Education beyond dominant master-pupil matrix

Jean-Luc Godard: ‘be sure you usurped everything that can be said by silence’,
a filmmakers advice
to avoid the dominance of the in principal non-filmic language of words
to enhance the language of image

Parafrasing this on education: be sure you usurped every opportunity to learn without being instructed
As to educate yourself
a researchers advice
to avoid being dominated by the in principal stultifying instructions of a teacher
to enhance the intelligence cycle of observing-comparing-verifying

But despite this advice, almost all films are driven by language and not by images
And, almost all education is driven by the dominant master-pupil matrix and not by intelligence.

The way we educate people in schools is still based on the principles to supply an effective fordist workforce. Despite many modifications the basic hierarchical principle stayed: the teacher assesses the quality of your knowledge and not you yourself. This erases ones ability to perceive, to assess, to qualify ones own observation. Lets call this, the ability to enhance ones general intelligence.

This is not new. Many people recognize the technique of stultifying as a basic principal of the current educational system. Quite some think it very bad. Some even consider it a prefascistic education, as it teaches a strong dependancy on dependance.
Why then can’t we put a halt, a stop, to this?
Because everybody seems accustomed to it. Read: addicted. Addicted to repression, to hierarchy, to deresponsabilisation. It feels comfortable. Although for many, teachers and students alike, that kind of comfortability of the incomfortable.

To educate yourself enhances to rely on yourself, on your perception, on your intelligence. We all do this everyday all our life: observing-comparing-verifying.
Self education comprises two possible approaches: 1. the education of the self to become a self or to become oneself and 2. an education where one teaches oneself (reflexivity). In this article we talk about the second approach.
Self education is based upon the possibility for a free choice of topics, methodologies, time, space, and intensity/quality of learning. That also comprises the necessity to learn how to learn by myself. Therefore, it is closely linked to the concept of self-learning.
Self education is not a matter of more freedom of choice (one makes one’s own curriculum, and therefore, becomes a project of oneself), but it is about a programme of experimentation, which needs to be constantly questioned for its specificity (what and how), consistency (how to maintain motivation as desire rather than a pragmatic/utilitarian interest), transformation (process of change which can entail a radical shift of thinking patterns), and availability for others (the questions of authorship and ownership) .

To develop a machine for reflexivity start with questions, in order to translate to another way of reading which leads to reflexivity. Translation is the medium, the operation and the way of gaining knowledge, whereas schools say that the translated (object) is knowledge.

Translation transposes something by changing its side, it transports it, but it also loses something of it, or it changes that which it transports. In order to translate, one needs to abstract, recognize the rules of the system one is unfamiliar with in analogy of the rules of the system one is familiar with (comparison by analogy, homology, equivalence).

Self education should not be understood as a lonely process. On the contrary. A technique of thinking together and outloud should be applied. Training the ability to shift the viewpoint, translate from one mindset (thinking pattern, method, procedure) to another, one can do by oneself, but it is mostly very helpful to use an environment, a dialogue or a collective process with fellow students, mentors, collaborators. Not to produce new problems, not that what should be problematized, but to produce new contexts of problematization.

Much knowledge till some years ago was difficult to obtain. The teacher was the guardian to knowledge. Nowadays it is much easier, one can say, since the last decade, to find the desired knowledge oneself. Google and friends opened up many resources and will continue to do so. Paradises and jungles of potential knowledge cannot wait to be used and explored.
A shift from the learner to the user is necessary. As information is available and free – and we are also overwhelmed by it – one needs to learn how to use it, because information in open source doesn´t include the grammar (rules and protocols) of use.
We have to acknowledge that library, archive and other places of knowledge dissemination have been until recently (information age) the privilege of the educated middle-class. Nowadays with open source and free software movement there is a struggle for open access, availability and computer-literacy which enhances the potential for acquiring knowledge on a non-discriminative basis.

This means that,
Teachers can change from instructor to facilitator
Teachers can change from better-knowers to fellow-researchers
Teachers can change from master to sparringpartner
Teachers can change from conveying only specific knowledge to facilitate the process and methods of problematization

A teacher can even be ignorant of the specific knowledge to be obtained but nonetheless be an excellent facilitator, as s/he went through similar processes to obtain (different) knowledge.

The advantages seem to be many.
Much more time will be left for the teacher to spend on quality individual or small group exchanges when s/he does not need to lose hers/his time anymore in conveying content most students can find themselves.
Much more time can be spend by the student to search for knowledge, read it, do it, interpret it and appropriate it when s/he doesn’t lose her/his time in the impersonal and unspecific conveyance of knowledge in classrooms.
Much more individual and different packages of knowledge can be constructed in order to fit to this filigrain of different abilities and qualities and different needs and desires, to this wide range of different personalities society consists of and of which a modern society with an ever changing market, will soon desperately be in need of. The school is thought to be efficient, although I tend to doubt it, to produce standardized knowledge, but it is highly inefficient to produce a specific and individual variety of knowledge.

