Memo: Open Access, the Struggle Against Oppression, and the Societal Family Unit

Parents are taught and parents even want to share what they have learned with their children. They want their children to know what to expect in the wold and how to navigate society. In this instance, the parents are the ones who have spent a lifetime learning and now they can teach their children and enrich their children’s lives with all that they know. For those in society who have spent a lifetime learning how to learn and how to teach, they do not see greater society like parents see their children. The fact is, not all parents see themselves as having any responsibility for their children or teaching them anything. Those children are disadvantaged from the start. I had those parents. They taught me nothing. Most educators are the same way. They do not see that it is their responsibility to pass on what they have learned. Unless…..they can be paid to do so.

Educators, scholars, ethical journalists, scientists, trade professionals, all fail to see the wider social unit around them as directly related to them, like parents are to children. This inability for those who should be teachers of society only seeing themselves in that role if followed by dollar signs is part of the ontological crisis of capitalism I have written about before. It is real, not rhetorical.

Those who have spent their lifetime learning can give back in two ways. However, first they must alter their internalized oppression before they can realize the importance of giving back knowledge to the world around them. It was never their knowledge to begin with. Since I was young I have argued that the apple in the Garden of Eden was intended to represent the possession of knowledge. Withholding knowledge except for a paycheck is internalized oppression; it is more than capitalism or the extremes of the lived realization of the whole-order fetish that comes with a wider social unit under capitalism.

One, there are those who are experts in a trade which could be anything from wielding to architecture to photography and film making. While not all trades are “applied”-only, they can still be taught in a manner in which applied education is taught, and I would place ethical journalism under this umbrella. Second, the paradigms that run into and through undergraduate and graduate school education is managed by those who have not only learned to teach, but how to think and how to write. Those writings are already available. It would take little effort to release that written, learned knowledge for educational purposes for the good of society and not just a book deal or tenure.

Open access, open science, open humanities, open research and open learning is already available in some forms today, though it is often abused because it is manipulated to, again, be of benefit to one’s career with the end goal of a paycheck. It will not be until those who have had the time and place to think, to write, to learn how to teach, also learn to see the extended world around them as part of their family, part of their responsibility, – part of themselves – that knowledge will finally become a true weapon against oppression. Open access, open science, open humanities, open research can fight tyranny of the state, tyranny of the abused family, injustice in the immediate community; it is anti-violence, anti-hate, anti-oppression, and opposes debt in learning.

Open knowledge is a first and major step in the revolution to a society unburdened by the power of the few over the many. While it is true that many already know this, there are very few who have internalized it well enough to act on it.