I am enjoying reading your work very much. It is always interesting and challenging. Raises very important questions. I also look forward to many more conversations with you.

I also agree that there needs to be more public debate into the future and purpose of education.

It seems to me that a necessary condition for the existence of a genuinely public education is that the public participate in shaping it.

Yes. Toward more conversations, and thank you for reading much of my works.

(2nd Ivan) – thank you Ivan. No, I’m not teaching next semester, but will be next fall. You’re welcome to sit-in on any of my classes. I’ll be teaching half a year (each Fall) for the next 5 years. Busy seeking out next career(s) – maybe returning to do “fieldwork” as the anthropologist I still tell myself I am.

I will be posting a great deal of new work on this site quite soon – including my book, “Teaching as Dialogue” – which may be interesting, even useful as you continue to “move-on.”

Harvey

I’ve heard wonderful things about your recent teaching. I’ll be the first to say that your course really changed me, intellectually and personally (if one likes to manage these categories). I am back on campus. My roommate was really impressed with your graduate seminar. I hope she follows up with you, I think the department desperately needs people outside of the conventional paper-milling and competition that, I suppose turn out good graduate students of a sort, at some more fundamental personal expense, perhaps.

I really like this on the curriculum. Asking the real question, or shifting one’s gaze just slightly, these are the real challenges… and anyway, it’s not often advantageous to publication.

Where do I plug in? Where do I find my space (place?) Isn’t this to ask, where am I wanted? allowed? demanded? … But yet, all I’ve known is ask where to go. Who answers, anyway?

Harvey, are you teaching a class next semester? I’d really like to sit in on it!

Of course in our “modern” society, the curriculum is the product of centralised institutions that are directed to cater to the needs of the corporate-state and the economic elite it serves.

The democratisation of knowledge and access to technological innovation — themselves conditions for the democratic participation into the development of the technological society — both require the (Jeffersonian) democratisation, decentralisation of education and research: the pluralisation of the curriculum, in accordance with pluralistic and diverse values and visions of the future of society, combined with collective funding and public ownership of knowledge and technological innovation, through a decentralised and locally accountable network of universities and public research centers. (Cf. my book Participatory Democracy, Science & Technology).

The questions of the development of the curriculum, how to envision the future, the purpose of education, and who owns the world? are all intimately and inextricably related.

- Miriam