Network for Self-Education

Italian activist project described here at http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=39&Itemid=33

In Italian: Rete per l’Autoformazione

Description

"The Network for Self-Education is a political laboratory of students and precarious researchers from many faculties, both scientific and humanistic. In fact, the Network is a device that cuts and criss-crosses the borders between university disciplines, the division between teaching and research, and the borderline between education and metropolitan production. This kind of self-education is a new form of political organization, a collective gear in which theory lives in praxis. It approaches the struggles surrounding knowledge production (and the quality and control of knowledge flows) as a strategic field of conflict for the cognitive workforce." (http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=39&Itemid=33)

Goals and hypotheses of the movement

"* That knowledge is a central means of production in contemporary society;

• In what we call the passage from exclusion to ‘differential inclusion’ in the higher education system, institutional knowledge is also a means to produce hierarchy in the (knowledge) labor market, to construct class, race, and gender divisions, and to control the mobility of free students and precarious researchers;

• The academy is exceeded by flows of knowledge production: the problem for us is not to re-build the ivory tower, but to transform the metropolitan area into an oppositional university;

• There is a contradiction between the capitalistic necessity to measure knowledge production and the excess of knowledge production with respect to the law of value;

• The ‘knowledge factory’ category is, at once, useful and inadequate: useful, because it describes the ways in which students’ labor becomes immediately productive; inadequate, because there is an irreducible gap between the ‘tayloristic-fordist’ factory and the current organization of knowledge production;

• Today, based on this gap, the conflicts in the university are conflicts in the knowledge production: between autonomy and subordination, and between the imposition of capitalistic time and the affirmation of subjective times in knowledge production;

• Our self-education courses are not simply a way to spread out antagonistic messages, but a flight line and a form of exodus from the crisis of academy, in its state and corporate forms: they are an attempt to organize an oppositional university not in the far future but in the present.

• Knowledge is a common good not because it exists in nature, but because it is produced by living labor - by what we call living knowledge."

Discussion: Self-education and Knowledge Quality

"The ‘self-education project’ consists in building up courses that are self-managed by the students. This kind of self-education overthrows the institutional academic model with regard to both the contents and the methods of knowledge transmission. The topics of the courses are collectively chosen and then developed by experimental ‘hybrid’ groups, which are composed of precarious researchers and students. For example, last year we ran a course on ‘Political Sovereignty in the Modern Age’ in the Department of Political Science: if the ordinary programs analyse sovereignty from the point of view of state theory, considering power as transcendent with respect to struggles, in the self-education seminars we tried to re-propose the question of sovereignty on the plan of immanence, reconstructing – in a genealogical way – the history and theory of resistance inside and against the development of modernity.

As regards methods, as we explain above, self-education attempts to deconstruct the traditional model of knowledge transmission and research. The seminars attempt to break with the classical division between the professor on one side and the users/clients on the other. They follow more the ‘circle model’ than the frontal lecture, favouring the moment of discussion and collective study. From this point of view, the seminars attempt to establish a new relationship between study and research, assuming these two aspects as interdependent. In a framework in which the multiplication of university courses means first of all the specialization of curriculum and the fragmentation of knowledge, self-education tries to knock down the rigid perimeters of the disciplines: so, concepts have to be analysed and understood through schemes of knowledge that are at once historical, philosophical, scientific, and so on.

What makes this self-education a conflictual device is the ‘inflation’ of educational credits. In fact, some years ago - in the framework of the ‘Bologna process’ (the effort to build a European common space of higher education through the harmonization of the reform programs in the different countries of the EU) - the Italian university introduced an economic language and system. The curriculum, rigidly settled, is subdivided in modules; to each module is attributed a numerical value. This number and measure is the credit, which – artificially – corresponds to the summation of individual study and (obligatory) attendance hours. The credit system is based on an absurd assumption: that learning and study can be rigidly calculated, disassembled and measured. So, we reclaim the credits in recognition of our participation in the self-education seminars to deconstruct this measurement system from within. This means, in other words, that we favour the use value of the knowledge over its exchange value." (http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=39&Itemid=33)