Emilia

Hi there!

     I'm Emilia, Emilia Carlyle.  And this is my site.  It tells the story of my education, starting about now, the middle of my junior year in high school.  It will keep going a long while, close to six years, until after I would finish college, even if I decide to skip college for something else.  You'll hear a lot from my family and friends, too — it's their story also.

     Soon, you'll meet a couple of my city friends, Ian, who thinks he's an intellectual, and Rose, who really is becoming a professional ballerina.  And all of us will meet others as well, as time goes on.  I'm a strong student and play a mean game of tennis — last summer I did well in tournaments and got a national ranking, though pretty far from the top.  I live out in western New Jersey, up in the exurban part where people are comfortable and pretty well off. There I go to a big high school that's surprisingly good, especially for kids like me in the college track.  My Dad's an academic, teaching at one of those universities that my friends and I desperately hope to get into.  Mom's a writer on environmental issues, a take-no-prisoners type.  My Grand Dad teaches at a graduate school of education — history and philosophy, while doing a lot with educational technology.  And Grandma used to teach French.  So you can see, with such a pedigree, I'm sort of an insider in the education game.

     Yup.  You got it.  I'm not for real, at least in the flesh and blood sense.  I'm a fiction, along with my family and friends and all the things that we do.  We exist in email and other communications, and if you want to get to know us, you'll just have to read a lot.  Sorry, that's the way we are — it lets us do what we're good at, like discussing ideas and applying them to our situations.  You see, we are not just a normal fiction, the kind you pick up at an airport news stand.  We are a special fiction, what our authors call a thought experiment, one in the form of a Bildungsroman, a German word that sort of means a novel of education, in a rather special, formative sense.  Typically, the hero, or the heroine, that would be me, goes through a course of development, starting as an ordinary, unassuming youth, to become a well-integrated individual, having overcome divergences between her self-expectations and the possibilities of her social circumstances.  I'm still in that ordinary, unassuming stage, waiting to find out what will happen with my self-expectations and my circumstances.  And my story may turn out a bit atypical as a Bildungsroman — so much the better for me!

     As a thought experiment, our authors have assigned a special function to all of us characters, especially me.  It's what they call "making strange." I know — a lot of you may be parents of real teenagers and you're sure that you don't need a fictional teenager in a thought experiment to do a good job at making strange.  But I'm going to do it in a special way, I think, not quite like normal kids might.  I've already told you I'm an insider in the education game, and my authors are going to make me strange by taking me a lot further, helping me get a whole lot of smarts about educational theory and a sharp eye for how it applies in practice.  I'm going use it to make the system strange by raising a lot of questions about the educational principles and practices inherent in conventional undergraduate education, and the processes of gaining admission to it.  Most kids like me are beginning to shit bricks about getting into college — I'll do some of that.  But my making strange calls the whole system into question, not as some willful rebellion, but because I'm going to show how its pedagogical practice is really, deeply miseducative.  To see that, you just have to look at it, not as someone hoping against hope to reach their top reach school, but as someone armed with a long tradition of pedagogical thinking.  That's me, after I've become strange.

     So, I'm going to mess with the system in a way most kids don't and can't, unless, like me, they're just a fiction.  And after messing with the system, I'm going to say, screw it.  Who really needs college?  I'm not going to ask that like some anti-intellectual boob, however.  I want the best education I can get.  So I'm going to get it, making really strange, by working to promote, shape, and develop the idea that twenty-first century cities can serve as essential resources in the formative education of young adults like me, and of all persons, regardless of age, like you.  Sure, the city as educator isn't some ready-made educational program to which you apply and then, once accepted, bask in it, like sunlight on the beach.  That's what too many kids do at the big name colleges. The city as educator exists only if you work at it to make it educative, but that's the power it puts in your hands.  In the city, you're in control.  Responsible, too.  Real, formative education doesn't happen to you.  You have to go out and get it, make it happen.  Prevailing ideas and practices about education are really confused, far-too-passive, and to take control, you have to learn to make strange what you think you know about how it all works.  My story, the fiction of which I am a part, aims to point the way to doing that.

