Teenagers and old literature: The Princess of Cleves

YL posted this on FaceBook:

«La Princesse de Clèves, premier roman moderne de la littérature française, est le personnage central du film. Manel, Aurore, Mona, Abou et les autres lui prêtent leurs voix, leurs visages. Ils sont élèves du Lycée Diderot de Marseille, un établissement difficile des quartiers nord de la ville, et leur professeur a décidé de leur faire étudier ce roman. Jeunes Français pour la plupart d'origine étrangère, ils sont souvent stigmatisés, caricaturés. Aujourd'hui, certains s'interrogent sur l'opportunité de leur faire découvrir les grands textes de la littérature française. Quelle en serait l'utilité sur le marché du travail qui les attend? Quel intérêt pour les jeunes que ces vieilles élucubrations du XVIIe siècle? Ensemble ils s'emparent du roman, de ses représentations, des questions qu'il pose. Objet transitionnel. C'est à leur univers que ce roman du grand siècle nous donne accès»

Translation:

The Princess of Cleves, the first modern novel in French literature, is the central character of the film. Manel, Dawn, Mona Abou and the others lend it their voices, their faces. They are students at the Lycée Diderot, a tough upper secondary school in the northern suburbs of Marseille, and their teacher decided to get them to study this novel. They are young French people, mostly of foreign origin, and are often stigmatized and caricatured. Today, some are questioning the use of being introduced to the great works of French literature. What would be the point in the job market facing them after school? What interest can young people have in these seventeenth century ramblings? Together the students took possession of the novel, the reflections it provides, and its questions. It's a transference object. The students' world is opened up to us by this novel from France's Great Century.

Nous, princesses de Clèves

www.cinemovies.fr

Réalisé par Régis Sauder Durée : 1 h 9 Date de sortie : 30 mars 2011 (FR) Distributeur : Shellac Genre : Documentaire Pays d'origine : France

I commented:

Good literature gives us access to other minds that see, act, think and feel in ways we can empathize with. Takes us behind the barbed-wire fences and locked doors of our social fronts. It puts a key in our hands, and says: "Open my door - welcome in!". This is something that happens less and less with people we don't know in our world today. To some extent, if we're lucky, it can happen on the net, and in that way the net is fusing into a general cultural phenomenon that includes literature.
So good for these kids, and good for Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette.

Slutwalk and sectarianism

On FaceBook, Juan G posted a link to an analysis of Slutwalk:

http://www.yasminnair.net/content/slutwalk-end-feminism "If Slutwalk is to remain relevant, it needs to become more than a gathering where people share stories about their abuse. Without a critical self-awareness and a willingness to address and act upon the structural, economic, and political problems that face women and others, Slutwalk is in danger of becoming the Halloween of feminism: the one day of the year when women feel empowered to dress in scanty clothes and call themselves sluts, but which leaves them without the power with which to actually make and create the kind of change that goes beyond an Obama slogan.

There is nothing insignificant about the demand that people not be harassed or worse for how they dress, but reclaiming “slut” is only the beginning. There is a particularly vapid form of activism that has overtaken the left-progressive world, where mostly people of colour and other oppressed groups engage in “story-telling.” This works like a drum circle, an endless chanting of personal woes that drowns out the structural components of capitalism, and allows for the construction of a fiercer, more powerful neoliberalism that uses the realm of the personal to erase our consciousness of the destruction of our social, political, and economic resources." - a thought-provoking piece ;0

I made the following comment:


We can see it a bit like this... Every powerful movement covers a broad spectrum, from very radical to ultra-cautious, and the more powerful and long-term it is, the more kaleidoscopic and varied the colours and pieces making up the mosaic. Important historical movements affecting huge numbers of people (like universal democratic issues such as national independence, freedom of association and expression, and women's emancipation) include tendencies so clearly delimited from each other that they seem to be totally incompatible, even if they are mainstream in relation to the extremes. 
Slutwalk is one of these apparently separate mainstream trends. It doesn't advocate a castration for every rape, for instance, and it doesn't hide in the gut of male chauvinism like some ultra-respectable tapeworm, so it's not extreme. But it seems incompatible with rational class-based socialist programmes for women's liberation.
So let's not see it as a threat to feminism, but as a partial ally, doing our work for us in places we can't and don't really want to reach. Not the way we would do it, naturally, but nonetheless.
In the 1926 General Strike in Britain the students were out fighting the workers and scabbing alongside the cops and troops. In 1968 they weren't. In some situations the petty bourgeoisie goes rabid and supports the most brutal exploitation of the workers and farmers - Germany and Italy in the 1930s, say. In others it sides with the broad masses and boosts the forces of emancipation - Russia 1917, Cuba 1959, for instance. In yet others it vacillates - as in Venezuela today where the petty bourgeois nationalist military leadership opposes imperialism and its local lackeys.
Our job is to explain, agitate and lead working women and girls in a revolutionary socialist movement for women's emancipation. We haven't really started in this task yet, so naturally people who want to see things change join what's available and visible. Like Slutwalk.
Slutwalk and similar movements show us what gets people angry and on their feet, and reveal all sorts of creativity and humour in mobilization that we're not too good at ourselves. 
Hell, I welcome the appearance of extremes! It shows things are happening, things are moving. If we handle the extremes well it gives us a perfect opportunity to define our own position as clear and rational - that is, as the most attractive and human position to take.
We need to get out of the habit of smacking down every trend in the broad movement that riles us. It's defensive and sectarian. And if we can't handle the variety and human cussedness in our own movement, how the hell will we be able to handle the variety and cussedness of real world society when the capitalists have been kicked out and we get to run the country??