I am not the only one who recognizes the need of fundamental changes in education. But nonetheless this mammuth called education hardly changes course, despite that for decades already the existing prevailing education system is in deep crisis (the violence in the schools is just a symptom of the generally stultifying hierarchy). Why is it so difficult to change when quite some successful experiments show that self education isn’t less effective at all. A recent experiment in a swiss highschool, in Wetzikon an outskirt of Zürich, in which the last year gymnasium students were left to learn by themselves, showed that the good students became better and the less good ones not worse, they kept their level.

Why then this strong resistance towards fundamental changes.
There are many reasons, besides it is such a colos.
-Teachers, students, parents, administration, and society are convinced that the ONLY way to learn, is when one is taught. One is convinced that one impossibly can do this oneself. One thinks, one believes even, that a teacher is indispensable. Because without him or her how should a student know where to start and how to continue. In this system the teacher knows and the student is ignorant. But it is the teacher who withholds information, conveys it in little packages. It is the teacher who controls the knowledge to be produced. S/he not only stultifies the students general intelligence, but keeps him or her ignorant too. Quite opposite of what we think a teacher does. This is quite close to a crime isn’t.
-Unfortunately the alternative of self education is so alien to the existing teaching principles based on obedience, which seem to be integrated in society as good common sense, despite modern enterprises need a creative and flexible workforce, that it seems inimaginable for too many to be a possible solution for the many problems schools have to deal with nowadays.
-The disciplinary, repressive process of learning seems necessary, seems, in a system that lacks every self-responsibility, in a system that denies the complexity and individuality of appropriation. It is evident that a repressive system needs discipline. Therefore, not the knowledge to be obtained presupposes the role of a teacher, but the system does. A teacher seems to be indispensable because of the rigid, classical way we structured the conveyianceof knowledge.
-The strict selection process in a school proves the market that you could stand certain standards and appropriate certain knowledge. Not you, what you did, how you speak, how you keep up a certain level of technical or specific knowledge, but the assessment of the school counts. The traditional thinking of the market thinks it needs for efficiency of selection this repressive school system.

The resistant to chance the educational system derives from some fundamental believe that growing up, that curiosity, that the desire to function well in the society, aren’t stimulating enough to build up a strong motivation which helps a student through difficult phases in theself learning process. And, of course, the perspective of becoming a member of the fordist workforce isn’t stimulating at all, but most of this kind of work belongs to the past or if not it is outsourced. The postindustrial society of informational economy needs other qualities and therefore promotes more differences of knowledge and of gaining knowledge. These different methods fit in the need of a society that is constantly under change and therefore needs the ability to change. The self education approach fits perfectly in a society that needs individual initiative, creativity and responsability and ability to change.

In PAF (PerformingArtsForum) we facilitate this self educating opportunity. PAF a tool-machine where one can work on developing methods, tools and procedures, not necessarily driven toward a product. In art education quite a lot of knowledge is learned by practicing. One learns while making. Every artistic production is also a kind of knowledge production.
Many professionals pass by during a year. A generous exchange between them and the not-yet professionals is the backbone of the formation process each student designs for him or herself.
Comparing to the existing art education PAF offers almost no more than a black hole to be filled by the student. A library, mediatheque, the future colleagues, the peers and the presence of conferences, seminars, exchanges between art schools are the main tools beside ones own desire to develop certain knowledge and skills.
PAF tries to make a difference. It tries not be an institute, let alone a famous institute. PAF is a site for experimentation, experimenting with strategies, methods, approaches, experiences, desires, skills and goals of developing, making, producing, distributing work. It tries to be as little an authority as possible. It tries to avoid those aspects which invite you to submit yourself to. PAF leaves it all up to you. And to your ability to confront and exchange the material you develop as well as the many questions that pop up, with your fellow not-yet professionals and the present professionals. PAF is interested in what you make. PAF is interested in what the future of the (performing) arts will look like.

Not many students get thrilled by this open and unrestrictive offer. They want a certificate and a planned curriculum and preferably of an institute of some name. They want to be taught as they can’t imagine how to teach themselves. They are in need of authority. In need to submit themselves. In need of somebody else to decide for them.
This need for authority is engraved in our society.
When PAF would organize auditions, after asking a serious application, to be assessed by a committee of highly esteemed professionals, it would not be difficult to select 20-30 not-yet professionals out of some hundred applications. But PAF won’t organize these auditions.
So strange this need of an outside eye who assesses you. An assessment that is always based on criteria developed from the past of the assessors. Why not wanting to be assessed by the future. By what you want to make, try to make, and make.
One doesn’t become an artist, a visual or performing or whatever artist, by the mere fact that you finished an art school succesfully. Not a certificate but a specific curriculum vitae can perfectly describe, what the students qualities are, according to the listing of the experiences s/he went through.
Art needs a strong desire to communicate something specific. What this ‘something’ might be, how this might change in the course of your artistic life and into what means you might translate/mutate this ‘something’ to, and how these means might change in the course of your artistic live, are all part of the critical, reflexive artistic self steered process. The self evident independence kept in the course of becoming an artist in an art school based on self education, of becoming an exception and not a product of the rule(s) of an art school, is of crucial importance for the quality of what the artist wants to communicate.

And this definitely doesn’t only counts for an art school but for the education cycle as a whole.

Jan Ritsema