Thursday 21 November 2013

Rebellion in Economics Courses

The news that students in Manchester and elsewhere are rebelling against their economics curriculum which simply grooms them for more lucrative and ongoing catastrophe in our contemporary City institutions is heartening, as is the recognition that religious zeal might not be the best justification for free market economics. Perhaps this is a serious awakening, and not one that just leans back in the other direction.
However the real importance would seem to be the realisation that education, especially degree and post graduate education, is crucially NOT about fulfilling the employment briefs of the existing status quo, since for the existing status quo to change effectively, it needs fresh knowledge. This of course would come as a massive surprise to university PR departments countrywide, who now sell their degrees like tickets, and to students, who are forced to consume their degrees as spectacle.
In architecture, if this meant that students understood as part of their course work the effects of the economic landscape in it's various and contradictory forms on their product (buildings in their various manifestations) it might help them out of at least one malaise they currently suffer. This malaise is ostensibly one that has taken processes that were radical back in the mid eighties and turned them horribly mainstream, in the process almost entirely losing any concept of what it might be to be radical at all.

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