Förbättra skolan - improving schools

My comment in Swedish on an article about a school in West Sweden that magically improved its results over just three years.
http://www.sydsvenskan.se/sverige/article1262061/Nar-skolan-ar-som-allra-bast.html

Dagens ungdomar är morgondagens arbetskraft. Ju skickligare arbetskraft, desto större produktivitet. Ju större produktivitet, desto större profit.
Skicklig arbetskraft kräver vetenskapligt baserad tillverkning, alltså optimerade tillverkningslokaler (skolor, klassrum, bibliotek etc), optimerat handhavande av råmaterialet för att minska spill (inte halva råvaran kasserad eller klassat som andra sortering, som händer med ungdomsmaterialet idag), och optimerade processer fram till slutprodukten (alltså inte någon bäng höjdares drömpudding).
Borgarnas skolpolitik, som också är sossarnas för den delen, går stick i stäv med detta framgångsrecept. Investeringar i skolan minskar obönhörligt från år till år. Produkten blir dyrare och sämre.

Skolpolitiken klarar alltså inte ens av att frambringa produktiv arbetskraft! Kortsiktig vinstjakt minskar långsiktig vinstökning.
Det om det. När kommer de mänskliga aspekterna nånsin att diskuteras? Mera harmoniska, självständigt tänkande o handlande människor som är aktiva, skapande, ohämmade, medmänskliga o glada, som stimulerar sig själva o varandra att upptäcka o uppfinna nyttigheter o nöjen - detta ska vara målet med bildning o fostran för människor.
Vi glömmer hela tiden bort att vi lever i ett förhistoriskt samhälle när det gäller att förverkliga alla människor på likvärdiga villkor. Såväl i Sverige som i Indien.
Comenius visste mer om pedagogik på 1600-talet än våra skolpolitiker idag. Vi rör oss baklänges i tiden.

Access to higher education and privilege

Mary Beard's blog:

March 16, 2007

Is university entrance squeezing the middle class?

Reinventing the wheel often causes a flurry of headlines. This time (once again) it is about university entrance and the decision to have information about parents included on the University (UCAS) application form. The idea is that it will help to “widen access” if admissions’ tutors know what the potential student’s Mum and Dad do, and whether have been to university themselves.

Squeals of horror from the usual (middle class) suspects.

There is in fact nothing new at all here.

For a long time parental occupation was a question on the special Cambridge application form. Some years ago (I can’t remember exactly when) that question was abolished. The idea was, I think, that this information was encouraging us to discriminate AGAINST the under-privileged – as if we were sorting through the forms and picking out the ambassador’s daughter and chucking the postman’s daughter into the “reject” pile. Socially elite dons looking for students in their own image -- or so the paranoid fantasy went.

I always thought that it was actually working the other way round. Knowing more about where the kids were “coming from” really did help to judge their potential and make a more level playing field.

To put it another way, when I am interviewing a student who wants to come and read Classics, one thing I want to know is whether they have made the most of their opportunities to find out about the ancient world. And it all depends what those opportunities are. If, for example, a girl who has had several long Greek holidays has never once taken the trouble to visit an archaeological site or museum, I will have some qualms. If someone who has never left the country, but lives within a mile of Hadrian’s Wall and has never visited it – well, similar qualms are raised (but I wouldn't hold against them the fact that they had never seen the Parthenon).

The point is that we are looking for those, from whatever background, who have potential – and the capacity to benefit from the course. More information helps (particularly now that the school’s reference is open to the candidate and can be almost useless).

The middle classes really don’t need to worry. I am not looking to favour the stupid daughter of the postman over the clever daughter of the ambassador. I am looking for intellectual potential wherever it is found. Exactly as I have always done.

Posted by Mary Beard on March 16, 2007 at 08:16 AM | Permalink

(There are some good comments, too.)

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Choppa's response:

Marx's reflections on The Jewish Question in 1844 might help us clear this contradiction up a bit.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

In a crucial passage he writes:

"The perfect political state is, by its nature, man’s species-life, as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers."

Thus he distinguishes between the human being as citizen (member of the state), with equal rights etc, and as "bourgeois" (member of civil society) with unequal possessions, wealth, clout, etc.

If we substitute "class" for "religion" in the first sentence of the next paragraph, we read: "Man, as the adherent of a particular *class*, finds himself in conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community."

So basically what academics and universities are doing in their selection process is resolving this conflict between abstract equality and concrete privilege - a conflict that will last as long as the capitalist state itself - as best they can given the built-in contradictions of the task and the varying wiggle-room for different (often mutually exclusive) criteria given by the rules at any particular time.

In my day (the postwar retreat by the capitalist class known as the welfare state) working class students were sucked into higher education with grants that actually enabled them to live and study, and the glorious false flag of "academic freedom" flew over spires and lecture rooms.

Nowadays, with the resurgence of the capitalist class and the rolling back of the welfare state, this is no longer the case.

The solution is not to change the rules of admission or even the grants system (though this might help temper the glaring inequalities a bit) but to change society so the interests of the penurious human majority can no longer be steamrollered by the interests of the inhuman moneybags minority.