Black Scholarly Activism between the Academy and Grassroots by Ornette D. Clennon

Author:Ornette D. Clennon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030008376
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

They were openly admitting their role in teaching young people to reproduce the social inequalities of the market through becoming “informed consumers ”.

Education for Self-Development and Social Knowledge (Co)Production

The central question here is that within our present capitalist system; what does self-development mean? Does it mean developing the self in order to better navigate the market ? 18 If so, then this is no different to education for employment, obviously. So, if education is about liberation and social knowledge , this poses other questions. For example, if social knowledge is not valued in the market because the only currency of knowledge is market knowledge, then what is its purpose? It can and indeed should be argued that social knowledge exists outside of the market whether or not it is supressed or ignored. This is true especially in a community context, which we will discuss later. But I am making the massive assumption that the market and its participation is all we have. But is it? I would argue that on a global level in terms of our financial institutions perhaps this is the case but on local levels there are opportunities for communities to develop bespoke systems of cooperative economies. So, here being taught about the production of social knowledge is about a form of envisioning a future and an alternative to our present market paradigm.

In this context, self-development and social knowledge are two important arms of the envisioning process. Education for self-development could be described as being taught about our ‘situated’ place within the system. This would entail being taught about the “inversion” and appearance of the market . On a curriculum level, this would perhaps look like learning about “connected histories ”, 19 learning about the way institutions work, learning about how democracies are formed. Much of this already exists in the Citizenship GCSE. However, these points of learning are only symptomatic of deep-rooted systemic thinking. What I mean here is that market already embodies social inequality, as it was constructed on social inequality. What this really means is that ‘sign’ values that are designed to keep power with the elite need to be problematised . Problematising ‘common sense’ ideology is difficult when everything around you is screaming the contrary and paints you as the problem for challenging assumptions. But challenging assumptions around race and gender and how racial patriarchy was formed into a racial rule and crystallised into an invisible racial contract is becoming very important.

So how would we actually go about doing this? It could be argued that these challenges have to come directly from within our ancestral histories and traditions. 20 This is why supplementary schools are so important. 21 They are able to provide spaces that exist outside of the mainstream education system. Supplementary schools have the ability to coproduce social knowledge that is native to their communities . Teaching their children about their native languages, culture and histories is an important radical 22 act for supplementary schools because this act alone challenges the market at large, which is determined to excise this knowledge from its actors.

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