Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to episode 101 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media educator from Ohio.
Speaker: Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kate Robotham, Laura Palandre, and Aubrey Holloman.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Speaker: Today, we are joined by Dr. Nick Stock.
Speaker: Dr. Stock, a former English teacher, now serves as a researcher for the University of Birmingham.
Speaker: He has published various essays which focus on critiquing education by using philosophy typically seen outside of traditional pedagogy, such as Evangelion, Schools and Futures, Education After the End of the World, How Can Education Be Considered a Hyper Object?
Speaker: and paradise shall remain lost, readdressing the schooling through a Miltonian lens.
Speaker: Specifically, we invited Dr. Stock on to talk about his recently published work, The Weird, Eerie Exit Pedagogy of Mark Fisher, which then dives into the work of Fisher, who wrote Capitalist Realism and connects it to pedagogy, something that isn't typically associated with.
Speaker: So I was just talking to Nick before we started recording.
Speaker: There's various reasons to invite him on, but the podcast really serves two purposes.
Speaker: One, it's to introduce these ideas that you're talking about because they're very interesting and different than the normal educational discourse that
Speaker: And two, it's to help D understand what any of this means because it's so far outside the normal discourse that it's kind of hard to comprehend because there isn't really an anchor to go off of.
Speaker: So I figure just starting off, it makes sense just to really summarize for the listener
Speaker: what capitalist realism is and then kind of how this connects to pedagogy or exit pedagogy.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's an important question, really, I think, for understanding education more broadly as well.
Speaker: I think kind of understanding what capitalist realism is is really helpful.
Speaker: I mean, so Capitalist Realism, so I mean, it was the title of a book that Mark Fisher wrote in 2008, 2009, which I didn't encounter until quite a lot later.
Speaker: You know, I'd kind of heard the idea floating around, but I think it was, I think it might have been towards the start of the first lockdown, actually, that I just kind of devoured everything he'd ever written and kind of became like obsessed with him, really, with Mark Fisher.
Speaker: And, you know, Capitalist Realism speaks so well to, you know, to now just as much as it did, I think, in 2008.
Speaker: I mean, the starting point really is he takes this quote from, it's both Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have both apparently said it, which is, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Speaker: And Fisher kind of takes that idea very, very seriously that we are at a point now where,
Speaker: We actually can't imagine in any way an alternative to capitalism and that whenever we do, it's not actually a kind of like a serious imagination of it.
Speaker: It's just a sort of an adaption of it or just, you know, kind of a way that it's progressed into a different form.
Speaker: And it's kind of, you know, something that's impossible to escape out of.
Speaker: I think the important thing to identify as well is that,
Speaker: It's kind of like a like a lens almost.
Speaker: You know, I think this is what some people miss when they're talking about capitalist realism is that, you know, we view the world through the lens of capitalism now that, you know, even even if it's something like, you know, radical praxis or if it's, you know, kind of trying to start a socialist project.
Speaker: Often we end up viewing those things through a capitalist lens still.
Speaker: And we find it impossible to see how those things aren't in some way capitalistic or aren't in some way touched by capital.
Speaker: And, you know, literally everything in my world within my realism is now in some way capitalist.
Speaker: And I think that's kind of one of the things he was pointing to.
Speaker: There is a sort of a few people are claiming that kind of we're hitting the end of capitalist realism.
Speaker: You know, with there was a brief success with, you know, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and with Bernie Sanders in America of, you know, seeming like perhaps people were starting to see things differently.
Speaker: But, you know, to me, the way those projects kind of ended sort of kind of pushes the point to me that actually the capitalist realism still remains very much in place for at least the vast majority of people.
Speaker: But it's not just as simple as just politics, though, that, you know, it's actually about the way that it kind of touches and taints everything.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: It's very much just, you know, like our ability to see pretty much everything.
Speaker: And it connects to like even how we can reimagine different systems in general.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's quite literally all encompassing.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker: I always say the totalizing lens of capitalism is how I kind of re-describe capitalist realism.
Speaker: um that it's not just that i see the world through it it's the only thing i can see the world through and you know there are simple examples of this you know if you want to read marks for example actually you have to kind of buy into uh you know buying it through a massive publisher and you know you have to kind of you know often people buy it from amazon and that kind of thing and so even like radical you know practices is being sold back to you as something that you can
Speaker: you can purchase and buy and that you know a lot of kind of radical theory is presented more of its aesthetic rather than any of its actual utility and um so you know there's some of the kind of more obvious examples of it but but it's it's so far reaching and you know kind of one of the things i started thinking about when i was reading it um and a few thinkers have done this is how capitalist realism actually relates to education as well
Speaker: Which it really does.
Speaker: I mean, actually, in capitalist realism itself, Fisher devotes a couple of chapters to talking about schools and colleges.
Speaker: He was a college teacher for a little while before he was a lecturer, like myself, teaches sixth formers.
Speaker: And he really kind of realised within the classroom that education was also very, very much being seen through this capitalist lens as well.
Speaker: And so he's kind of starting to think about ways that it could be freed from that.
Speaker: How successful he is in thinking about that, I don't know.
Speaker: And that's one of the things I've started to kind of to look at in some of my work is.
Speaker: how education can be freed from capitalism.
Speaker: Because, you know, it's very difficult actually to imagine a kind of a form of capitalism that's not capitalist realist, really.
Speaker: Sorry, a form of education, sorry, that's not capitalist realist.
Speaker: You know, that, I mean, a kind of a short history of schooling, for example, which really is the most dominant kind of arm of education that we have.
