| Entering a classroom, the social subject stands poised to encounter the received ways of learning and knowing. The doorway marks the gap between the self-as-subject and the school subject, a gap sometimes called the divide between private and public life, the gulf between what we live and what we learn. This dissertation explores that gulf---how it gets carved out, how it gets negotiated and with what consequences.;I want to suggest two things about such histories. First, though not valued within the educational system, they remain inevitably present. Paradoxically, education refuses our histories a say in deciding what is worth knowing, despite their presence in shaping our knowledge. Second, though our histories might appear to atrophy in the absence of recognition, to shrivel up and disappear, their very persistence and the subsequent rules of representation make efforts at their erasure necessary. The efficacy of schooling, the elaboration of the proper moral subject, depends on it.;Keeping the paradox in mind, I examine the formations, presences and masquerades of the self. I focus on what are commonly perceived as the private and public realms, to challenge the ideologies that sustain them as being distinct. In particular, I look at the self with respect to schooling, to call attention to how our histories are mobilised within us and the crucial role these invisible (to some) but mobilised histories play in forming knowledge, consensus and subordination.;Here are snapshots of a life, pictures that shape me as a social subject, histories that inevitably inform how I learn and how I know, expressions of how the self orients its sense of itself in the social world, so as to make certain things unthinkable. They manifest themselves in my ability to learn and my capacity to know, and they reveal themselves in my writing in ways that I mayor may not be aware of. Like all our stories, these histories change over time, creating new possibilities for, and limits on, learning and knowing. My purpose in exploring their nature is to contest a paradox: they are absent but always present. |
