I happened to read this post today just an hour after reading about the death of Utah Phillips – a storyteller whose parables on power and privilege have stuck with me ever since I first heard them.
When asked about the inheritance of culture and ideas between generations Utah Phillips once responded:
Joseph Campbell, late in his life, said, “All we really want is to be completely human and in each other’s company.” Everything in this country is unilaterally against that–our best and most natural selves.
It is this idea explored in the bavatuesdays EduPunk post. Technology has the potential to bind us together to solve problems, articulate ideas and vision, and enrich our understanding of both ourselves and others. Technology also has the potential to obfuscate the ends through a confusion of the means.
EduPunk is a cry for ideas, creativity, risk taking, and DIY ethos that challenges assumptions of teaching and learning.
I encourage you to head over to bavatuesdays.com to read more and leave you with a rare live track from the greatest DIY punk band of all time – The Minutemen.
Grant,
Wow, awesome! And you pull out The Minutemen eve, that is a key connection. Long live D. Boon!
Your quote from Utah Phillips about the inheritance of culture here is amazingly on mark framing an ethos that needs to be cultivated, and when I saw a post from Downes talking about him yesterday, I was amazed by Abbie Hoffman’s contempt of court orations in the Chicago 8 trial. it really resonated on a deep level about our position in a culture, and our responsibility to shape it to our needs and desires, rather than fit it into a template that can be mass produced til kingdom come.
The oscillation between community engagement and obfuscation is a trajectory I feel we are kind of spinning around now. I find myself getting caught up in the technical and hype-related details when I truly know that I write, think, and create for others whom I respect, learn from, and imagine with. That is not my job, that is my immediate cultural inheritance that I value and want to both celebrate and preserve. Commodification isn’t always necessarily wrong (I guess 🙂 ), but in the moment of imagining education, learning, and cultural inheritance we must be vigilant, for learning in a box is always already just a technological innovation away.
Thanks for this genius!