Speaker: And it kind of arises at the same sort of time that mass capitalism does, you know, in Europe, in the 1800s is when mass schooling really kind of becomes the norm.
Speaker: So you have, you know, England with the Forster Act kind of enforced mass elementary schooling.
Speaker: In Prussia, there is a...
Speaker: set of mass schooling introduced there, Napoleon introduces mass schooling in France as well, it starts to become the norm.
Speaker: But of course, this is exactly the same time that capitalism is taking forces, the dominant economic force in Europe.
Speaker: And so it's no surprise, really, that school and education in that sense have always been sort of hand in hand with capitalism.
Speaker: And so, you know, here we are 200 years later and it's very, very difficult to pull those two things apart.
Speaker: You know, I mean, how does school work?
Speaker: It's very competitive.
Speaker: It's very, very individualist.
Speaker: It's becoming more and more instrumentalist, you know, seeing that it's meant to take you on to something else.
Speaker: And so it's no surprise, really, that it actually kind of works as something that really feeds into capitalism.
Speaker: Basically, if we can't imagine a world without capitalism, you also really can't imagine a world where education is not tied to the things that are explicitly capitalist.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: For example, like imagining an education system that...
Speaker: is not primarily devoted to college and career readiness or devoted to standardized testing.
Speaker: It's very hard to do because even if you're homeschooling or something, you're still tied into that.
Speaker: This is exactly right.
Speaker: And I would say it's verging on impossible, in fact, really to actually truly, truly disjoin them that our imagination has been tarnished by what we think education can be.
Speaker: And
Speaker: It may be there actually isn't a version of education out there that is truly free from this history and this process.
Speaker: But nevertheless, it's that kind of thinking that a lot of what I've been doing really.
Speaker: And it connects to, I think it's worth noting that, and I believe you write about this, and it's also said about Badrard, is that both Fisher and Badrard aren't nihilists.
Speaker: So it's not like this line of thinking is like, hey, the world sucks, it's never going to get better, and we're always going to be here.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: How does that then connect to this concept of exit pedagogy?
Speaker: Because I feel like those two things are connected.
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: I mean, to kind of pick at your first point about nihilism, I think it is really important to kind of emphasize that point that anybody who sees somebody like Fisher or Boudreaux as a nihilist is, I think, really only hearing what they want to hear rather than actually really engaging with his work, that actually Fisher's work is infinitely hopeful.
Speaker: And his entire project really was about seeking alternatives and looking to what else could be done.
Speaker: And I think this is particularly clear if you look at his final book that was released posthumously, which was a collection of lectures of his final lectures all the time that he died.
Speaker: And they were transcribed very, very faithfully by Matt Carhoon, who was one of his students who was in those lectures.
Speaker: And this set of lectures was called Post-Capitalist Desire.
Speaker: And it was actually about trying to find and imagine something that could exist beyond the capitalist realist now and looking at what do we want to keep from capitalism and what do we want to drop and what do we want?
Speaker: What do we actually want out of it?
Speaker: any kind of future, is there something that we actually desire?
Speaker: And so it's very much not nihilist at all.
Speaker: It really is about trying to find something that we can look towards.
Speaker: And perhaps we don't know what we want yet, but that means we need to find out what we want.
Speaker: And I think that's a really important thing from Fisher there, that we maybe don't know the future that we want beyond capitalism yet because our imagination is so tarnished.
Speaker: So you're absolutely right.
Speaker: It's definitely not in any way a nihilistic project.
Speaker: then that kind of builds into the educational side of things.
Speaker: So if our goal is to then reimagine a system that is not capitalism, that means we also need to reimagine how schooling works to get there.
Speaker: And it's kind of a chicken and the egg type deal because you start with schooling or do you start with economic systems?
Speaker: But there's no doubt that the way someone goes through the schooling process will affect the way that they view the world.
Speaker: that you would in turn impact how future societies learn.
Speaker: And I think that some that might be like extreme scare quotes around that.
Speaker: Because it gets like, is this like getting like propaganda?
Speaker: And of course, all this kind of thinking always needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Speaker: And actually what you said about the chicken and the egg is so important as well, because often all the issues that people kind of want to address with education are actually issues that need to be addressed everywhere in society.
Speaker: A lot of them are, you know, to do with,
Speaker: things being funded properly and time being given to staff and, you know, kind of a change in relations to other systems as well as just education itself that, you know, education isn't the panacea for all of these things.
Speaker: It's kind of one of many things that needs to be addressed and ultimately, you know, kind of
Speaker: can be rethought perhaps, but how is difficult?
Speaker: And that kind of brings me to this idea of exit pedagogy, which is something I kind of coined really in my work.
Speaker: But it was based on the idea of, so Matt Carhoon, who I mentioned a minute ago, who is one of the students of Mark Fisher's, he wrote a book called Egress, which was zeroing in on one of the concepts that kind of he sees in Mark Fisher's work.
Speaker: And there's lots of other really interesting aspects to the book as well, where he kind of thinks about the mourning of Mark Fisher and other theoretical ideas that are tied to it.
Speaker: But ultimately he sees this concept of egress is really, really important to Fisher's project.
Speaker: And egress, you know, it sort of means exits.
Speaker: It's kind of like, it's also like a military tactic, a way of kind of getting out.
Speaker: It's kind of a strange word, really.
Speaker: But ultimately it kind of seems like egress is something that really, really haunts all of Fisher's project.
Speaker: that what he's often trying to do is trying to keep our eye on what is the kind of the dominant structures that we're within and how could we get out of them.
