pk's Doctoral Orals

The original of this post had been at Knatz.com, K. got destroyed, I recreated it here; but now will maintain all such materials at my PKnatz blog. I'll delete it here once pKnatz blog is mature.

I entered graduate school braced to endure a meaningless ordeal of an initiation for the sake of teaching at the college level. Encountering another school in which information flowed downward easily, but upward only with difficulty, was no surprise. I did however foolishly believe that with persistence I would eventually succeed in communicating my understanding of literature, art, and life. Failure only rededicated me to trying. That was in 1962, at age twenty-three.

But by 1971, a tad past thirty, married with a child, having already founded the world's first grassroots learning opportunity network, volunteering as it were to act as the world's cybernetic librarian for volunteered public information, already corresponding with other would-be cybernetic librarians on forming the world's first internet, having already figured out a half a dozen years earlier how to read Shakespeare's sonnets so that their relation to the history of Western orthodoxy was transparent, my orals committee merely interrupted me.

The first interrogator interrupted my answer to her first question. My answer contained a précis of my entire Shakespeare thesis, the way the Mandelbrot Set contains in any detail the whole of the Mandelbrot Set (the way a small cloud, out of scale, is the same as a huge cloud): and this authority simply cut me off, asked me a different question. The other four professors on the committee kept their silence as she did so. They too, all but one of them, would do their own share of interrupting when their turns came. (When it was over did a single of of them know that they still didn't know my answer?)

My thesis advisor had been reading installments on my thesis since 1965. But by 1971 he showed no more understanding of what I was saying about the Sonnets that he or any of the NYU professors showed of the significant of my passing around Free Learning Exchange, Inc. fliers.

My grammar school teachers taught that the modern school system respected individual learning, that it abhorred rote answers. But here I was, being allowed to speak while the teachers, certified original scholars by their own doctorates, waited impatiently for me to give the individual's pretense of spontaneity — accompanied by — The Expected Rote Answer.

My committee tortured me for their alloted two hours. I wasn't sure what I would do as of that date. What I did was concentrate on what I'd been concentrating on: creating an internet to replace the school and university system, the media, the government ...

That it doesn't exist is not my fault. That we still have the same old same old is your fault ["your" plural, "your" collective].

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From 1970 onward I preached deschooling everywhere I was, setting up literature tables around town, regularly camping on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. I asked the public for funds. Specifically I asked for a van from which my volunteers and I could set up our table in neighborhood after neighborhood: the people most in need of deschooling not always frequenting the museum or Fifth Avenue. I did not specifically preach against my own schools. I did not spend public time complaining about the frauds visited on me personally, on me in particular. My critiques were on behalf of the world. That changed in 1995 when I added a personal home page to my offerings on the www that the public's institutions plagiarized from Illich's and my work. My indoctrination modules were among the first up. A file specifically devoted to my Ph.D. orals wasn't added till 1998: since which time it's been one of the most worked and reworked of all of my 2,500 text posts.

Now I have to translate it, with its dozens of links, down to a blog entry, where none of the links work: like representing the Mona Lisa with a chess piece, or a chess piece with a subway slug.

Check back: it will be the next post here.