culture and fascism, both of which feedoff and reproduce immature structure with high, almost child-like,
dependency needs. Radio soap operas, newspaper astrology
columns and fascist propaganda structures share the
characteristic that they operate by at once meeting and
manipulating the dependency needs of the psycho-individual. [...]
The leaders power and charisma function for the follower as a
narcissistic projection of his own ego-ideal, a projection with
which he then identifies...the fascist leader is the “great little
man,” embodying in enlarged form all the collective virtues of the
little men who are his followers (p11)
On Adornment
With adornment we refer to the situation where the individual is willing
to use illegal or criminal means in order to obtain very expensive,
luxurious, or overpriced faddish, usually gaudy, social status symbols.
These illegal means include the willingness on his part to sell addictive or
self-destructive substances, and willingness to personally rob, viciously
assault or murder another person… [in order] to project his self-image in
ways which influence his consciousness and behaviour and in ways he
considers advantageous and/or pleasing to himself and others…
[Adornment is] designed to mobilise a particular type of response from
others to incite a variety of reactions such as defence, admiration, envy,
acceptance, or fear… [so] that the body so adorned is being utilised as an
object, as an instrument, as a prop to support a staged performance… thus
[denoting] the presence of split between his body and soul… utilising the
adornment of his body as an instrument of denial and repression of his
real self and of some important aspects of reality… [the] individual may
intensely dislike his natural body or may perceive it as the only really
acceptable and lovable characteristic he possesses.
Humanity, Coloniality of Being
…our economic system too is more a symptom than a
cause of separation. The root and the epitome of separation is
the discreet isolated self of modern perception… it is a self
conditionally dependent on but fundamentally separate from
the other, from nature and from other people…[thus we
naturally seek to manipulate the ‘not’-self for our best
advantage; technology in particular is predicated on some
kind of individuation of conceptual separation from the
natural environment because it takes the physical world as its
object of manipulation and control … our self conception… is
based on an illusion… that is why the implications of our
present re-conceiving of ourselves are so profound promising
no less than a radical re-definition of what it is to be human;
how we relate to one another and how we relate to the world
(introduction to The Ascent of Humanity) [emphasis mine]
Four Fundamentals
As explored by Luigi Pirandello as early as 1919
were the four fundamental themes of human
existence that were to be tackled by the individual:
•the definition of madness,
•the problem of identity,
•the impossibility of communicating with others
•the impossibility of being (or knowing) one’s self
Motivate Forgetting
Many people don’t want to read history… because if they feel about
[it] they get angry, [and] upset. Some may feel some shame, and guilt
and self doubt and other kinds of things and since these feelings are
unpleasant they want to avoid reading the history and avoid the
knowledge but look at what’s happening then if you don’t want to
read that history and if you try to deny the history it means then that
your life become motivated by denial in other words denial itself
denial of reality becomes a defining force in your life. if you don’t read
that history because you are afraid to deep feel shame or guilt then it
means that you have organised your life to escape shame and guilt
that means you are motivated by what, fear… so the absence of
knowledge means that you are being motivated by negative forces and
you organised your life around negatives , in a sense then life becomes
organised around escape denial distortion avoidance which means
then that you are even more influenced by it now in a negative way
but history that you don’t even know. That’s why the very foundations
of mental health is a knowledge of reality we measure mental illness
by the degree to which the individual is out of touch with the reality
Motivate Forgetting
if you do not know the reality of … your own history and your
own personality… [it is] to this degree that you lack
knowledge of that history; to that degree you are suffering
from mental maladjustment. Your behaviour then becomes a
puzzle to your self and you walk around, “why do I act like
this”. “Why do black people behave like this?” it’s not mystery
when you know the history when you understand your
experience but when you deny knowledge of yourself and
when you refuse to know yourself then you are a puzzlement
unto yourself and you are baffled by your own behaviour and
it means then that you lose control over your self it means
that the forces of which you do not know, from which they
come, are the things now that are controlling your. As a
matter of fact if you faced up to it directly and integrated it
correctly into your life you’ll find that it will just increase your
health… you cannot exist well with a vacuum in the middle of
your mind. (The Developmental Psychology of the Black Child)
The Truthication of Europe’s Dominance
Eurocentric history is used to motivate forgetting in the Afrikan
personality, to create amnesia, to maintain repression… [yet] the
most powerful forces that shape human behaviour are those
factors that are consciously not remembered by human beings,
that are unknown by the person… that is one of the paradoxes of
human behaviour… and so the idea that we don’t know, that
we’re not aware of certain early experiences, does not mean that
we have escaped their effects. In fact is puts us more profoundly
under the influence of these unknown forces…. There are those
of us who are made ashamed of our history of enslavement, who
are made ashamed by the distorted presentation of Afrikaans
history… [so] many of us attempt to repress any knowledge of
our … slave experience … life is then lived in terms of denial, in
terms of escape and addiction … people who manipulate the past
and present manipulate one’s mentality, sanity, contact with
reality and the ability to deal with reality … (p. 53)
I Gave You Power/Bonnie and Clyde
Wilson Words
Fanon wrote that the moment a black man is ‘seen’ by
the colonising European gaze, he becomes objectified…
he ceases to exist for himself, but instead he becomes
objectified as a black man; no longer a unified subject.
