Books
While I was away I started reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. The novel itself is pulling me along. It's largely concerned with a characterisation of a mode of female consciousness. I can't help but compare this version of womanhood with women I know or have known; some similar, some who would be irritated by the comparison. There's also an introduction, added later by the author, which was prompted by her observation that in her eyes the book has been widely misinterpreted by being split into its constituent concerns (it being alternately about politics, relationships, authorship etc) and analysed along those separate lines, when the whole thrust of the novel is to point out that these distinctions are a problem and a challenge to health, productivity and self-esteem. In this introduction there is a passage which struck me as being as true as anything else i've read in the past few years. It's this:
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something liike this:
'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgement. Those who stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.'
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Zantedeschia aethiopica.
Echeveria glauca.
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something liike this:
'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgement. Those who stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.'
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Zantedeschia aethiopica.
Echeveria glauca.