Speaker: And that requires a bit of re-evaluating, rethinking, re-describing, rather than just kind of looking at the object, okay, here's capitalism and then what next, actually thinking about, you know,
Speaker: is the way that we think about this thing correct?
Speaker: And therefore, does that mean that we can get out of it if we don't really know what it is?
Speaker: And that's what I like about Fisher's work so much.
Speaker: He's always kind of looking at, are things exactly what we think they are?
Speaker: And, you know, Baudrillard was so good at this as well.
Speaker: And one of the things that he definitely draws from him.
Speaker: that, you know, is capitalism exactly what we think it is?
Speaker: The way that Fisher describes it is it's kind of monstrous.
Speaker: It's materially present.
Speaker: You know, it's something that's here.
Speaker: It's something that almost has an agency of its own.
Speaker: And this is where he kind of starts to bring in some of these words about weirdness and eeriness that...
Speaker: It kind of has this strange presence that kind of lingers in our lives.
Speaker: And yet there's also something very eerie about it because, you know, because where is it?
Speaker: You know, it's nowhere, but it's also everywhere at the same time.
Speaker: And he makes, you know, kind of great comparisons to, you know, kind of monsters from the Lovecraftian mythos and this kind of thing.
Speaker: There's this kind of weird movement in between worlds, between this strange thing.
Speaker: And just to think of it as a set of economic relations really kind of
Speaker: doesn't help us that much in terms of actually thinking about how we can get out of it.
Speaker: There's so much more to thinking about it.
Speaker: Which is also something I think you could do with education too.
Speaker: You can use that same kind of thinking for education as well.
Speaker: Just thinking of it in terms of a system of teaching is too minimising.
Speaker: Actually, there's something kind of eerie and weird about that too, really.
Speaker: I think that before we dive into how that could be used literally in the classroom, I think it's also probably worth defining this concept of hauntology.
Speaker: Because that's kind of connected to what you're talking about right now.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Hauntology is, yeah, so it's a difficult thing to describe really because it's such a flexible term and it's used differently by different people.
Speaker: But I think it's such an important concept really.
Speaker: And it definitely was for Fisher as well.
Speaker: I mean, some of the things to kind of get to grips with with hauntology.
Speaker: So firstly, hauntology is a pun on the word ontology.
Speaker: that was made by Jacques Derrida.
Speaker: And he was kind of rethinking ontology in the same way that I said a minute ago, Fisher was rethinking Capital.
Speaker: And ontology is the study of being, you know, the idea of existence, of presence, of being, and in a sense of our being in the world and, you know, how we exist.
Speaker: So, you know, obviously a very, very kind of
Speaker: big complex area of study that doesn't necessarily help us for thinking about operating in the classroom that much.
Speaker: But nevertheless, so Derrida kind of made a pun on ontology as hauntology, which in the French would still be pronounced ontology.
Speaker: So it sounds like it's the same, but the word reminds us that actually there is something wrong with ontology that actually because it is haunted, the word itself ontology is haunted if it's hauntology.
Speaker: And so he's kind of trying to get us to really rethink what is being, what is that thing, and is being something that is entirely present?
Speaker: And really the whole history of kind of philosophy and metaphysics always kind of makes this assumption that the being is here, it's present, it's something that is always happening.
Speaker: And Derrida and then Fisher later on kind of picks up that idea and starts to challenge it, which kind of has lots of interesting avenues that are really important, I think.
Speaker: And one of them is about time.
Speaker: And Derrick is really interested in time.
Speaker: And he describes in part ontology as a disjointed or disadjusted.
Speaker: Now, he takes this line out of Hamlet that the time is out of joint.
Speaker: And that is the way that perhaps we should think about beings, that things aren't in this kind of linear, present form, that things are actually out of joint.
Speaker: And this also helps us think about if we're thinking about being, we're thinking about beings as well and how those things are formed and are they formed in kind of simplistic and linear ways or again, is there something disadjusted and disjointed about beings?
Speaker: And so Fisher kind of develops this concept a little bit and he looks at the way that we're not just kind of haunted by things of the past, that, you know, hauntology isn't just about the kind of time being out of joint as in, you know, things from the past that are haunting us.
Speaker: but he also talks about kind of ghosts or specters of the future.
Speaker: You know, he says that really what we are mostly haunted by these days within capitalist realism is the ghost of a lost future, the future that, you know, that people thought they were going to get in the 70s and the 80s.
Speaker: And if you go back and, you know, he spends a long time talking about this, about 70s and 80s popular culture and its imagination of the future is so, you know, kind of thrilling with what it could imagine could happen.
Speaker: It thought that,
Speaker: You know, great stuff was really going to come.
Speaker: And, you know, other writers talk about this too.
Speaker: David Graeber wrote an article about, you know, where are our flying cars?
Speaker: Where's everything that we were meant to be getting?
Speaker: And it never came.
Speaker: I mean, Back to the Future, that reimagining in Back to the Future, that was only, what, 10 years ago?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like the actual future that was supposed to be.
Speaker: Exactly, exactly.
Speaker: You know, I think the first Terminator film where the world has ended is 2029.
Speaker: So, you know, visions of the future were quite... But dystopia and utopia are both important in terms of thinking about the future.
Speaker: And basically what Fisher kind of claims is that we actually have lost the ability, at least in the dominant imagination, he's not saying that people can't reimagine the future anymore, but he's saying the dominant imagination, especially within popular culture, has lost the ability to actually imagine a future beyond capitalism.
Speaker: And so we are now kind of haunted by the ghost of this future that never came.
Speaker: And this is why we are seeing, you know, potentially a lot more kind of...
