Going Public- Space and what the heck it has to do with this class

Barring a freak occurrence of snow in April, the chance that we were indeed going to have class on Friday was actually pretty high, and were it not for the freak occurrence of snow in April, we were going to talk about public space.

Why?

That's the question I asked myself on Friday morning when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my day, and I figured I should probably at least think about what class was going to be about if I couldn't actually go.

This is what I came up with:

Public Space creates Representation. Representation creates Agency, the ability to act and do things. Having people know who you are, either as a celebrity or as a group of people, gives you the power to do things -- Agency.

Public space can be anything, a billboard, a park, or the airwaves of TV. This is why free speech is important, because free speech helps create public space, a place where people can voice their opinions and represent ideas, concepts, and groups, giving them the ability to act. This is why we have publicly traded companies, public television, public libraries, public lots of things! By making them available to the people, they give the people space to act. That's why it's important to have unregulated public space, free from commercialism that tells us who we are or who we should be, because that's forced agency, and that's actually a loss of power for the consumer. That's why Naomi Klein is scared of the corporate university, because then those students are loosing their agency for forced agency, which, as I mentioned, is no agency at all.

Without public space, the people (all people) loose their representation and their ability to act. In my education class now, we're beginning a unit on homosexuality in schools and whether we should teach students to accept it or not. The jury's still out because we were supposed to discuss this in class on Friday, but the point remains that schools can be Public Space: they can be a place to create representation.

Now, you can argue with me till the cows come home about whether homosexuals are right or wrong, but the fact still remains that they exist, they are fellow human beings, and their side of the story deserves to be heard. I started thinking about the history of education and how we're kind of at a crossroads here that future education students will be thinking about and judging us on. First we had a debate about whether to have public education at all, then to have (white)women get education, then to get (white) women and men to be able to get an education at the same school, then to get blacks and other minorities to be able to get an education at the same school, and now we're concerned about homosexuals.

It's a matter of Representation; we wanted to show that different groups existed. Well, homosexuals exist, so let's show students they do. It's up to the students to determine whether they think they're 'right' or 'wrong' for being who they are. Representation creates Agency, and Agency is Action. Action, in this case, is discussion, and I think we can all learn a lot from that. That's what school's all about, isn't it? Learning?

Or maybe it's snow days. I'm not sure.