Merely a representational iconic body… that can be
read in a transparent chain of signification; the black
body reduced to stereotype and metaphor signifying
drugs, guns sexual hedonism and so on, depending on
the time and place… its power to penetrate the selfconsciousness of the black African, to alienate the
black subject from his own experiences of his body so
that he comes to see himself through the dominant
perspective of the legislative gaze of the other he
learns to objectify himself… an invisible majority.’
Orthodoxy Unconsciousness
The basic assertion [of friendship orthodoxy] is that to achieve peace and harmony
whites and blacks must work toward recognition of their fundamental commonality,
must undertake, as individuals, to see through superficial differences to the needs and
longings that all share. The discourse declares that we must teach ourselves how to get
along together and how to become friends (p 4)
Race problems belong to the passing moment. Race problems do not involve group
interests and conflicts developed over centuries. Race problems are being smoothed
into nothingness, gradually… by good will [and] affection. (p. 11)
[the] is lesson [is that] once blacks are awarded unconditional white friendship, as
individuals, they cases to harbour any sense of vexation or injury that would need
suppressing… incessantly and deliberately, the world of pop is engaged in
demonstrating, through images, that racism has to do with private attitudes and
emotions… not with differences in rates of black and white joblessness, or in black and
white income levels… in the world of pop, racism and fraternity have to do solely with
the conditions of personal feeling. Racism is unconnected with ghetto patterns… racism
has nothing to do with the survival strategies prudently adopted by human beings
without jobs or experience of jobs or hope of jobs… pop shows it audiences that racism
is nothing but personal hatred… (p 23)
The Roots of Race
In Bullwhip days, James Mellon was to ask
when and where did the kind of racism peculiar to America originate? If even the earliest colonists
– those who themselves had immigrated to these shores – already shared a pervasive conviction
that black people are fundamentally inferior to white people, could American racism have
originated in America? And, allowing that it originated in the Old World, why was racial antipathy so
much deeper and more pronounced among the British and northern European colonists than
among immigrants from the Mediterranean world?’
In his much referenced book, Lie My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen looks at the true nature of
racism, in it’s substance and form, revealing it to be, at it’s root, based on aristocratic old world
fables and ideas:
‘Some slave masters secretly feared that their slaves might revolt even as they assured the
abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery’. Slavery, subordination to the superior race is his
natural position it was believed. Blacks had no rights that whites must respect.
‘What made the white men believe that black people were inferior in their intellects? It wasn’t
because they believed there was a creator god who created mankind; it was because they believed
that the black race had not evolved as far as the white race. That’s the real cause of racism.
The Roots of Race
• We are talking about an elite who have their own religion,
their own belief system, which differs from everybody else's and
they believe that their spirit, is different from that of Joe average;
they believe that they were a separate created race, you might
say, spiritually and physically, from Joe Average... what they
believe is that they themselves were banished, or cast out - and
this is where the whole fallen angel philosophy comes from - and
because they were [they believe] created higher than man, they
still retained special powers when they arrived here and [that]
through pure will they created their own physical bodies which
they claimed were perfect and they could do with them amazing
things ... but when they started to inter-breeds with the [races]
of people here, they started to loose them powers and so they
turned to intensive in-breeding to try and get back what they
were...
