“How many times have I failed before? How many times have I stood here like this, in front of my own image, in front of my own person, trying to convince him not to be scared, to go on, to get out of this rut? How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how may self-murders is it going to take, how many times will I have to destroy myself before I learn, before I understand?”
— Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
“The flag I was carrying is the same one I always hold in all the other protests I’ve attended. My friends make fun of me, saying it is easier to throw rocks without holding a flag in the other hand, but I got used to it.
If I get killed, I want to be wrapped in the same flag. We are demanding our right of return, and protesting for our dignity and the dignity of our future generation.”
“We need a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of horror, a self-consciousness that does not steal away when it is time to explore possibility to the limit.””
— Georges Bataille. The Accursed Share Volumes II & III.
It’s disturbing to me how high school is like a blatant survivor of the fittest thing now it’s like they throw all these kids with various budding issues together and say whoever gets out at an ivy or with the most scholarships you won! the rest are filler
Yeah literally by design the education system’s intended to separate kids whose parents can afford to invest time/money into their ~academic/personal growth~ outside of school and prepare them for state schools feeding into middle-upper management career paths at worst and Ivy Leagues preparing them to be part of the ruling class at best, from poor/working class kids who are supposed learn to exist under rigid and arbitrary authoritarian structures cause basically at birth they were sentenced to grow up to either work in awful retail/service jobs or go to fucking prison. And even the better off kids in this scenario are ruined cause from childhood they’re taught to understand that their worth is a result of their advantageous place in a social hierarchy that they have to maintain by seeing themselves as commodities and as the sum of their achievements/social status which indoctrinates them to dehumanize themselves and especially those ‘beneath’ them.
“The ‘hidden curriculum’ of school work is tacit preparation for relating to the process of production in a particular way… School experience, in the same of schools discussed here, differed qualitatively by social class. These differences may not only contribute to the development in the children in each social class of certain types of economically significant relationships and not others, but would thereby help to reproduce this system of relations in society. In the contribution to the reproduction of unequal social relations lies a theoretical meaning, and social consequence, of classroom practice.”
– Jean Anyon, Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work (1980)
countervisuality 