     Why should someone like me, at once a kid and a figment of a few people's imaginations, call huge instructional systems into question?  I'm aware — the system spends big bucks, hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions world-wide, and millions of kids struggle through it, and millions of teachers labor on in it, too.  What could make it worth our while to say that this emperor, so proud and powerful, seeming to be so essential, is strutting around without any clothes?  Here in my fiction at least, we are going to ask these questions, to entertain these doubts, to recognize these failings, and we'll do it for the sake of the real, shared, communal future.  In your world, people spout democratic ideals while they grovel in divisive practices.  World around, educational practices set people apart from one another.  Some enjoy a privileged path to fulfillment; others struggle with parched prospects.  The current system butts against the limits of its possibilities, while it achieves neither security nor justice.  Should we coddle such a system?  Should we refrain from upsetting questions?  Not me.

     Made strange, I speak for the future, against the present.  The present world is neither stable nor just, and until it is, the burden weighs upon those who would protect that world from probing doubts, despite its instability and injustice: they need to show that the present world is the best of possible worlds, and therefore exempt from our questions.  Neither I nor my authors think the present world to be the best of those possible, and we believe that we can secure greater stability and justice by aspiring with effect to a more fully democratic culture.  To achieve a more democratic culture, real people — that's you! — need to invent agencies of life-long learning, effective and meaningful for all.  A truly democratic culture will not develop through an endless extension of school and college, for institutions of formal education work for some and fail for others — they inherently admit and exclude and thereby create divisions.  Already, and far more in the impending future, the global culture is ceasing to be primarily national — instead it's becoming profoundly urban, everywhere drawing even those who inhabit isolated, rural locals within its nets.  To realize the democratic potential of this future, real people like you need to make their cities, and the urban culture those cities project to all, more fully educative.  My making strange is an invitation to all of you to perceive more sharply and develop more fully the city as educator. 

     Currently, my authors have put drafts of two parts of my story, Emilia, online — Part A: An idea germinates and Premises of the Emilia Project.  You can navigate through them using the "Table of Contents" to the right of the screen.  Many of you, young at heart like me, may want to plunge into my story, and the discussions embedded in it, saving its authors' premises for when you feel the need for them.  Others, perhaps older and wiser, may want to be instructed about what is going to be going on in the story.  You will prefer starting with the premises, the plot, who's who, and other explanatory sections that strike your curiosity before engaging the narrative that unfolds in Part A.  In either case, remember that my story, the story in Emilia, is a means for developing ideas about education through their systematic discussion.  We, both characters and authors, seek to make the site one in which we, and you, can maintain the coherence of discussion, while engaging broad participation in it. 

     Here's how you can join in and participate.  My authors are presenting my story through numbered "segments," which are grouped into "parts."  Each segment has two components, a "page", the main screen on the segment which carries the story by the authors, and an associated "study" screen for further interaction by the authors and readers (see at the top, left — ).  Each study screen has sections for annotations and comments.  Please use these sections to debate assertions, raise concerns, and contribute ideas.  Readers — that's you! — can and should interact, either by emailing us, the characters, directly.  You do that by clicking on the mailto: links in message headers in our email messages that you read (but don't copy the email address you see on the screen, like mine — EmCar-40-Love@gmail.com — because that is part of the fiction; click the link instead, which activates my real email).  In addition to emailing us, those of you adept with Wikipedia editing, or familiar with other wikis, can create a free account on the StudyPlace wiki and then enter annotations or comments directly on any study screen.  That's pretty powerful because you can put links in there and point to whole alternative segments, if you like, and even create a parallel universe for me, like sending me to Harvard, or to Paris — Hey, yes! Please do!  Oh, but of course — do it with a good allowance!)  And if these hints aren't enough, you can get fuller "how-to" information on starting a StudyPlace account and contributing to my Emilia site by checking out my help page.  So, welcome!  Go to it!  There's a lot to think about and do!