So what if you suck a dodgeball, board games in the class room

How do we know what is important to learn? We have been told by teachers and parents for all of our primary and secondary education that the way to learn, and what is important to learn, will be facilitated by the education system. So we go to school sit in our neat rows and the teachers pour knowledge into our brains and we regurgitate that information back to them so we can get good marks and move on to the next level until we finally reach the end of the government sponsored educational track, Paulo Freire refers to this method of education as the “banking” concept of education. Then what? We have our heads filled with “facts” but have we really learned anything? Are we any better critical thinkers? Have we developed better social skills? Not really, we are better at taking orders, following guild lines and being submissive to authority figures. Even in post-secondary learning the model is not vastly different, some professor will try alternative learn models but ultimately the system is set up for traditional testing and grading which evaluates students on their ability to take the information that has been given to them and repackage it.

The Irish and whiteness

In North America there is a discourse regarding whether or not white people have an advantage over racialized populations, Peggy McIntosh is one voice in this discussion. In her article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, she outlines the concept of white privilege, and how she sees white privilege in her daily experiences. In order to understand white privilege, I think we should first examine McIntosh’s concept of “whiteness”.

So what are the main components of Peggy McIntosh’s notion of whiteness? I will examine some of her ideas of whiteness in relation to the racialization of the Irish in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. First I will look at how McIntosh’s views of whiteness confer dominance and privilege and it’s relation to the Irish. Then, I will examine how McIntosh sees whiteness as being taught to be seen as morally neutral, average, ideal and what relationship this has with Irish immigration and immigrants.

Stuart Hall and ideology: A brief look at Animal rights

I will be looking at Stuart Halls’ definition of ideology, Hall describes an ideology as “The mental frameworks – the language, concepts, categories, imagery of thought and system of representation – which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works” (Hall, 1996 pg. 26). What does Hall mean by this definition of ideology? From this definition it is easy to see that Halls definition is rooted in the material, instead of the metaphysical, the physical world and how we interpret it is the most important part of understanding our lives and how we fit into things. I intend to look at the Animal rights movement and use it as a lens with which to look at Halls’ concept of ideology showing that the Ideology of the Animal rights movement is grounded in the real world and stands against real oppression.

I will do this by looking at some of the components that make up the ideology of the Animal rights movement; first I will look at language and examine some of terms used by proponents of Animals rights to communicate their message; I will also talk about the imagery, how it is used and the meanings behind the imagery.

Panopticon, society and power

Michel Foucault sees Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as a metaphor for how disciplinary power is exercised in modern society; the panopticon is a shift from the earlier model of disciplinary power that housed prisoners in a dungeon and exacted out physical punishment via torture or execution on the physical body of the prisoner; Power was viewed as being solely in the hands of the monarch. (Foucault, 1975/1977)The Panoptic model was that prisoners would be housed in individual cells cut off from contact with the outside and other prisoners and under constant surveillance, or perceived surveillance, by a central tower within which would be stationed a guard. The prisoner could see the tower but not the guard, the uncertainty of the exercising of power made the power constant (pg. 200, 201). The power then shifts from the observer to the observed who thinks they are being constantly watched (Foucault, 1975/1977). In this way the observed will exercise power upon themselves to keep their actions in line with what is perceived as normal behaviour for fear of being of punished. This is a decentralisation of power; the power to discipline is now in the hands of the disciplined. This economy of discipline allows for less authority to govern more people (Foucault, 1975/1977).