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nick dennis skip to the content nick dennis toggle mobile menu toggle search field search for home about work home about work degrees of belonging august 23 2026 nick 0 comments i think the university dislikes education as a field of study i read a blog recently where the opening pointed out that cambridge had a professor of sociology of education and look how well that turned out when jan hendrik schön fabricated results no one stated that physics as an area of study should be minimised i have written about the o reilly case before in relation to history and the result was not that history as a discipline should be discarded or discounted when david r morgan admitted that he plagiarised work from other poets it did not call into question the whole field when there are cases to be answered about the conduct of an individual in these established disciplines there is no question about the wider subject in the piece mentioned above they railed against the pedagogue at university level and how its incorporation has made the process of learning soft i thought the writer had not spoken to anyone in the education department because if they did they would have mentioned rosenshine biesta or hooks and have been immersed in a subject that is arguing with itself which is what an academic discipline is supposed to do but i am not surprised the training academics receive about teaching and learning from what i understand is behind what exists in schools in terms of recent literature partly because the institutions running the training do not have education departments or do not speak to their colleagues within those departments because you know it is not a real subject of enquiry of course i think this is a mistake and i want to return to baldwin s a talk to teachers to explain why in it he argued that education creates people who examine the society that educated them and this is something that society does not want education as a field or discipline is baldwin s examination institutionalised but it appears to be one that some academics and institutions least want to believe in baldwin argues that a society that produces only obedient citizens who do not question its structures is one that is about to perish the same thought could be applied to education it is also a historical anomaly as education was not seen as a sub field plato s republic is concerned with the forming of a person an education but we seem to have forgotten this martha nussbaum has written extensively and brilliantly about education but she is a philosopher which seems to give her a pass but to work in the field of education that does not seem to pass muster it reads almost like a caste system it is important to say clearly that the low status of education has also been absorbed by the teaching profession at school level too hence why the increased focus on the appearance of scientific research as intellectual seriousness and audit is in part a status bid to mimic other subjects so that it too will be taken seriously it doesn t work and so it becomes locked in some sort of doom loop which underscores the anxiety i have been in a number of meetings where i have reemphasised that teaching in schools is a graduate level profession and people seemed to be taken aback by this statement is it any wonder then that the story of the last few weeks is also a story about the university itself as an institution what counts as knowledge what is a legitimate route to career advancement and how it is made up of disciplines bounded hierarchical and policed ways of knowing that manufacture respectability it also has its own common sense which is better dressed in academic garb and well spoken and operates on clear degrees of belonging reading is not knowing august 18 2026 nick i learned of the death on friday evening my audible gasp caused the person next to me to cautiously ask what was wrong fearing it was something to do with immediate family i explained that i had just learned something shocking and closed the conversation down because the grief i felt in the moment of learning was visceral felt in the body before i could talk about it watching the weekend s discourse around the death the statements the threads the tributes that were already arguments i realised i was watching grief processed as information fluent instant grief shaped text produced at scale with no body required to help me think through my feelings i spent the remainder of the weekend reading james baldwin s essay notes of a native son james baldwin buried his father on his nineteenth birthday and as harlem had erupted in violence the night before the family drove the body to the graveyard through streets strewn with the riot s wreckage private grief moving in procession through a landscape of public rage at the funeral the minister eulogised a man baldwin tells us nobody in the chapel had ever met thoughtful patient forbearing nothing like the bitter frightened impossible father he had known baldwin did not call the sermon a lie as he came to understand it as true in a sense deeper than questions of fact that everyone in that chapel hoped that when their own hour came their lapses and errors would be gathered into coherence and regarded at last with charity i have been thinking about baldwin s essay for the last few days because jason arday will be eulogised and eulogy is never fact finding it is a human practice in which charity precedes verdict it has to because we extend it in the certain knowledge that we will require it ourselves and no one truly knows the struggles we have endured in our lives apart from in baldwin s formulation the lord people in britain knew arday s name this summer through the press and the number of articles may suggest familiarity at the funeral they will grieve a man the public never met or knew and no volume of text could contain fully frantz fanon wrote about what it is to be fixed by other people s seeing to walk into a space and be sealed in what he called a crushing objecthood it is worth remembering that fanon s account is an account of a body in an ordinary encounter not a person who lives in their skin but information carried by the racialised body and filed under meanings set long before meeting the last month of jason arday s life was an extremity of being read read for evidence read for meaning read for what he proved underneath the reading was a human being getting up each morning to face the day reading is not knowing i have been trying to think about him the person and i find i am unable to comprehend him through text and that text includes my own writing at the end of the essay baldwin states that we should hold two ideas that seem opposed acceptance of life and of people as they are and a refusal to accept injustice fighting it with all one s strength he added that the fight begins in the heart and losing it leads to a life filled with bitterness which poisons everything it touches baldwin realised that the bitterness his father had carried was now his to claim but he declined it because hatred destroys its carrier before it reaches anyone else with no exceptions there is a bitterness available to me too and as much as it might feel like clarity it is not what is left is small physical and does not resolve easily the new academic timetable for the year will be quietly rearranged and a room in cambridge that would have been his teaching space will be allocated to someone else a family is planning a funeral in private for a man they loved and miss when the day arrives they will carry him through a landscape littered with the debris of public rage made this time of text instead of glass or concrete their response is happening in person rather than on the web in a kitchen at a table on a sofa as they run the terrible practical and bureaucratic errands of a death older posts search search 2026 nick dennis theme by anders norén up