happy thanksgiving too!

from a uK kid, chillin’ in the state of Illinois - Springfield!

AREA Chicago Won a MacArthur Grant

Opening Paragraph about AREA Chicago in this article below: “I want to make sure that everyone knows how awesome AREA Chicago is….”

http://gapersblock.com/ac/2009/11/23/area-chicago-wins-a-macarthur-grant/

CHECK IT YALLLLLLLLL

The Sheffield Landscape [working title]

PUBLICATION

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Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

“Structures do not take to the streets”

“It is never structures that make history; it is men.”  - Goldmann

Whilst this text starts in a place relatively remote from Chicago, its real focus is on how alternative institution collective learning is more autonomous using the Chicago Freedom School (CFS) as a case point.

There is a pleasure in taking part in a counter-education, a splinter to the institution, to bask just in the love of learning. It makes me feel like I am back in the late 60’s, where revolutionary hope tinges the air.

But more interestingly so is the actuality of the existence of counter-educational institutions. Why do they exist? Why aren’t there more of them? Why don’t we know of them in an everyday sense? Do these splinter-educational institutions teach better than the official educational institutions?  And where exactly do they get their funding from? These are all the type of questions that plague our minds.

We think of institutional critique when we think of alternative education.  Institutions, in a word—transcends into assuming great political divides that lay in between anticapitalism and antisocialism being only the most obvious. Institutions were understood to be the means by which authority exercised itself and were thus by definition—regardless of the politics of the institution in question—the embodiment of conservation and constriction, of untruth and unfreedom, of illegitimate authority.

The principle of institutionality itself reverts back to the heart of the bourgeois. We can see historically the resentment of institutions from 1968.  Blake Stimson in his introduction of his book institutional critique suggests that “That dream of becoming social, becoming institutional, of becoming governmental in its larger (pre- Foucauldian, pretendance Groucho) sense, ultimately, was also always the dream of becoming human, of self- realization”

Meaning, as humanity we always strive to find or be something bigger than ourselves, thus when we become part of an assembly line, a party, a class, an institution—as the original Karl Marx famously  said, “he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species”

What is interesting, however,  are institutions that are set up to be reactionary to the institutions before them.  Thinking about alternatives to the educational institution I instantly think of the Chicago Freedom School, Chicago, IL and far away more near my home – Islington Mill, Manchester UK.

Islington Mill Art Academy is a free self-organised art school based in Manchester, UK. It was set up in 2007 by a group of art foundation students (freshman at college), dissatisfied with the quality and standards in University/College fine art courses open to them at that time.

Where as The Chicago Freedom School (CFS) is a project that has been running for 45 years now, which works as an intense summer program in the Downtown area of Chicago for teens up to the age of 16.  The CFS is grounded in creating a place where youth can emerge as leaders through developing an activist orientation and was created by people who were committed to social justice within a society plagued with inequalities.

Both schools seek to exist by experimenting with what an equal and just education can be, where it can take place and how it can be paid for. They are both open to anyone who would like to be a leader and whom are interested in taking responsibility for the direction of what they learn and in which way they intend to do this.

The students who attend these alternative educational institutions take all of the decisions related to their personal learning process and put these decisions into practice themselves.  The investment in institutionality by these students are different, of course—as a rule they occupy private institutions and redirect them to public ends rather than occupying public institutions and holding them accountable to their founding purpose.

This dialectic, as I noted earlier, defines the central impulse of historical institutional critique, and is evident in much of the work and curriculum produced by the students of these institutions. For instance, while the tactical CFS curriculum has several decades now persistently foregrounded the flagrant discrimination and prejudices that contradict the education systems avowed equitableness and lack of bias toward anything but disinterested quality, they do so with a sense of possibility.

Moments

There are moments in life that should be treasured. I’m a glass half full person, unless i need a drink, but at the same time I’m being a bit of a half-empty kinda person - which means the glass is equally full as it is empty. But  I need to take the time to remind myself to appreciate these things; to remind myself that the world isn’t all bad.

Things like the first bite of a nice crunchy piece of toast smothered in strawberry jam.
The view of Sears Tower (willis) from a tCTA window after 8 hours on an aeroplane.
The cuteness of Monday my housemates dog when he does little dreamy woofs when he’s asleep.
Larry David saying, ‘Pre-taaay, pre-taaay, pre-taaay good.’
Or something as simple as watching a ladybird that’s landed on your arm. Or how the sun breaks into a billion pieces on the skyscrapers of a beautiful city- creating a piece of abstract art.

This morning I had one of those moments.
I woke up. Well rather woken up by the crazy guy who lives in the basement chatting shit to his wife. However this was awesome.  I saw that it was already gone half past ten and stumbled towards the bathroom. I decided to have a bath.  got clean, stepped out, grabbed a towel, got rid of most of the excess water, then went and sat on the edge of my air bed. Then I flopped back and rested my head on the scrunched-up duvet. Then I slivered myself up completely onto the bed. Then I fell asleep, still damp from the shower. I woke up just before midday, no longer tired, and already clean for the day.

It was beautiful moment.

Like the feeling i still get when i step out of a store, the office, a train and i see YES I AM IN CHICAGO. I AM IN AMERICA. BEAUTIFUL.

the small big city

travelling to the bigger city always make me feel calmer, especially at nite. the city looks more alive and you can see the creations of man with checkered lights that are erected and displayed throughout the nite for the people. the little specs that make the soaring buildings move as if to hold a thousand and two different stories of (probably twice that many) single people living in the world. although the nite didn’t hold as much as we would want it to, driving pass downtown and around the big city with friends venturing somewhere not quite familiar was a good enough situation for anyone, even for me. we found the bright pier along the historic beach as it bursted with the lives of a million people. I found it comforting to find families being families still and forgetting the complications of today’s standards of living. the homeless who slept, begged, entertained and wandered, never fails to shoot a bolt of reality through my chest, feeling the weight of our society on my heart. I hate to say it makes me feel better to be who I am and it makes me want to be more giving, but there are a million things you can never do in a lifetime, several even…

going to the city reminds me of school trips to museums and travelling farther than the outskirts of town to learn what else the world has to offer. it’s not somewhere you’d exactly want to stay,  but it’s something you’d never want to forget. and so you set back to the world you’ve accustomed yourself to, the world you call mundane, but is an ironic analogy for ignorance. travelling farther from the world that suffers and back to the world of the outskirts. sitting in a CTA car, getting lost, feeling the innocence leave you slowly, stopping at a place you know to get food and in a small way you’re glad to be home, but you still wish you could go back to see it all again tomorrow…