Thinking Beyond The Curriculum
Read More"Philosophy is all about fine distinctions, and it is a fundamental error to conflate philosophy itself itself with its professional cousin. There is no logical reason the philosophy produced by a primary school student cannot reach conclusions just as profound and perception-changing as the philosophy produced by a professional academic."
As always, we are taking May Day off to celebrate International Worker’s Day, remember the Haymarket Affair and the battle for an eight-hour work day, and ask that you spend at least some of this day off work thinking about what needs to be done to improve your workplace, or work in general. More autonomy? More democracy? More meaningful participation in the decisions that determine your day? Less hierarchy? Better communications? More money? Less time for more pay? Two recent books I have loved which investigate our current relationships with work are Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back and Amelia Horgan’s Lost in Work. Meanwhile, CrimetInc’s Work is a long-time favourite and there is no better book about work than the late, great David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. And while we’re talking books and May Day, you may as well check out radical publisher, Haymarket Books, on this day as they, too, are named after the Haymarket Affair. We’ll be back (at work) next week as always - Monday May 9th at 6am - with a new proper post. But for now, I shall leave you with this lovely quote from Bertrand Russell’s In praise of Idleness:
“It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, people would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilisation”.
Happy May Day everyone!
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com