The Roots of Race
• they believe again that there was a creator... but that they
rebelled because they believed they had all the powers of the
creator themselves and of course that's where all your
Luciferian doctrine comes from...the same philosophy... the
light-bringer, and so it is ancient religion which belongs to an inbred [special few] ... even in Sumer too they did find some of the
royalty in an underground grave... and they found the wigs which
the royalty wore ...wigs made from the local people which was
black but they themselves had red or blonde hair and its the
same in Egypt... so the nobility were literally a different race from
the people they lorded over ... they might look like you but they
don’t believe they are the same as you, you’re an inferior species
to them, your skin might be white but it takes more then that to
belong to them genetically. They don’t identity with you the
peasant of America is no different to the peasant of China
Unconsciousness
The vital link between [the friendship] orthodoxy and pseudo- and antihisotry was
forged, in Roots, with the creation of the figure of the Unscathed Slave (Arguably the
rise of the orthodoxy commenced, in fact, with this invention.) Nominated for thirtythree Emmy Award, the series intimated, to a seemingly enthralled audience of over
130 million, that the damaged resulting from generations of birth-ascribed, seminal
status were largely temporary, that [British] slavery was a product of motiveless
malignity on the social margins rather than of respectable rationality, and that the
ultimate significance of the institution lay in the proof, implicit in its defeat, that no
force on earth can best the energies of American Individualism. (p. 124)
The assault on history encourages belief that two centuries of labour bondage followed
by a century of post-emancipation repression has no consequences to speak of; that
the bondage had no permanent injury (p. 144)
Benjamin Demott The Trouble with Friendship: Why American's Can't Think Straight
about Race, (1995) New York : Atlantic Monthly Press
To By or not To By
Unrepentant
• Schools represented, especially to American Indians, a new
relationship to space, which was conceived of in linear terms.
Lines, corners, squares, and strait rows represented industrial
civilization’s relationship to wilderness. Space was colonized
by the disciplinary imperative: freedom of movement was
carefully regulated. As the student learns to heed the
teacher’s commands, he internalizes the discipline that
shapes individuals. “A relation of surveillance, defined and
regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching,
not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that
is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency.”[69] Is it any
wonder that schools resemble prisons?
The Written Word, The Spoken Form
•
•
•
•
•
Language structures our perception of “reality”… the fact that the new media are
inseparable from the changes occurring in the environment requires that the
school’s virtually exclusive with print literacy be extended to include these new
forms (161)
The invention of writing produced a chain of more or less radical reactions at
almost every level of society (162)
Not until the invention of print did another linguistic medium drastically intrude on
man’s symbolic consciousness (163)
The book, by isolating the reader and his responses, tended to separate him from
the powerful oral influences of his family, teacher, and priest. Print thus created a
new conception of self as well as of self-interest. At the same time, the printing
press provided the wide circulation necessary to create national literatures and
intense pride in one’s native language. Print thus promoted individualism on the
one hands and nationalism on the other. (164)
Since the sixteenth century, written examinations and written assignments have
been an integral art of the methodology of school teaching; and since the
sixteenth century, the image of the isolated student, the student who reads and
studied by himself, has been the essence of our conception of scholarship (165)
On Changing Childhood
•
In the essay ‘Down With Childhood’ Shulamith Firestone argues, that the creation
of childhood ‘dictated that children were a species different not just in age, but in
kind, from adults… with a resulting belief that children were asexual.’ From this
point, even costumes were creator for children, with the purposes of exaggerating
the difference between them and adults. With this, children came to be
sentimentalised, and with this, they came to be the targets of ‘affection’ in the
form of fondling. (‘The Smile is the child/woman equivalent of a shuffle; it
indicates acquiescence of the victim to his own oppression.’ (p 38)) Much rather,
the authors advocates that ‘”raising” a child is tantamount to retarding his
development. The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF.’ As it were, at present
‘the myth of childhood happiness flourishes so wildly not because it satisfied the
needs of children but because it satisfied the needs of adults.’ Childhood is an
oppressive period, ripe with economic and physical dependence, as well as sexual,
educational and family repression. As R.D. Laing wrote about family’s, and their
own keeping up of appearances, or Games, ‘there are concerted family
resistances to discovering what is going on, and there are complicated stratagems
to keep everyone in the dark, and in the dark that they are in the dark.’
The Full Monty
• From the 1880 until the 1960’s, children were taken from their
homes and sent to strict, military-style boarding schools to be
turned into ‘Americans’ or ‘Canadians’. They were brutally
punished for speaking their own languages and taught to despise
their own people.
