Was too late to go for my French class today. Wasn't feeling super-good physically and there was also the fact that last night I went out for a dinner after AGES, and ended up staying out till almost 11.15 pm and then chatted with RC until 1.30 am. Besides,I am allowed to wallow in Monday Morning Blues once in a while. So I have been here at home, and graded almost 50% of the student papers.Now this set wasn't that bad. But there are other things that bother me about my students.
1. The extent to which they accept social inequality
2. The extent to which they think "choice" solves it all. Rarely do they try to see that none of our choices are absolute.We all choose from the given options, to begin with. Besides, what we end up choosing are almost always profoundly influenced by what we have internalized through socialization. Therefore, all choices are and can be and should be ideologically de-constructable.I mean, no one should get a blank check by saying, this is my choice. That choice needs to be contextualized and justified. Yes, I will agree to the possibility of disagreement there. But nothing seems more problematic to me than when people leave it at choice and do not probe on the social, historical, ideological factors that made that specific choice possible.
3. My students have no freaking sense of history.
4.They are incapable of thinking of anything beyond the scope of the "personal" and the "individual." In other words, they fail to see how the "personal" is implicated within the social.
To be fair to my students, I don't think they are alone in this. I see this amongst my younger friends and cousins in India, amongst my high-school friends, and heck, even amongst all-term activists and artists who really should know and feel better.So part of it is just, I will have to say, human reluctance to see how we are all structurally implicated even when we think we are so damn free.I will also say, all of us, in varying degrees are reluctant to see how our most personal moments are problematically embedded within centuries of evolving power structures and modes of domination.But then, there are also ways in which the neo-lib regime transforms the incapacity to see the structural into an art-form. Precisely because,a capacity to see the structure might also produce a desire to transform that structure. To change its basic thrusts. And no social hegemony (or even system) wants that.
Yet... yet, human beings rebel! Maybe that's where human beings are thoroughly and profoundly human?
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