Sunday, May 8, 2011

Nightmares...

It came in the middle of the night...

It was a block in some research slash thinking that has been inspired by my plunge into social science. Poverty, we have it because our system requires inequality to operate. Children are set up to fail at school - they leave with a similar social position as their parents and no manner of whips and carrots really changes this predetermined reality.

So capitalism fails children in its need for hierarchy and exploitation to generate profit. Yet as an early childhood educator I'm guided by Te Whāriki which holds aspirations for all children to succeed like nothing else matters...

but then they go to school and their wings are clipped: sit still, listen, passivity, docility, obedience, where the social and cultural capital of middle-class pākehā are the keys to the magic bus...

Te Whāriki is recognised as a tool of neoliberalism and promotes the high aspirations of this ideology, yet there is tension with traditional capitalism which seeks hierarchy within a social structure like New Zealand.

The thing is we're now global. We follow the knowledge economy where we are positioned as thinkers and not doers. The hierarchy is now global with working-class poor not in Porirua or Otara, but in Asia. Tension within the systems of capitalism.

Of course.

What the hell are we to do?

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