Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
41. "because the purpose of mass schooling is to create a distinctively national subject…minorities…are never simply different but also always subversive, an ideological challenge"; "although societies like ours offer citizens a[n]…array of idenities…so many, perhaps, that choice itself may be confounded—identity has still become the principle arena of struggle between individuals and powerful institutions, a struggle that often replicates, in the context of a single, isolated life, larger inequalities between and within groups….the movement from the home to the school and to the world of work almost always involves an untiring labor of ascetic self-suppression and refashioning….literate practices matter as much as they do because they are essential to the normalization of identity. quite apart from what books and classroom lectures may profess, these books and lectures teach people how to think and act, how to represent themselves to themselves and others."
42. "just as the survival of the modern nation depends on the persistent suppression of regional allegiences and 'provincial' traditions, so what qualifies as 'knowledge' is almost always removed from experience at the local or personal level….since the 17th century, however, we have increasingly presupposed that the pursuit of knowledge must begin with an act of voluntary alienation, of radical, cartesian detachment….mass education has typically served to wrest from ordinary citizens the power to effect such a change on their own, in their particular social interests."
44. "the most important social changes of our time are not taking place inside the academy but in the private lives of women and men who have begun to explore new and uncoercive forms of interaction—as couples, families, support groups, 'salons,' and congregations—and in our courses we too might endores and explore social forms of this same uncoercive kind"; "whether academic intellectuals…will support the more equitable distribution of cultural power remains an open question. labor reform, the civil rights movement, women's suffrage, and later, feminism—achivements the academy would like to take some credit for—all started first on the 'outside.' are we prepared to give up our privileged role as cultural 'leaders'? are we prepared to recognize nonspecialists as genuine collaborators in the making of knowledge?"