• The boarding school system devastated Native American
communities. Families were broken up, and thousands of
children died form disease, brutality and despair. If they tried to
run away, they were hunted and rounded up like escaped
animals … when they finally returned to their reserves and
reservations; many children spoke on English and could no
longer communicate with their own families. Not surprisingly,
many of them ended up unsure about who they were and where
they belonged
• Many languages and cultures were almost destroyed. Because the children
were taken away from home, their parents and grandparents were unable to pass
on to them their traditional stories and beliefs. When they finally returned to
their reserves and reservations, many children spoke only English and could no
longer communicate with their own families. Not surprisingly, many of them
ended up unsure about who they were and where they belonged.
• Today, most boarding schools have gone, but children are still often confused
about their identity. Most of their classes are in English and they learn many of
the same things as other American Children. Every morning, in most schools in
the USA, they have to pledge allegiance to the American flag, and they are taught
to respect national leaders like Andrew Jackson, who was President of the USA
from 1828-1837. He hated Native Americans and tried to destroy them
• […] For most of this century, Christian missionaries were one of the biggest
threats to Native American culture. The Canadian and US governments gave them
enormous power of the reserves and reservations, including their right to run
some of the boarding schools. Traditional ceremonies such as the Sun Dance and
the Potlatch were banned, and people who did not go to church or who tried to
prevent their children being sent to mission schools were punished, sometimes by
imprisonment. (p 32)
Gatto, John Taylor: The Congregational Principle
Since 1960 there has been a deadly difference in the effects of
schooling, in combination with the universal spread of television which
was achieved in that year, by 1960, 94% of all American households
had a television set. The destructive power of schooling with television
is now awesome and thoroughly out of control, a television institution
structurally very similar to a teacher to the style of mass schooling has expanded so
successfully that most of the escape routes are now blocked. Children could come
home from school before 1960 and then they could cure themselves
but if you snap on the tube it does its job the same way, it tells you
what to watch. I don’t believe there are good shows and bad shows;
there are only shows which tell you what to watch, from what
perspective to see it and exactly how long to give it your attention and
then the next show in the sequence has nothing to do with the one
that came before. No, television and schools are the same
institution.
Threatened Cultures
• Even the most isolated Native American communities now
have television. Many people feel it has taken over from the
school system as the worst threat facing their cultures… because
the programmes they receive are mostly American of Canadian,
they teach children to speak English rather than their own
languages and to see the world through different eyes. One
Oglala leader remembers: When I was a kid, I used to watch
Westerns on TV, and I was so brainwashed I’d be cheering for the
Cavalry rather than for the Indians.
• Through television, children are down a way of life very
different from their own and taught to think of it as normal. They
are encouraged to want things which are often inappropriate to
their own cultures and which they and their families cannot
afford
Pre-colonial East Afrika
•
In pre-colonial Africa (as for the vast majority of people in western countries prior
to the industrial revolution), all education was of the informal type described
above. As pointed out by President Nyerere, in his essay “Education For Self
Reliance”, this informational education system was ideally suited to its purpose of
transmitting from one generation to the next the accumulated wisdom and
knowledge of the society, and preparing children for their future participation in
the maintenance and development of the society. With the advent of colonial rule
this changed. A Formal system of education was introduced, the function of which
was not to prepare children for service to the community in which they lived, but
rather they produce servants to the colonial administration. The selected few who
entered the African sector of the racially segregated school system were taught
according to a curriculum modelled on that used in the Metropole, and instilled
with the individualistic, competitive, materialist values of western capital society.
This alien system of education was a powerful factor contributing to the
emergence, in many newly independent African countries, of a ruling class who
had internalised the values of western capitalism and had a vested interest in
maintaining the status quo and the educational system which supports it.
Alternative Cosmologies
If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or abhorrent
social act. The individual is called to the centre of the village; the people in
the community form a circle around him or her, and they sing their song. The
tribe remembers that the correction for anti social behaviour is not
punishment but love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognise
your own song you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt
another person and a person and a friend is someone who knows your song
and sings it to you when you’ve forgotten it. Those who love you are not
fooled by your mistakes that you have made or dark images that you might
hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly, your
wholeness when you feel broken, your innocence when you feel guilty and
your purpose when you’re confused… life is always reminding you of when
your in tune with yourself and when your not. When you feel good what
you’re doing matches your song and when you feel awful it doesn’t … just
keep singing and you’ll find your way home.