Speaker: nostalgia existing in popular culture, because, you know, one of the reasons that somebody, somebody my age, for example, might really enjoy Stranger Things or, you know, some of the kind of big 80s vibe show, even though, you know, I wasn't around in the 80s.
Speaker: I was born in 1989.
Speaker: So I don't remember the 80s all that well, but, but, you know, you kind of get this wonderful experience of like being in the 80s by watching a show like that or listening to some kind of nostalgia wave music.
Speaker: But theoretically, is what I'm enjoying the past or am I enjoying the future that they thought they were going to get?
Speaker: And, you know, is there still a time when there was something imaginably different from what they were living in?
Speaker: And is that what the kind of the real haunting nature of the show is, perhaps?
Speaker: So, you know, this is kind of...
Speaker: Kind of some of the ways to think about hauntology, you know, I think these ideas about time being disjointed and about beings being not necessarily entirely present or not necessarily entirely absent.
Speaker: Some of those things can be kind of good ways of thinking about it.
Speaker: But then think about in the classroom.
Speaker: That's, of course, a lot more complicated if it wasn't already complicated enough.
Speaker: But, you know, that's kind of the challenge, really, finding how we can move from one thing to the other.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So kind of like to tie this together, the overall idea is, is that it's very difficult to imagine a future without capitalism and the, the hauntology component, uh, to put it like, I guess like the layman's terms or an example of this would be, uh, like my future is through a capitalist lens because someone has constructed that future for me.
Speaker: Like I've grown up in a world that is, uh, very corporate, uh, because everything is controlled by a corporation in one way or another.
Speaker: And therefore, my future that I imagine is influenced heavily by corporate forces.
Speaker: And that impacts our ability to exit this capitalist system, because I am not able to come up with an alternative.
Speaker: Everything is built off improving a system that already exists.
Speaker: And if we relate that over to education, because these forces are so tied together, my ability to reimagine to a new educational system is heavily impacted, if not impossible, because just everything is so intertwined.
Speaker: Yeah, that's quite a nice little summary, really.
Speaker: I mean, and it's even perhaps a step further that it's not even that our future is kind of controlled by capitalism, it's that there is no future.
Speaker: I mean, quite literally, there is no future at the moment, because, of course, if capitalism keeps on going in the way that it's going, we will be an eco-catastrophe in no time.
Speaker: And so quite literally, there is no future.
Speaker: But then also kind of metaphorically, there's no future that we're sort of stuck in this stasis where nothing is changing.
Speaker: And that everything is just kind of repeating and it's the same over and over again.
Speaker: And that's why that example of kind of suddenly everybody loving nostalgic TV and everything's a remake kind of is manifest because there is no sense of anything new ever happening anymore.
Speaker: Everything feels really kind of stuck in this presence.
Speaker: And education can sometimes kind of perpetuate that.
Speaker: You know, there's a great quote from from Takoon, who are a like a French anarchist collective, and they talk about schooling in France.
Speaker: And they say that it's actually something that's teaching us to live within the crisis of the presence, that rather than actually trying to kind of project anything into the future, it's just actually teaching people how to stick it out and get used to this kind of terrible world that we're stuck in.
Speaker: And this is just kind of education and just learning to make you live within it in the best possible way that it can.
Speaker: Which is, when I come back to this idea of exit pedagogy then, that actually, how can education not keep recycling and keep teaching us to live within the presence, but how can it actually teach us to look at the exit and think about where is the way out?
Speaker: How can we get out of this place?
Speaker: And that's something I think that Fisher is starting to kind of get at in both his pedagogy, literally, which you can see in his lectures, but also in his kind of broader project as well.
Speaker: And his kind of pedagogy beyond the classroom, just in terms of his full project.
Speaker: That concept of stasis is so fascinating because it's something that is very real, I guess.
Speaker: Fisher talks about the idea of
Speaker: the future being boring.
Speaker: There's no real major difference.
Speaker: And I think a lot about neoliberalism and the fact that ultimately it seems like not a lot changes.
Speaker: Folks get really rallied up about, for example, political elections or the hot new technological trend.
Speaker: And ultimately everything feels kind of samey, kind of like nothing really is changing there.
Speaker: And I think when that connects to education, the most real thing for educators would be
Speaker: what just has happened with COVID.
Speaker: You have a massive pandemic that has killed millions of people.
Speaker: And as a result, education went online for a year, maybe two years, depending on the district.
Speaker: And what happened was there was all this talk about this grand reimagining of education because we had to take things online.
Speaker: That means everything's going to change.
Speaker: But sadly, for 99% of folks,
Speaker: what ended up happening is we recreated the exact same thing online, which ended up being very boring.
Speaker: And then to top it off, we went back when it was worse than it was before.
Speaker: And then just ended up doing the exact same thing again.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I, I was, I was, I was teaching from home for, for months and then, and which was already, like you say, it wasn't a re-imagining at all.
Speaker: It was just, how can I do what I do in college, but, but at home?
Speaker: And then it was just repeating.
Speaker: And then we went back into college and we did it all over again.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it just demonstrated, like you say, just such a lack of imagination and this unbelievable sense of stasis.
Speaker: And it also kind of represented this imperative that we have to, you know, get kids through school, get kids through the curriculum.
Speaker: There was this, you know, this real kind of chorus of lost learning, which I think everybody kept on talking about.
Speaker: You know, what does that even really mean, like lost learning?
Speaker: You know, that people, they are, they need to catch up.
Speaker: Well, they need to catch up to what?
Speaker: Because we set these boundaries of what students should do.
Speaker: We set these curricula and we set these exams.
