I once had a teacher who said that youth thinks it has a monopoly on sex. By his tone we knew that this claim was being challenged. This debunking nicely complements this bit from Natalia Cecire, a counter-claim about learning.
It is not only the young who are learning; it is, however, more socially acceptable for the young to admit that they are learning. Learners should not be shamed for learning at any age.
http://natalia.cecire.org/works-cited/
The piece goes on to explore how appeal to generational difference is sometimes figured as a “paying the price” which displaces a “doing the reading”.
The enjeu is political:
This conflation of newnesses, and the erasure of learning beyond emergency learning on which it depends (the learning that takes one outside oneself), is a way of relabeling violence as pedagogy, and it is anti-intellectual as well. It is “teaching a lesson” as beating. It rests on the fallacy that learning is an office of youth, where youth is a category of subjection to legitimate violence. (That is to say: it makes plain the violence on which the designation of “youth” is constituted under patriarchy.) We can learn something from paying a price, but being made to pay is not a pedagogy. Pedagogy means: letting people who are new at this learn, and not imagining that we have nothing to learn ourselves. I absolutely do not mean this in some liberal “let’s all be nice to each other and hear all sides” way. In fact, I believe that “being nice” and the regimes of favor that it entails often lead straight to abuse. What I mean is: let’s not confuse doing the reading for paying the price.
And so for day 2686
21.04.2014