•October 1, 2006, “Creativity and Change” Karen Vyner-Brooks and Rev. Dr.
Arvid Straube
Peace Villiage
Voices of Our Ancestors, Dhyani Ywahoo furthers another notion that
relates to dealing with people who act irresponsibly, or out of
character: the Peace Village:
Up until the 1800’s throughout much of the south-eastern part of what
is now the United States, there were villages called Peace Villages. The
Peace Village was one way the Tsalagi people saw to maintain peace
and balance – to maintain villages whose single purpose was to
mediate the various aspects of the mind, always aware of the whole…
the Peace Villages were places of sanctuary where no blood was shed,
no harm was done. Any person, even a killer or a thief, who made his or
her way to the village and followed the cycle of purification within the
sanctuary for one year could be forgiven all transgression… even “white
criminals,” non-native criminals in flight from the laws of their own
people, could find sanctuary there, and many did.(p. 148)
The Yellow Pages
•
•
They used the gauntlet on a boy and girl who were caught together kissing. The
two of them had to crawl naked down a line of other students, and we beat them
with sticks and whips provided by the principal. The girl was beaten so badly she
died from kidney failure. That gave us all a good lesson: if you tried having normal
feelings for someone, you'd get killed for it. So we quickly learned never to love or
trust anyone, just do what we were told to do.
They were always pitting us against each other, getting us to fight and molest one
another. It was all designed to split us up and brainwash us so that we would
forget that we were Keepers of the Land. The Creator gave our people the job of
protecting the land, the fish, the forests. That was our purpose for being alive. But
the whites wanted it all, and the residential schools were the way they got it. And
it worked. We've forgotten our sacred task, and now the whites have most of the
land and have taken all the fish and the trees. Most of us are in poverty,
addictions, family violence. And it all started in the schools, where we were
brainwashed to hate our own culture and to hate ourselves so that we would lose
everything. That's why I say that the genocide is still going on.
Forgetting Selves
For as long as they can remember the Guarani have been
searching – searching for a place revealed to them by their
ancestors… this [seems like a] permanent quest … today this
manifests itself in a more tragic way: profoundly affected by the
loss of almost all their land in the last century, the Guarani suffer
a wave of suicide unequalled in South America… Rosalino Ortiz
puts it this way, ‘The Guarani are committing suicide because we
have no land. We don’t have space anymore. In the old days, we
were free, now we are no longer free. So our young people look
around them and think there is nothing left and wonder how
they can live. They sit down and think, they forget, they lose
themselves and then commit suicide.’ … squeezed onto tiny
patches of land, living in cramped and polluted communities,
suffering an epidemic of suicide and violence, it is perhaps only
the deeply spiritual side to he Guarani’s nature that has enabled
them to survive at all. (p. 64)
Threatened Cultures by Anna
Lewington
Missionary Boarding Schools
• Rain Forest Amerindians
• Kalahari Bushmen
• Australian Aborigines
• Maori
• Romanichal Gypsies
• English Gypsies
• Bedoun
• Anuak (Southern Ethipia)
Rhodes to Rhodesia
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Guest: I think it is deteriorating and I feel it’s deteriorating to an extent that
probably in a year or so we’ll have the same type of situation that developed in
Nigeria where you had two and a half million people dead as a result of tribal
warfare.
Interviewer: Can you see the same type of thing happening in South Africa
Guest: Eventually, the situation is developing in that area to the extent that they’re
encouraged by what is happening in south east Africa, shortly to be called
Namibia, and of course, what has happened in Zambia and Rhodesia, now
Zimbabwe of course.
Host: Do you see this government in Zimbabwe lasting very long
Guest: No there’s bound to be tribal conflict there because probably a fight to the
finish if one can put it that way, between the economy and Robert Mugabe
Host: And if the same thing were to happen in South Africa do you think there’d
tribal conflict there also in time
Guest: Yes, definitely because this is what Africa is, full of tribes, smaller nations
who of course have always been in conflict with each other and the stabilizing
force has always been the white man
Further Falsification
European history to a considerable degree, attempts to control
consciousness by the way it Is presented,,, we are focused on
their so-called birth. Even more pernicious than this is the fact
that many of our people feel as if they do not come into existence
and self-conscious until they have been recognised by European
historians. So Columbus “discovers” America and it’s almost as if
the “Indian” comes into reality and into self-consciousness as the
result of Columbus discovery. Before that time they were nothing.
