Schooling as a Political Choice to Conform to the Colonizing Narrative of Domestication
Obligatory schooling has become the global narrative that frames our understanding of how children must learn. Narratives become reality when people act according to the plot that drives these narratives. Hence, obligatory schooling, where children are taught through literacy how to know and live in the world, has become the reality for most human children on earth. Furthermore, even if the specific details of what, for instance, is taught in French schools might differ from what might be taught in Kenya, there is a unifying experience of submitting children to “discipline” and hierarchical structure of obedience through literacy from an early age. This literacy is mostly linked with today’s major civilisations: European, Arab, and Chinese, the core of whose syllabus aims to domesticate human resources and instill in them a place in the hierarchy of the “food chain”. In this respect, the seemingly personal choice of parents or a community to whether send their children to school or choose to educate them at home or in the community, in both cases, constitutes a political choice: one to conform to the socio-economic and political system based on consumption and exploitation or to resist this paradigm. In this talk, Layla will draw on her discussion of “unschooling” and “schooling” in her new book Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood Publishing 2013) to address how successful resistance has to entail a critique of the underlying speciesist, racist, and misogynist mandate of the domesticating narrative of civilisation and the disciplining methods of the civilised institution.
To order copies of Wild Children Domesticated Dreams
http://fernwoodpublishing.ca/Wild-Children-Domesticated-Dreams/
Please visit Layla’s Website (where you may find many of her writings online)
http://layla.miltsov.org/
The Wikipedia entry about Layla Abdel Rahim
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layla_AbdelRahim
