One good example of fool

Sorry~ I couldn’t write a blog before the tutorial on Peter McLaren and Lois Weis and Michelle Fine. But I had some note I made while I was reading them, and now putting them together with my thoughts.
First of all, the reading by Peter McLaren was so difficult… I think the reason it was so difficult for me was that I was not able to think of the examples of rituals that I think those are the rituals. Maybe, I can’t think of because I’m one of the “inveterate ritualizers” so that I can’t even see ritual as ritual because it is just normal thing. McLaren suggests that “rituals are the generative forces by which we, as social actors, adjudicate our instinctual conflicts with our surrounding culture…….; at the same time they are the articulating mechanisms of social control which literally ‘put us in our place.’”In other words, the rituals shape who we are in the place where we are. Thus, trying to know who we are is a process of de-codifying the symbolic power that rituals have imposed upon us. However, this process isn’t a simple. It takes courage and guide to be able to take steps into the process. For example, students in Michelle’s class, students were not able to talk about race in depth because by confronting what they have been used to can cause confusions and another conflicts in their relationship. Also, without educator who can discern patterns and repattern the rituals with great critical understanding of ritual, it would be difficult for the students to re-think of rituals they practice. I think experience that teachers design for the students should be a chance of de-codifying rituals and creating new symbolic (new power) relationship between students and surroundings; experience that leads students to re-located themselves in their place.
One of the recent news from Korea was about a group of high school students’ demonstration. The groups of students are so called “fool” at school. But who call them fool? It’s the teachers. Some of them are called fool because they don’t get good grades, and others are called fool because they like something else than studying only. So, these fool students came out to street to express their voice; the fools are also human, why do we have to be discriminated against because we are not like the smart ones? I think it is ritual that Koreans think there’s something wrong with students if students do not study and do something else than study. It is ritual that students have to study only. I was very proud of the students who were able to see the ritual and try to re-locate themselves in new relationship. They maybe still called fool, but they are wise and courageous fools more than any other ones who still call them fool.