Dead! And many of us still have that deep psychology, that we are
“invisible” people until White-folks recognise us today; we are not
famous until they make us famous; we are not anything until they
make us something. Before that we are nothing… history by
Europeans is seen as a validation of truth… consequently, we can
only feel it is the truth when it comes out of a European mouth –
solely. (p.33)
When Santayana Met The Boys
Inheritance arrests the flux by repeating a series of phases with a recognisable rhythm; memory
reverses it by modifying this rhythm itself by the integration of earlier phases into those that
supervene. Inheritance and memory make human stability. .. Inheritance is repetition on a larger
scale, not excluding spontaneous variations ; while habit and memory are a sort of heredity
within the individual, since here an old perception reappears, by way of atavism, in the midst of a
forward march. Life is thus enriched and reaction adapted to a wider field ; much as a note is
enriched by its overtones, and by the tensions, inherited from the preceding notes, which give it
a new setting. . Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change
is absolute there re- mains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement:
and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage the mind is frivolous and easily
distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition
of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second
stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on
original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and
true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once
forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and
fertile readaptation. In a moving world re- adaptation is the price of longevity.
On Psychiatry and Eugenics
Proponents of standardized tests often wrap themselves in the language of
high standards. But that's not the issue. No one advocates low standards. The
issue is what we mean by higher standards, and how we can reach those
standards.By and large, calls for more standardized tests come from
politicians eager to prove they are serious about school reform and creating a
"high skills," internationally competitive workforce. But they offer little if any
evidence that links increased testing to improved teaching and learning.
Similarly, test-pushers pay scant attention to key issues such as smaller
classes, improved teacher education, more time for teacher planning and
collaboration, and ensuring that all schools receive adequate and equitable
resources needed to boost achievement.
[...] Dating back to the development of IQ tests at the turn of the century,
standardized tests have been used to sort and rank children, most
reprehensibly along racial and class lines, and to rationalize giving more
privileges to the already privileged.
The Next Million Years
The English mathematician Sir Francis Galton first coined the term in 1883. He wrote,
"Eugenics is the study of the agencies under social control that seek to improve or
impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally." What
Galton saw as a new branch of scientific inquiry became a dogmatic prescription in the
ranking and ordering of human worth. His ideas found their most receptive audience
at the turn of the century in the United States
[..] Eugenicists used a flawed and crude interpretation of Gregor Mendel's laws on
heredity to argue that criminality, intelligence, and pauperism were passed down in
families as simple dominant or recessive hereditary traits. Mainline eugenicists (those
eugenicists who were explicitly preoccupied with issues of race), believed that some
individuals and entire groups of people (such as Southern Europeans, Jews, Africans,
and Latinos) were more predisposed to the "defective genes." Charles Davenport, a
leader in American eugenics, argued for laws to control the spread of "inferior blood"
into the general population. He told an international gathering of scholars "that the
biological basis for such laws is doubtless an appreciation of the fact that negroes and
other races carry traits that do not go well with our social organization."
"Learning Disability": A Rose by Another Name
 "Labeling is disabling" because children believe what we tell them. If we must
label something, let it be the learning environment, not the learner: instead of
"hyperactive child", let's concern ourselves with "activity-restrictive" schools;
instead of an "attention-deficient" student, we ought to worry about "inspirationdeficient" classrooms; instead of "school-phobic child", we should use honest
words such as "anxious" and "frightened", and be very careful when we look for
the source of that anxiety. Using Occam's Razor, let's look for the simplest theory
that fits the facts, not the most obscure and complicated one. A stressful,
punitive, and threatening environment more than sufficiently explains learning
problems. There is no need to confuse ourselves with school techspeak,
unproven theories, and scape-goating which serve to protect a social institution
that has failed our children.
 ...as Armstrong urges, "give children the encouragement they need in order
to feel like competent, successful human beings."2 Children are born to learn.
They deserve a safe, nurturing learning environment where they can do so, in an
atmosphere of patience, respect, gentleness, and trust, not threats, force, and
cynicism. As Einstein warned us years ago, "It is a very grave mistake to think that
the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion."
