Thursday, February 21, 2008

Protocol Education

Reading Galloway’s Protocol in conjunction with Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” gave me a framework with which to think about how systems of “enclosure” structure our lives.

One of my points of reference was my experience working at a primary school last spring as a teaching assistant in a kindergarten class. What struck me then was the relative absence (from a five-year-old’s mentality) of what I’ll call “cultural IQ” – the little cues and procedures that basically function to get us through the day. Looking back on this in the context of Galloway and Deleuze, I can understand the operation of a kindergarten classroom as, essentially, a way to teach children the protocols that will structure the rest of their academic lives and beyond.

For example, five-year-olds always forget to put their names on their work and must be constantly reminded to write their names on everything they do. Eventually, this “identification protocol” becomes completely intuitive. All activities are concluded with a “clean-up protocol,” and interactions involving adults are characterized by a forced politeness, etiquette. (Also, because the school was bilingual, the children had to learn when to speak in French and when in English, but obviously this isn’t generally the case.) This sort of protocological training underlies every aspect of a kindergarten classroom.

I hope this doesn’t sound facetious – perhaps it’s an extreme example, but I really do find it interesting that the learning of protocols seems to be so central to primary school education. In retrospect, I also realize that, though the children who were most adept at following protocols were the easiest to teach, those who refused to obey protocols – those who behaved spontaneously, without regard to the conventions of behavior – were the ones I liked best.

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