Speaker: And so if they didn't get to those, well, that doesn't really matter.
Speaker: They're not some kind of natural existing imperatives that people have to follow to progress in their life.
Speaker: If they didn't learn about who was the king of England in 1500, whatever, it's not going to make any difference to them at all.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I mean, speaking of kind of the, I guess, the stasis of it, or just, I guess, the lack of reimagination, what's interesting to know about that learning loss narrative is that there wasn't even that much law.
Speaker: Like if we were to even take it by the terms that are defined, the actual stats are about like 3% standardized test scores, which is not, it's a question.
Speaker: It's exactly, it's completely negligible.
Speaker: And, you know, I think a lot of people have gone back to teaching in the classroom and have
Speaker: you know, have noticed maybe some small differences that perhaps there's some things that people don't know, or maybe there's a skill that they lack.
Speaker: But generally speaking, there has not been this massive furore of, oh my God, my students know nothing and how am I ever going to, you know, so it really, it kind of just reflected this sense that schooling in its current form is the most important thing in the world for people that age.
Speaker: And that without it, society will fall apart, will fall apart.
Speaker: which is actually sadly kind of true that actually our current society would sort of fall apart because, as I said a minute ago, it is teaching us to live in stasis.
Speaker: And of course, it's, you know, so directly linked to our neoliberal workforce as well that, you know, students currently are very good at learning this kind of fluid set of skills and being able to move from kind of one area to another.
Speaker: They learn a kind of a sense of discipline that's really, really encouraged in neoliberal workplaces.
Speaker: They learn this kind of work ethic that they're expected to kind of repeat that, you know, these kind of like slavish capitalists, you know, kind of ways of being are really, really instilled in schooling in its current form, definitely.
Speaker: Yeah, the hidden curriculum is very much like explicit about this and the idea of it's intentionally telling students not to question the system at their end and encouraging behaviors that we often see in the workforce, like toxic positivity through mindset, kind of like co-opting ideas that were good in theory, but transforming them into this lens that makes them very gross and not really what the original intent was.
Speaker: I read a great line about the hidden curriculum the other day actually that said it's weird that we call it the hidden curriculum when it's actually the most obvious manifest part of schools that actually if you were to tell me what a school is that's the hidden curriculum that all those things that make it a school so actually it's really it's just schooling is what the hidden curriculum is but again as you say you know that those things are really really fundamentally tied to our projection into capital beyond schooling and thus again they become
Speaker: Contimentally intertwined.
Speaker: And so then we're kind of back to exit pedagogy again.
Speaker: And actually, one of the things I've been thinking about exit pedagogy in terms of thinking about what what do you want students in a classroom to do or to think or to talk about?
Speaker: Well, one of those things is this, surely that, you know, students more than anyone are taught to believe that school is the most important thing in the world for them.
Speaker: And, you know, the.
Speaker: especially if we see that the rise in mental health concerns around students in the last sort of 10, 20 years, it's completely on the rise.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: that is surely tied to, in part, the pressure that they're put under in their schooling and especially towards testing.
Speaker: And so they are made to believe that this is the most important thing that will ever happen.
Speaker: And therefore, of course, not to question the structure of it.
Speaker: And that was one of the things I started to think about is if I was to think about Fisher's project in my classroom, would it be me trying to get them to rethink what is schooling?
Speaker: What is education?
Speaker: What are these things for?
Speaker: And letting them see, you know, part of the exit exists in the very structure that they're in in that moment.
Speaker: And that was that was at least one of the things I started to think about anyway, in terms of.
Speaker: exiting in a kind of metaphorical way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that this is a good transition over to kind of what does that actually look like?
Speaker: And I think this is where it starts to get confusing because there isn't really an answer.
Speaker: And a lot of this is very theoretical.
Speaker: And I think a valid critique of kind of this line of thinking, especially Fisher's line of work, is that the actual classroom
Speaker: looked relatively similar to how classrooms look today.
Speaker: So we're talking about this while ironically using the same lens to talk about the thing.
Speaker: Like you can't escape the system, so you're in the system talking about it.
Speaker: Yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, Fisher's lectures, they are very much lectures.
Speaker: You know, it's him standing at the front of the classroom talking.
Speaker: students ask questions and have discussions and they do readings.
Speaker: He's a good pedagogue in the sense of encouraging student interaction and letting them lead sessions and that kind of thing.
Speaker: And he obviously very much cares about his students as well, that there is a real sense of care from him, which is really important because actually we couldn't say that about most, well definitely about some educators anyway, that actually we see quite a sadistic attitude from lots of teachers.
Speaker: And definitely wasn't the case from him.
Speaker: In fact, actually, in an earlier version of the article I wrote, I pointed that out.
Speaker: And the reviewer said it was kind of irrelevant.
Speaker: And it was just him being nice to his students and it wasn't irrelevant.
Speaker: And to me, actually, it's not irrelevant.
Speaker: I think it's really important to see actually, you know,
Speaker: what a great teacher might look like in the classroom and his care is really, really manifest there.
Speaker: You are right though, that ultimately he is describing these kind of issues that we are doing it within that system itself, that he is kind of, you know, definitely stuck within it.
Speaker: That, you know, if you think about actually, you know, critical pedagogy in general, which on lots of education courses and politics courses around the country, around the world, you'd be taught, but you'd probably be taught them not in the manner of actual critical pedagogy.
Speaker: You'd probably taught them in lecture formats,
Speaker: And so there's this kind of disconnect between the content and between the theory, definitely.
Speaker: And it's very, very difficult to reimagine how would the content be represented through this theoretical lens, as you say.
