note on Interpellation

Is this the name for the reason I hate “we are learning to..” or WALT. I think it tells a child that whatever they get out of any activity isn’t as important as what the teacher wants them to get out of an activity… I don’t want a child to think that.

With the example on the tutorial of detention, isn’t it letting a student know that what they spend their time is not as important as what the teacher says is a good use of time, that they are not free.

I am often told that my child should go to school (my child is homeschooled) because she will have to learn to be told what to do one day….

My child did go to school recently for 3 weeks, a small rural school. I just had a discussion with her (she is 12) explaining what interpellation is and if she experienced anything like this at school. We strayed onto the topic of punishments… oh, she said, “one of the 5 year olds was sent from the junior room, he was crying and told (her teacher) that he had been sent over for hitting someone and (her teacher) made the crying child stand with his face to the wall (in front of the class) for 5 minutes… he told the class that you do as many minutes as the child is old!!!” Thank goodness she told me after we had left the rural town as I am appalled. My child told me that she tried not to think about it, she knew she was powerless and scared she would be in trouble too, … My child is now cross with me as it would have been enough for me to pull her out of a school – we were helping them have enough students so they could have two teachers. And now I don’t know what to do with this information. I can’t undo it. (her teacher did this 3 times – two different children). Does the junior teacher know? is it her idea… 

My Teacher refresher course also had an example of teacher bullying, but they were using it as an example of child agency (being forced to contribute).. the list of ideas the children were being interpellated with bore little resemblance to her words! That school also had a policy of no community visits as it would interfere with their hour of literacy and an hour of numeracy.

Interpellation is the moment someone confronts me to tell me this, and it sinks in so that I get with the program. When I believe suspect-know that I am the one, in fact, who has not understood.

At a certain point, in the first six months of life, a baby wants to see themselves, but they can’t. Frustrated, they look around, wondering if other things are themselves
and find other people and objects and creatures. In this phase, they are constantly asking, without language, “is that me?”
I want more proof of this statement. I like the writers style, aiming at more readibility, but a statement like this should have research to back it up. Is there a name for assuming another’s thoughts.

Counter interpellation has to be able to change the very grain of the wood, not just go against that grain. Resisting is going against the grain. Counter-interpellating
is changing the grain.

(can be Inbetween interpellation, – neither interpellated or not interpellated) (active and passive)

DO YOU know how hard this is? Do you know how hard this is for even adults!! This is where a friend and I came up with the process of No, but yeah! The first No is the total rejection of the new idea as it faces the years of interpellation of the “normal” system and then eventually as you think on a different level about the idea you begin to see the wisdom of the idea – this only works with ideas with a comprehensive internal logic.

If we had to remember these things, then school would be less effective at achieving its goal. The point is that you don’t have to remember what you learn.

I have some problems with this theory. As a nanny, I was the primary caregiver for many hours with many children where the family values were different to mine. I watched children successfully navigate two different sets of rules (spoken and unspoken), two different sets of expectations (spoken and unspoken) with no apparent cognative dissonance.

School interpellation assumes passive children – not ones with strong role models that show the lack of truth in what society tries to interpellate. Children can live in thriving communities that have counter ideas and different social orders  – as I did, with me hanging out with my family friends and parents who were involved with the Values party. As I did with feminist parents. I saw school on the whole as a place full of “Work, Eat, TV, Sleep” sheep.

Interpellations are all about ideology. Ideology is a representation of imagined relations to real conditions. Real conditions are the complex layers of stuff that
make up reality. Having an imagined relationship to the real conditions means imagining that this complex reality is one or way or another, that it’s “cut and dry” or “is what it is,” and then acting accordingly..

Rather, an interpellation is a process of configuring a kind of unconscious tacit consent, which might develop into express consent (if the ruling classes are lucky)

It is ANZAC day. Perhaps this could be an example. The state scantioned commerations act as a way of making people believe that a group of people died for them (not the government of the day, also not the reason that most people joined up) and that soldier deaths are particually noble as a way of the state ensuring that there is a supply of soldiers for the next time that the state wishes to convince others to scarifice themselves for the wishes of the state, as most wars are fought for capitalistic goals. This also removes the not dead soldier’s ability to say they were sold a lie, interpellated.

My child’s example of interpellation was, before we delved into punishment, sitting on tables. I started following this as it is considered tikanga at Otari school. My child is so interpellated to this that she finds it offensive when others do this and has extrapolated the concept to cats on benchs, etc. It has internal logic to her.

I was brought up to question capitalism (father is passionately interested in alternative ideas about economics). We live on the poverty line (according to the less than 60% of the median wage measure). This is not a problem as I don’t do stuff. I do have a fear of intepellation of my child by watching shite american movies, adverts of middle class people, people talking about their overseas holidays, etc, and that she will consider these normal features of society. The “What I did in the holidays” story writing that many don’t realise is traumatic.

What about biology? the impact of our biological animal selves.. what about the interaction of interpellation and “personality”..

What about the “real” lord of the flies example were some kids were on an island, no one to interpellate them, and they created a society that functioned until they were rescued a very long time later.

It would be interesting to evaluate different interpellations with different educational styles – Montessori, democratic education, etc. Programmes like the one I work at…