September 1, 2024

Back to School

What are we going back to when we say this?
What is being indicated here? Are we turning around? About face, march?

Are we on vacation and returning to work? Are we going back to our parents’ house? Grandparents’ house?

The narrative of education given to us by the institution of school and the schooling narrative is one of progress. Why are we going back?

This seeming innocuous phrase has a lot going on in it. I wonder about it a lot. I think it just rolls off the tongue in such a way that I really grow suspicious of it.

I do understand it makes for great signage at the shops. A chalkboard, an apple, a stack of books tied together with a belt as if 1910 were still with us. At least one of the letters of the phrase written in chalk on the blackboard must be backwards (perhaps that’s why we are going back).

Going back to school from the earliest days for me and up till today (my first day back isn’t until after Labor Day this year) never felt like a return. It felt like a new thing, something unfamiliar except for the school hallway smell (I later learned this smell was created by Bippy, the state approved cleaning solution for all schools in Texas) and the feeling of those faux pages in the textbooks, I think they were made out of a mixture of clay and laminate. They felt amazing but didn’t provide a lot of information.

What are we going back to? Where are we coming from? It makes me think today of this passage from Lacan about dreams, from The Four Fundamental Concepts in Psychoanalysis:

The other day, I was awoken from a short nap by knocking at my door just before I actually awoke. With this impatient knocking I had already formed a dream, a dream that manifested to me something other than this knocking. And when I awake, it is in so far as I reconstitute my entire representation around this knocking-this perception I am aware of it. I know that I am there, at what time I went to sleep, and why I went to sleep. When the knocking occurs, not in my perception, but in my consciousness, it is because my consciousness reconstitutes itself around this representation- that I know that I am waking up, that I am knocked up.

Our subjectivity, our consciousness exists in relation to something, which is language/symbols. As Lacan realizes the knocking exists both in his dream and 'outside' of that constitution of a subject, so too our understanding of ourselves as 'students,' 'teachers,' 'parents,' and so forth are constituted as identities around the phrase "back to school."

Such a phrase is a powerful tone that garners the formation of the recognizable subjects of teaching and learning, authority and supplication, dominance and submission. But these relationships do not have to exist in relation to school. But first school would have to cease being an institution within the power relationships that sustain it and it sustains. It is possible to have education without punishment or error, but it would take a lot of knocking - perhaps a different kind of knock - to wake us to it.