ABSTRACT
Experiences stick with us; they stick to us. They orient our feelings toward things and our capacity to engage. This Chapter shows how feelings are raw material for our thinking, which, when understood through the embodied nature of the imagination, can be seen as crude, unprocessed thought. Emotions are not just the products of daily [often difficult] lives, but are also the raw materials that young people are called to negotiate, to critically assess and quieten in order to study and learn. As noted in Chapters One and Two, Spinoza’s writings on embodied imagination can be employed to demonstrate the extent to which feelings are critical to the production and disavowal of educational futures. The data in this Chapter shows us that when feelings are experienced regularly they accumulate like calculus; they form a hard amalgam that young people must
chip away at if they are to question the apparent truth of the feeling. For example, the young people from Portlandia*, a suburb in a non-capital city, used words such as ‘extremely restrictive’ and ‘hypocritical’ to describe school, and a young person from the ‘dangerous’ Flindersvale used words such as ‘terrible’, ‘struggle’, ‘bullying’ and teachers who ‘didn’t really care’. In the following interview, two young women from Gilchrist North, a suburb on the periphery of the state capital city metropolitan area, describe being told they are ‘not smart enough for university’ and being told to ‘drop out’:
I: You said you’d consider going to uni – would you ever consider going there? C: I was told in high school I wasn’t smart enough. I: Really? Who’s that teacher . . . ? C: A teacher. He literally said, ‘You’re not smart enough for university’. S: I got told to drop out of school by a teacher too. I: They told you to drop out? S: So I told them to go and get ‘F-ed’. I: Well said. That’s not very nice. C: It was actually a counsellor; he was a teacher/counsellor – he said I wasn’t
smart enough. (Casey and Sarah, aged 14-15,
Gilchrist North)
As this vivid memory shows, such experiences are retained in subjectivity and provide a reference point through which future educational experiences are encountered.
