‘Every town looks like a brand of olive oil’ Susan, Sun 10.48 am

Roma – Bologna, somewhere in Tuscany

When Pasolini wrote about how state schooling killed a form of life (Lutheran Letters), and bred a new kind of human beings, how can we understand that? How would this relate to his other famous comment on the policemen of the 60s being the real historical subject of change, and not the long haired students in the demonstrations as everyone at the time believed? Was he referring to the way the form of the apprenticeship has to do with choosing your teacher and your teacher choosing you and choosing the way of the teaching, about initiations and secrets, the idea that knowledge is partial but complex and layered, and you know that, and you must get it extract it from your mentor who may be giving it to you or refuse, extracting the secrets, the trade secrets…
But also the idea that a whole society is taking care of what you know and how you know it. We have been talking about having kids. These kinds of conversations that often start a little bit in between a joke and a sense of a private confession, a slight awkwardness of intellectually active women being caught talking about kids… the issue seems to be that none of us could ever conceive growing kids on our own, the point being not about having a fixed companion for life, but the opportunity for them to be grown by a tribe of adults, a number of safety net ants and uncles that would save them from our parental dyscrasias. It feels totally incommensurable to have both the choice AND the responsibility for another human thing being brought about.

Later on at the dinner table I was wondering about intelligence and its myth, what does it mean to be intelligent, why do we want to feel special that way, doing internships to just be able to acquire that type of credibility we are worth because we use L’Oreal and because we are interesting, sophisticated human beings. Jimmie said that for him we learn this really early on in our life when we come to realize that if our mother does not like us we not get food. We depend on approval to survive. We learn to perform ourselves. In a context when if your mother does not like anymore and you could still go to see your cousin or aunt, how could that idea of competition be different?

Wondering what happens when the students will fully reach the grasp that they are costumers…and teachers fully grasp that their students are potential competitors….bbrrrrr