Find & Share Quotes with Friends
The Wave in the Mind Quotes
The Wave in the Mind: Imagination and the Art of Writing and Reading
by
Ursula K. Le Guin6 ratings, 4.00 average rating, 1 review
The Wave in the Mind Quotes
Showing 1-1 of 1
“Audre Lorde said you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. I think about this powerful metaphor, trying to understand it.
By radicals, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries, education in the masters’ knowledge is seen as leading inevitably to consciousness of oppression and exploitation, and so to the subversive desire for equality and justice. Liberals support and reactionaries oppose universal free education, public schools, uncensored discussion at the universities for exactly the same reason.
Lorde’s metaphor seems to say that education is irrelevant to social change. If nothing the master used can be useful to the slave, then education in the masters’ knowledge must be abandoned. Thus an underclass must entirely reinvent society, achieve a new knowledge, in order to achieve justice. If they don’t, the revolution will fail.
This is plausible. Revolutions generally fail. But I see their failure beginning when the attempt to rebuild the house so everybody can live in it becomes an attempt to grab all the saws and hammers, barricade Ole Massa’s toolroom, and keep the others out. Power not only corrupts, it addicts. Work becomes destruction. Nothing is built.”
― The Wave in the Mind: Imagination and the Art of Writing and Reading
By radicals, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries, education in the masters’ knowledge is seen as leading inevitably to consciousness of oppression and exploitation, and so to the subversive desire for equality and justice. Liberals support and reactionaries oppose universal free education, public schools, uncensored discussion at the universities for exactly the same reason.
Lorde’s metaphor seems to say that education is irrelevant to social change. If nothing the master used can be useful to the slave, then education in the masters’ knowledge must be abandoned. Thus an underclass must entirely reinvent society, achieve a new knowledge, in order to achieve justice. If they don’t, the revolution will fail.
This is plausible. Revolutions generally fail. But I see their failure beginning when the attempt to rebuild the house so everybody can live in it becomes an attempt to grab all the saws and hammers, barricade Ole Massa’s toolroom, and keep the others out. Power not only corrupts, it addicts. Work becomes destruction. Nothing is built.”
― The Wave in the Mind: Imagination and the Art of Writing and Reading