Comments on: “Head-Decay-Shun”: Literacy, tool of the dependent and displaced? http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/07/09/head-decay-shun-literacy-tool-of-the-dependent-and-displaced/ Turning and turning in the widening gyre | The falcon cannot hear the falconer | Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold | Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world | The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere | The ceremony of innocence is drowned | The best lack all conviction, while the worst | Are full of passionate intensity. -- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:31:50 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Maximilian Forte http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/07/09/head-decay-shun-literacy-tool-of-the-dependent-and-displaced/#comment-997 Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:20:22 +0000 http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/?p=1179#comment-997 Thank you Alanna. I also had the chance to visit your blog and find it very interesting — you have some amazing experience behind you, and ahead of you too I imagine.

]]> By: Alanna Shaikh http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/07/09/head-decay-shun-literacy-tool-of-the-dependent-and-displaced/#comment-996 Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:30:58 +0000 http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/?p=1179#comment-996 I’ll be thinking about this for the rest of the day, at least. It’s the kind of observation that makes you stop and recalibrate your whole world view.

Thank you.

]]> By: Maximilian Forte http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/07/09/head-decay-shun-literacy-tool-of-the-dependent-and-displaced/#comment-971 Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:41:49 +0000 http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/?p=1179#comment-971 Thanks very much to both of you, great comments.

]]> By: Guanaguanare http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/07/09/head-decay-shun-literacy-tool-of-the-dependent-and-displaced/#comment-970 Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:38:05 +0000 http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/?p=1179#comment-970 Amen and Amen and Amen!

“We don’t need no education.
We don’t need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher, leave those kids alone.
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.”

–Another Brick In The Wall By Pink Floyd

]]> By: Jacob http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/07/09/head-decay-shun-literacy-tool-of-the-dependent-and-displaced/#comment-969 Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:29:49 +0000 http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/?p=1179#comment-969 I’ve had related qualms about the going-to-English-in-the-third-world for as long as people I’ve known have been doing it, that I’ve never really managed to articulate precisely, and so reading this take on the issue of literacy is helpful. The issue with teaching english is very similar in so far as it, if well done, provides a skill that helps if people “are to have any chance of succeeding, of surviving, in modern” most places.

Having said that, part of understanding how education became education entails the history of literacy as a form of exclusion and power, the counterpart to the “a tool of the dispossessed and displaced”. As such, its dissemination of literacy serves ideally to reduce that particular exclusion, although without doing much about its roots.

I’m reminded of a passage from Adorno’s Minima Moralia: “in the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so”

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