Until my conference, I had a lot of ideas about access to education, but not really one clear topic to focus on. It wasn't until I told Professor Cohen of an experience one of my friends had in relation to her access to education that I realized it was very relatable to the discussion we had in class on Thursday and the article we read by Earl Shorris. 

In class, Professor Cohen asked us to agree or disagree – in movement – with the statement "The poor must be taught the humanities." (hope that's accurate, there are definitely nuances depending on wording, but I can't remember what the exact words were). I stood in the middle of the classroom but closer to the disagreement side because I decided that though it was certainly important for everyone to learn the humanities, if the poor weren't given the tools to continue that education or make use of it in a life they found fulfilling, there would be no point enforcing such teaching. In my essay I wrote about how one can have access to an academic education, but without practical knowledge or help with the logistics of the college application process (for example) one cannot continue his or her study. This isn't to say that the poor shouldn't have access to the humanities if they cannot afford to go further. I simply believe that in addition to access to the humanities, there should also be access to navigational tools of the sort that help you navigate College Board, write a resume, or even know how to confront someone if you feel a mistake has been made or you've been wronged.

I have a couple of separate threads of thought for this post -- not terribly related but both things I've been mulling over:

Of the many paths of access, a greater question is raised. Does anyone have a complete access to education? Tompkins chose the path toward academia, which disregarded her path of the outside world. Luttrell’s women had a sense of the real world, but barely had a taste of schooling. Rodriquez chose the academic path as well but shut out his home education. In each situation no one had a complete access to education. There were numerous ideas and paths that each person could explore, but those paths were not taken. There was barely any thinking or experience done for Tompkins and Rodriquez in the path of the outside world and vice versa for Luttrell’s students. This idea of access to education in accordance to experience and thinking can be applied to the greater majority. The upper and middle classes do not always have a sense of the struggles the lower class faces and the lower class does not always know the benefits that come with an education. Although the three classes have access to education, it is incomplete. In each case, there is always something that can be experienced and thought about. The process of learning is endless and with the possibility of an endless education, access to education will never be complete, but through thinking and experience, it can broaden.

I've been thinking more about what rachelr said in her post and what we discussed in class about the repetitive nature of Eli Clare's book.  I remembered an experience I had that helped me better understand the Clare's repitition, so I will share it in the hope that whoever reads it might gain something from it.

Last summer, I interned with a judge who worked with both civil and criminal cases.  One of the cases I got to sit in on had been brought by a deaf woman.  In court, when a questioning attorney asks a question, the witness is supposed to just answer that question, not add anything else.  But whenever this woman was asked a question about what had happened, she not only answered the question; she went on at great length about other details until the judge inevitably cut her off.  It was strange and somewhat frustrating.  I had trouble understanding why she kept over-answering after both attorneys and the judge asked her to stop.

                Last week’s discussion and Exile and Pride have made me think a lot about the de-sexualization of people with disabilities in our society.   When our class looked at the picture of the women with disabilities dressed up in pink dresses the first thing that most of us noticed was the disabilities and the second thing we did was to try and figure out why each person in the picture had a disability.  For most of the class, our first reaction was not to see them as beautiful but as disabled.  I am interested in understanding why the de-sexualization happens.  I feel like part of the reason this happens is because the body is a series of symbols that mean different things to different cultures and when someone has a physical disability those symbols get jumbled.  Our bodies display a lot of our personal information and when somebody has a disability that is the first thing that people see.  I am interested in learning why this happens and how it can change.

I was struck by Professor Grobstein's affirmation of Varenne and McDermott's theory that, "cultures provide individuals with a sense of motivation and achievement." This cross-cultural norm, however, has created a disabling effect in cultures "by setting standards of achievement which... [people] can't adequately satisfy."

Professor Grobstein acknowledges this continual practice of cultural disablement and then moves on to suggest what it would be like to create a "non-disabling culture." My first reaction to a non-disabling culture, at least an American culture that actively works to promote enablement and agency was, was that it was an absurd idea. Of course, it's not that I don't think that it would be splendid to live in union and identify with others based on the skills and abilities they do possess, but that I feel we, as humans, are so trained to identify what is different from us.

We spoke last class, when looking at the image of the women in pink dresses, of the voyeur, indentifiying and analyzing difference. I feel this act of voyeruism and practice of being the voyeur is so much a part of the unconscious shared human experience that to promote an abling culture that doesn't point out or identify difference would be near impossible.

Within Eli Clare's own book Exile and Pride he speaks of feeling at odds within his own crip community. He references he feelings of not being crippled enough, not being wheelchair bound or without sight.

            I don’t think that I really had a clear idea of what to write for this essay and I found it difficult to write due to how broad the topic was. In “reflecting on the relationship between access and education” I found it difficult to get anywhere without first defining “education,” and “access.” I settled on a rather idealistic idea of what education should be which made my essay rather abstract, but I attempted to back my claims with concrete examples from the readings. The claim I attempted to explain throughout my essay was that education should include experiential learning, critical thinking and the obtainment of knowledge. Furthermore, I tried to address the idea that though everyone certainly does not have access to “good” schools, everyone does have access to experiential learning and that this learning should be nurtured in a proper school setting (therefore, there is a need for such a “proper school setting”). In addition, I tried to express the idea that this is the type of education gives a person access to many other entities (good jobs, college, etc.).

When Kaye and Anne showed us the images and video to discuss in our pairings, I was initially perplexed by the second visual representation: Vincent's Zeuxis Choosing His Models for the Image of Helen from Among the Girls of Croton

When discussing the pictures as a class, someone brought up the idea of gender being a disability in the world of the painting. This positioning of gender as a disability--instead of as an occasional liability or disadvantage--is deeply unsettling for me.

By Michael Oliver's definition, disability is "the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from mainstream society" (Clare 6). In Vincent's painting, then, the "contemporary social organization" would be that of ancient Greece, when the painter Zeuxis was active. During this time, society only distinguished one sex, Male; females were simply "inferior versions" of "essentially similar" bodies (Wilchins 90). In this gender rendering, female bodies could be hypothetically seen as impaired and thus excluded from a mainstream culture, here depicted by the men on the left side of the painting, who control the power of representation.

“…No group stands alone, nor even in a simple relation to more dominant other groups, but always in relation to the wider system of which all groups, dominant and minority, are a part.”

McDermott and Varenne describe culture as a set of collective norms rather than individual behaviors. Since our last class, I’ve been thinking about what is “normal” – the authors describe assumption that culture is universal as fundamentally flawed because that results in the perception that those who do not confine to those norms are missing something, in effect, “disabled.” The concept of “health” is defined as being “free from illness or injury,” and the origin of the word is related to “whole” – but then, most people are never “healthy” or “whole.” Is it “normal,” then, for the body to be “unhealthy” or not “whole?” Then why do shows like “Britain’s Missing Top Model” exist? Where do we draw the lines between which injuries/illnesses/disabilities are “normal” and which stray from the norm? Does it matter whether or not they are hidden, or how common they are? But then, how do we know how common they are if they are hidden? Normalcy is driven by perception, and, I would argue, in contrast to McDermott and Varenne’s arguments, these perceptions are individual rather than collective, based on one’s own experiences and diffracted upon their own world.