Therapy or torture
Do psychiatrists really concentrate on
curing illness and alleviating pain like
other doctors, or are we merely using
them to control ‘socially unacceptable’
behaviour:
“when a branch of medicine deals with
intangibles like delusions, when it
cannot agree on diagnosis, when
treatments are introduced on
insufficient evidence, when its
relationships with the law are vague
and contentious, it is open to
manipulation from within and without”
Carl Jung “The Undiscovered Self”
The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the
relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic
isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more
consolidates the State becomes, and vice versa.
Fear that anarchist instincts will thereby be let loose is a possibility that is
greatly exaggerated, seeing that obvious safeguards exist within and
without. Above all, there is the natural cowardice of most men to be
reckoned with
The fatally short-sighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large
numbers and mass organization, though one would think that the world had
seen more than enough of what a well disciplined mob can do in the hands
of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have
penetrated very far (p 38)
Can The Subaltern Speak (1994)
For me, the mundane call for a language of "simplicity
and clarity" represents yet another mechanism to dismiss the
complexity of theoretical issues, particularly if these theoretical
constructs interrogate the prevailing dominant ideology. It is for
this very reason that Gayatri Spivak correctly points out that the
call for "plain prose cheats." I would go a step further and say,
"The call for plain prose not only cheats, it also bleaches.“
to substitute monologue, slogans, and communiques for
dialogue is to attempt to liberate the oppressed with the
instruments of domestication. Attempting to liberate the
oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of
liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a
burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and
transform them into masses which can be manipulated.
Techniques of Persuasion – Brown (1963)
The new media of radio, television, and the cinema were at first welcomed by
progressives who saw [opportunity] in them… but this hope… has not been
realized; for even in the democracies the radio and television are controlled their
directly or indirectly by the government or, worse still, by commercial companies
paid by advertisers who ‘give the public what it wants’ – that is, according to this
view, the rubbish it has been conditioned to want… according to Wright Mills,
Vance Packard, and many others, the media and the social pressure of the
messaged conditioned by the media act to bring about increasing uniformity.
Through them the individual is told who he is in terms of status and role, how he
ought to think and behave in his role, what his aspirations ought to be and how
should strive to attain them [33,34]
[there is] the anonymity of the individual when he loses himself in a crowds and
the feeling of permissiveness he develops when the observed behaviour of others
makes him believe that he can safely express emotions and behaviour he would
ordinarily repress… The usually isolated individual enjoys the sensation of
freedom and from conventional restraints and the awareness of power which
participation in a crowd gives him and he may express views or commit acts of
which he would otherwise be ashamed...the many ordinary men and women in
frustrating jobs, with no job at all, or with frustrating home situations, find a new
purpose in life [92]
Trivial Trivium Tripole Tripartate Tripe
 The Trivium is an ancient method to learn and think effectively, and
therefore to come to truth. It is like a manual for how our mind, as a
"processing unit" works, and for how to use it in an effective way,
without prejudging and logic errors [...] It is the "Three-Fold Path to
Truth", consisting of the three steps of gathering information,
understanding it, and expressing it (Input, Processing, Output)
 The Liberal Arts and Sciences are a grouping of seven subjects: The
Trivium, consisting of the three subjects Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric,
and the Quadrivium, consisting of the four subjects of Arithmetic,
Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. The Trivium (Arts) deal with the
Mind, and the Quadrivium (Sciences) with Matter. This group of seven
subjects, as well as numerous variations containing more or less
subjects, has origins in Ancient Hindu and Greek cultures, and it was
revived in the Roman era, and once again during the Middle Ages, each
time forming in a way peculiar to the time and place. Not only was the
Trivium presented as a historical grouping of subjects, it was an actual
method for learning called, the Integrated Trivium.
Trivial Trivium Tripole Tripartate Tripe
 The Integrated Trivium incorporates all of the knowledge of
the three subjects and combines them with a three-part
metaphor for the learning process in which Grammar, Logic, and
Rhetoric (in that order) symbolize the natural mental processes
of absorbing information, organizing information, and
communicating information. Grammar asks the Who, What,
Where, and When. Logic answers the Why, and Rhetoric
provides the How
 Grammar – Input – Knowledge
 Logic – Processing – Understanding
 Rhetoric – Output – Wisdom
 He who teaches, learns
Monolectical, Dialectical, Trialectical
• General Grammar, Aristotelian Logic, and Classical Rhetoric
comprise the first three rules-based subjects of the 7 Liberal
Arts and Sciences. As these disciplines are learned and
practiced together, they form the overarching, symbiotic
system for establishing clarity and consistency of personal
thought called the Trivium.