Speaker: It's quite difficult to disjoin them.
Speaker: And so that's some of the thinking that I'm trying to do to try and think about what it could look like.
Speaker: A lot of folks listening into this would be very much familiar with the work of Freire, I guess, Hooks, Darter, etc.
Speaker: Different folks that exist in the critical pedagogy space as well as liberatory pedagogy space.
Speaker: And it's interesting because at first glance, if I were reading this work,
Speaker: The first thing that I would assume is, oh, what these folks are talking about kind of is this reimagined way of looking at the classroom because it is very, I mean, a lot of it's based on theories of Marx.
Speaker: A lot of it is explicitly anti-capitalist.
Speaker: And a lot of it is looking at teaching differently, even though it was historically kind of taught in a very traditionalist lens.
Speaker: However, at the exact same time, kind of the critique that's offered via your article is that this liberatory pedagogy can run into the exact same issues that the current system runs into.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult one.
Speaker: The critical pedagogy does have its...
Speaker: Obviously, you know, there are amazing, amazing sides to it.
Speaker: But there are a few things that I've noticed in critical pedagogy that are problematic.
Speaker: In part, it's kind of still reliance on the classroom, that Frera and Hooks and Giroud, et cetera, you know, that they really see the classroom itself as the kind of radical space.
Speaker: And ultimately, the classroom is something that is so fundamentally tied to a disciplinary apparatus and tied to structures of schooling.
Speaker: Not to say that it couldn't be freed from them, but often does.
Speaker: And the other thing that's really interesting is that also it still relies on having an educator in some form.
Speaker: I think some people would disagree with me there that they would say the whole point of somebody like Ferris Project is that actually it doesn't have an educator as such.
Speaker: But I think there still always has to be somebody who takes on that position of the teacher, even if they have a less active role.
Speaker: And, you know, they are, the way I always phrase it is there always has to be a Socrates.
Speaker: The people talk about Socratic discussion as the, you know, the kind of fairest and most equal form of discussing concepts, but there still always has to be a Socrates.
Speaker: There still always has to be somebody to guide the discussion and to introduce the ideas and to ask the questions that keep discussion moving.
Speaker: And so the role of the educator itself is a, you know, a corruptible or even corrupted force, really.
Speaker: And, you know, to reiterate something I was just saying a second ago, and this is something I've started researching recently, is thinking about educators themselves as subjects.
Speaker: And, you know, they are not, you know, a kind of a transcendental necessarily group of people.
Speaker: There are, you know, thousands and more fantastic teachers out there, definitely.
Speaker: but there are also some, some truly, truly awful teachers out there who are educators because they enjoy the discipline.
Speaker: They enjoy the sadism.
Speaker: They, they enjoy the, you know, kind of making students' lives hard.
Speaker: They, they enjoy the, the egotistical side of feeling like, feeling like they are the most knowledgeable person in the room.
Speaker: They, you know, even anecdotally thinking about teachers that get excited about making a child cry because they shout at them so much or,
Speaker: There's this thing in the UK called no smiles till Christmas, where, you know, some teachers, they say, oh, I don't smile until until we get to Christmas.
Speaker: So all my students know that I'm a real hard ass.
Speaker: And they get a bit of a kick from this from this kind of sadistic desire.
Speaker: And so, you know, the position of the educator is a slightly corruptible position in that sense.
Speaker: And so that's always going to be a bit of an issue, really.
Speaker: And critical pedagogy itself, you know, it's become this kind of symbol more than praxis.
Speaker: Often, you know, does it actually fit in a school?
Speaker: Does it actually kind of get used properly?
Speaker: And could it be used properly on a kind of a mass scale?
Speaker: And so that kind of starts to open up some of the other problems and possibilities.
Speaker: You know, Roncier, who's another French theorist, he talks about pedagogy without an educator.
Speaker: You know, that would be the truly most radical liberal form of pedagogy, that actually how could we do it without an educator?
Speaker: I mean, I don't know how you could do that.
Speaker: I think a lot of what Fisher talks about with popular culture is really important in that sense.
Speaker: And we'll come back to that in a minute.
Speaker: But I think actually that removing the educator kind of starts to challenge that issue that I've raised.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But also, I think a lot of liberatory pedagogy is something that can't necessarily be bottled.
Speaker: And this is also something that Rod C.A.
Speaker: talks about, that to institutionalize education.
Speaker: And whenever I use the word education, really, I'm always thinking about it with a capital E as this institutionalized thing.
Speaker: And it's impossible to break free from that institutionalized way of thinking about it, because whenever somebody says, oh, we need to educate people more, that means it needs to be in an institutionalized fashion.
Speaker: And that's where, you know, these kind of liberatory experiences can't really take place because suddenly all the issues of schooling that we have come into it.
Speaker: As soon as you start to try and institutionalise anything liberatory, to me at least, I think it becomes far more kind of oppressive and stratified and hierarchised and taxonomised.
Speaker: You know, kind of all the problems that we have with schooling at the moment start to arise again.
Speaker: And so critical pedagogy, you know,
Speaker: brilliant of its on its own can we make it work in the kind of uh systematized manner that it would be needed to have the kind of wholesale effect that we want um maybe it can you know maybe i'm i'm being being pessimistic um because ultimately at the moment you know there's not even anything close to to that within within universities and with schooling um
Speaker: And so maybe this wholesale reimagining of teacher training and university educating in that system, you know, would start to see those differences take place, perhaps.
Speaker: But, you know, my experiences in the classroom haven't always told me that it will necessarily work as the system that will change everything and that.
