[The Seven by Nine Squares home page] [YAWN 9] [Art Strike 1990-1993]

What Would Be the Role of the University?

Education in general and the university in particular are part of the web of domination and have to be destroyed if we are to be free. As technology, the systematic science of relating to the world through artifice, has developed, artificial "knowledge" has come to replace experiential knowledge. We "learn" by reading or listening to the words of experts or performing a set of prescribed rituals called experiments in a totally artificial environment called a laboratory (and this only after we've taken in enough of the words of the experts). In fact, we are taught to believe that what we "know" is what authority tells us is true and that this is more trustworthy than our own experience.

So the university is nothing more than an indoctrination center for training us to accept authority and the dominant ideology. There may, indeed, be material in a university that can be used in the undermining of authority, but it has to be used in a way that utterly undermines the university itself, a way that counters the dominant ideology with the knowledge that comes from direct lived experience. And ultimately, that means destroying all universities and schools along with the rest of the web of domination.

[Karen Eliot