the history of the university - part two
In my last post, I reflected upon how my childhood education prepared me for university, and for living within the systems and structures of Western post-colonialist empire.
After high school I attended the University of Iowa where I majored in English Literature, and also spent a year at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Both of these universities host renowned writing programmes, and although I wasn't enrolled in the creative writing track, I did benefit from the high quality of faculty these programmes attracted.
During this period I learned about the literature canon: the idea that certain books are esteemed and studied as approved curriculum, while others are not. At this time, postmodernism was taking hold and my professors guided my reading toward texts that challenged the canon and deconstructed the very idea of text itself. Post-colonialism was a prominent theme, with its sleight-of-hand implication that the colonial project no longer existed. India had won its independence, after all! I don't remember much critique of the neoliberal capitalist project, nor any deep reflection about culpability and inherited structures.
One of my best essays explored the theme of colonialism in children's literature. Babar removed from the jungle and dressed in his suit; the Wind in the Willows battle between the civilised creatures of the English countryside, and the wild, savage ones of the forest; and the romantic ideation of Tarzan. I also remember writing about colonialism in the context of the Tempest and Wide Saragasso Sea. The latter book is a prequel to Jane Eyre, told from the perspective of Mr Rochester's first wife Bertha (the madwoman in the attic.) I'll come back to this.
About five years after finishing my undergraduate degree, I decided to return to university for a masters. This time my subject was Multiculturalism in Children's Literature, which intrigued me when I stumbled upon it being offered by Xavier University (a Catholic university in Cincinnati, where I lived at the time.) Based in the Education department, this programme was aimed at teachers to help them progress in their careers; my own interest, on the other hand, was very much on cultural discourse. Much of the coursework focused on encouraging multicultural materials in the classroom, and the majority of texts were by American writers, sharing the stories of immigrant subcultures within the United States. I sought out translated books from other countries, mostly in vain, so I wrote as much as I could about stories which were set in countries other than the USA. At the time I felt very disappointed in the course, but I completed it all the same.
Cue to another five years down the line, and I was back at university – this time, for a masters degree in Information Analysis. I had struggled to find my place in the working world and with a small child to care for, felt compelled to top up my qualifications with something more vocational. The course took place at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, and was situated within the School of Business, as part of a suite of Information Studies and Library Science courses. Information Analysis took the principles and practices of Library Science and placed them in the context of industry and government, with a particular focus on European Union data and information structures.
One abiding lesson we were given in this course was how to evaluate information for trustworthiness. Had the research been vetted by academic peers? What was its source? Could it be accurately cited and retraced? We were continually pointed to approved resources: vast databases of research which were owned by corporations and locked to the general public except via exhorbitant access fees. In essence: I learned how to gatekeep.
My greatest joy in this course was meeting a friend who was more radical and subersive than possibly anyone I'd met before. She had landed up in this course as an alternative to living on the dole, after achieving a first-class honours degree in English Literature (and this after fleeing an abusive marriage where she'd been told repeatedly that she was stupid.) She gave me a gift I'll never forget: a book called Free to be Human: Intellectual Self-defense in an Age of Illusions by David Edwards, who is one of the founders of MediaLens and a committed Buddhist.
Influential writers such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have shown that the corporately controlled mass media of Western democracies serve as a giant filter system favouring powerful state and business interests: what we receive as 'objective news' about domestic politics, human rights and environmental issues, is in fact an extremely partial and biased view of the world. Free to be Human shows how the same filter system distorts our understanding of many personal, ethical and spiritual issues, ensuring that we remain passive, conformist, confused and uninformed; and willing to accept the irrational values of corporate consumerism. David Edwards argues that, in order to counter this continual process of disinformation and disempowerment, we need to master the arts of 'intellectual self-defence' and so become able to challenge the deceptions of a system that subordinates people and planet to the drive for profit.
This book – and the many leads it gave me to other writers and thinkers - served as a lever for me; it wedged open the door to my education in such a way that I was able to begin redefining my own values, and reframing my experiences accordingly. Needless to say, it wasn't as simple as reading a single book. For years I explored, read, journaled and unravelled – until a decade later, I came apart entirely and landed up sectioned in a psychiatric hospital.
And here's what I learned: mad knowledge is legitimate and worthy knowledge. The education I received from madness was as meaningful and useful as the education I received from my schools and universities. The information offered to us by madfolk is as meaningful and useful as other forms of knowledge. Just because it doesn't fit into the constraints by which information is typically delivered doesn't mean that it has no value.
I have more to say about mad knowledge – but once again I am running out of time/steam/space in this particular post. I'm on a train; it's late; I'm knackered. So I shall once again defer to another instalment, to dig further into this.