Speaker: that will kind of lead towards this radical future that, you know, is kind of hoped from it.
Speaker: There's two things that you're talking about here that are, I think, interesting to note.
Speaker: And I think it'd be probably interesting to kind of dissect these.
Speaker: The first is that that concept of, I guess, the teacher as liberator, or at least seeing themselves as such, versus the teacher that upholds the system.
Speaker: And the connection between those who, as you use the word sadistically, see their students tend to, at least in my experience, when you talk to those teachers, the reason why they act like that is that they are very trustworthy of a meritocracy.
Speaker: They very much believe that by...
Speaker: instilling a very, I guess, aggressive tone with students that they are preparing these students for the workforce or for the future, because that's how, quote unquote, life really is.
Speaker: And it's all very much centered on the idea of not reimagining.
Speaker: Like, this is how the world is.
Speaker: This is how it's going to be.
Speaker: And by doing this, I am making the world a better place.
Speaker: And that's kind of how that's seen versus kind of the, I guess the opposite angle at its extreme would be someone like Freire, who even though they are an educator in the space, they see their role as almost deprogramming.
Speaker: the existing structure, as in they are attempting to make themselves no longer useful.
Speaker: They are trying to eliminate their own position, which is kind of odd.
Speaker: But in a system that's so large, that probably would never happen in someone's lifetime.
Speaker: It would take a lot of work.
Speaker: I think that kind of building off of that,
Speaker: one of the things that concerns me about critical pedagogy beyond its ability to change at a mass scale is its ability to remain relevant in a space that tends to attract this idea like post-truth, I guess.
Speaker: Critical pedagogy is very much involved in like the critical race theory arguments.
Speaker: It's very, Marx in general has been kind of weaponized as this
Speaker: this word that doesn't really mean anything.
Speaker: It's just kind of like, this is bad because it's Marx or this is bad because it's critical.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They become floating signifiers that kind of any, any issue that somebody might have gets kind of bundled into without, without, you know, the original meaning of it is completely disappeared.
Speaker: It's been replaced by all these other nefarious concepts that are bundled into it and painted as these kind of bogeymen of, uh,
Speaker: of the education system, which of course, with every era, there are new bogeymen as well that critical race theory is the current one that, you know, kind of very,
Speaker: right-leaning individuals are claiming is the thing that's coming to destroy education system and you know of course marx has performed that role in the past and and cultural marxism has also been described that way in the past as well that there will always be something that will act in that way definitely um the big irony being of course actually as we've said education is a real great prop of capitalism and so that although lots of um
Speaker: lots of right-wing individuals are trying to claim that education is being corrupted by these forces.
Speaker: Actually, education is doing a really good job of upholding capitalism in all the strongest ways possible.
Speaker: So it's a real, a real kind of crazy claim, really.
Speaker: The confusing parts begins to be like, how do you convince people to take this on when what we're talking about is the thing that they're afraid of?
Speaker: So like up until this point, like everything has been like critical race theory,
Speaker: in concept is not really something to be scared of.
Speaker: But when we start talking about to these folks, Hey, we're talking about ending capitalism.
Speaker: That's way like, that's way far out there in comparison to anything that at least how CRT manifests itself in the classroom is even getting at.
Speaker: Um, and, and just kind of to build off that for one second, um,
Speaker: I don't know, I guess this isn't my opinion, but the concept of having an educator almost is needed, even if it's not by its traditional role or by its traditional term, just because how else would you deprogram someone into thinking differently, especially when you're young, all you've ever seen and heard is within that system.
Speaker: I think about almost like indigenous ways of knowing, so before capitalism.
Speaker: there were educators, they're just elders, there are folks that you would you would talk to, and they would teach you the ways of the world.
Speaker: And even though it's not like an educator, at least in terms of schooling, it is still someone who kind of informs your ways of knowing.
Speaker: And that role has always kind of had, to my knowledge, in every culture, even beyond cultures of capitalism, there's always been someone who's told you like, hey, this is the way things are.
Speaker: So as a result, you
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I feel like you'd almost have to have someone there to tell you like, Hey, things could be better.
Speaker: Things could be different.
Speaker: Things could be a re-imagined and here are the tools to get there.
Speaker: And I'm going to attempt to get me out of the picture so you can do it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I, you know, if, if that's, if that's how it could go, then that would be, that would be great.
Speaker: Um, I, I suppose one of the things I've been pushing back against is that that's not, doesn't tend to be, doesn't tend to be how things go.
Speaker: Um, but you know, if we are, if you are talking about that kind of figure, um,
Speaker: And that's when the kind of Fisher comes back in the picture, really, that I think he really kind of exemplifies that figure that you're talking about.
Speaker: Of course, again, how do you make sure you've got 20 million Mark Fishers knocking around to be able to educate everybody?
Speaker: I don't think it's necessarily a possible thing that these are contingent individuals like Prera and like Hooks, that they are formed by a set of contingent circumstances, that they're not generated by a linear path that we can just kind of recreate every time if we wanted more individuals like that.
Speaker: And that's, of course, you know, one of the issues with something like teacher training, that it can never, you know, produce those individuals necessarily because it's not just that training program that creates them.
Speaker: But that's not to say that we still can't use them as good models and people that, you know, perhaps people can aspire to act more like in their educating and that are certainly better than a lot of what we have at the moment, that's for sure.
Speaker: You know, and I think that some of the things that we were talking about earlier are good models for that in terms of bringing those kind of hauntological ideas into the classroom and thinking about getting a more kind of clear understanding of technology.
Speaker: what does your future look like and how could your future be imagined differently?
Speaker: And what, you know, I think not just the future, but the past as well, what of your past has been erased?
Speaker: So what are the ghosts of the past that are still haunting you as well?
Speaker: And, you know, this is something that curriculum does, of course, because curriculum is very, very narrow set of, generally speaking, you know, kind of patriarchal and very, very kind of Eurocentric ideas.
Speaker: And so in a sense, there is a sense of killing that has happened by the curriculum.
Speaker: It's haunted by ghosts of things that it has destroyed.
Speaker: And so that's obviously an important aspect of that as well as kind of coming to terms with those ghosts that have been instituted by the curriculum.
Speaker: But also the sense of understanding what has been done in the past and kind of confronting those ideas.
Speaker: I think that's something that Fisher does really well as well.
Speaker: And of course, something that has been talked about quite a lot at the moment in more kind of mainstream discourse in terms of decolonisation, for example,
Speaker: And obviously, of course, that'd be a good piece of practice for this sort of thinking.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's one of those things where it seems like to me that the purpose of this for your average everyday K-12 teacher is really just the moral of the story, is to question and theorize what it is that you're doing and whether or not it's leading to the outcomes that you anticipate or what
Speaker: Whether it's leading to the outcomes that the system has already dictated for you, which is more of a reflection or a practice in reflection than it is a literal question that you can answer.
Speaker: It's an ability to think differently about the world, even though the end goal would be great to imagine an actual difference.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right.
Speaker: It's that constant sort of reminder of rethinking and questioning, not just the thing that you are doing in the classroom.
Speaker: You know, lots of good teachers will do that all the time.
Speaker: They're teaching a text or they're teaching a theory or they're teaching a historical event.
Speaker: And of course, they will...
Speaker: rethink and interrogate that but also the kind of the structures that come around it more broadly um that you know that okay well you know we are looking at the french revolution today okay so we're going to rethink and we're going to question that we're also going to rethink and we're going to re-question the uh the sense of understanding french history we're going to rethink the sense of history itself we're going to rethink the sense of teaching itself and why are we in this classroom together and who are these people why are we put in this form and why am i put in the position of power here and
Speaker: There is this constant sense of engaging with structure and then the reality, the realism of that structure, which comes right back to capitalist realism that we were talking about at the beginning.
Speaker: It's constantly trying to engage with the way that we see the world and that includes every aspect of it.
Speaker: It's very easy in the classroom to kind of get sucked into what needs to be done, which is getting students through their exams.
Speaker: That is something that all teachers are not going to be able to easily free themselves from anytime soon.
Speaker: But nevertheless, I do think there's always room for this kind of broader rethinking and challenging of structures.
Speaker: And that's something that we see in Fisher all the time in all of his teaching and his books, even in some of his kind of weird stuff.
Speaker: One of the things I really love of Mark Fisher's is he did this audio essay.
Speaker: called On Vanishing Land.
Speaker: And it's kind of has all these, these eerie tracks playing and it's kind of got this part narrative, part theory.
Speaker: And it's just this really, really weird bit of pedagogy in the end that it kind of gets you thinking about, well, if, you know, the way that he's seen the world is in this kind of weird, strange way.
Speaker: And so maybe I should start looking at that way.
Speaker: And then you start to challenge, well, actually what kind of form should essays come in?
Speaker: And, you know, could this, it starts to rethink that structure and,
Speaker: I started doing loads of audio essays of my own now because I just completely fall in love with the idea.
Speaker: So, you know, I just like putting music to my own voice, apparently.
Speaker: But in other words, it's these kind of slightly stranger ideas that perhaps get to rethink the structures when the structure itself that it's being presented in is challenged.
Speaker: I talk a lot about Brecht in my article as well, because Brecht was someone that did that so well, that was always trying to kind of challenge political structures and the rise of fascism.
Speaker: But he was doing that through theatre and would often really challenge kind of what theatre was.
Speaker: And it kind of keeps making a step back, that distancing from theatre and letting us think about what it is and what are we watching here and to keep that distance from it.
Speaker: And so, again, I'm sort of wondering how those ideas could be.
Speaker: could be transposed into the classroom as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that that's probably a good note to almost end on is that concept of, well, where do I start?
Speaker: So if this is something that I'm interested in, like where does the rabbit hole begin?
Speaker: Because as you mentioned, like the audio essay is, so I've listened to that and it's,
Speaker: I don't know if that's a good place to start because I feel like the average person will listen to that.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: Everyone would listen to it and they should especially listen to it near Halloween because it's spooky as hell.
Speaker: But I don't think it would be the place to start.
Speaker: I think everybody could and should read capitalist realism because it's very short.
Speaker: It's like 100 pages.
Speaker: It's got loads of really great complex theory that we've actually been talking about without giving the names too much.
Speaker: Things like Derrida and Lacan and Deleuze and that kind of thing.
Speaker: But they're made really, really digestible through these great pop culture examples.
Speaker: And actually, he looks at pop culture itself as the thing.
Speaker: It's not just theories looking at pop culture.
Speaker: Pop culture itself is really important to Fisher.
Speaker: And there's loads of tales from the classroom as well that he talks about his time as an educator.
Speaker: And so I think that's a really good place to start for anybody is to recap just realism because it's so short.
Speaker: And, you know, these theories can be really useful for rethinking things.
Speaker: bell hooks you know talks about theory as as radical praxis and and you know fisher makes that very very clear in his in his work that theory is a really really powerful tool for helping us rethink these structures and he makes that theory so accessible um that perhaps that's a good good enough reason in itself to read some of his work
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
Speaker: You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
