Some Oaxaca thoughts

According to our original plan we should now be living in Toronto, I finishing my graduate studies, Þórdís juggling various freelance jobs and our two younger boys attending elementary school. Instead we now find ourselves in a small town at the outskirts of Oaxaca, Mexico, with our four children and a recent addition in the form of a Greek boyfriend of our daughter. The reasons behind our decision are many but, in short, we came here to escape our over-scheduled routine, get away from the familiar, away from consumer culture and depressing politics, to be together as a family, to gain focus, to think, read and contemplate in quiet surroundings, hoping that a relatively foreign environment will breed new ways of thinking.

We had been living in Toronto for a year and a half, without our 20 years old daughter Eyja, and partly without our 18 year old son Kári who has felt a bit lost, unmotivated and frustrated with school these past three years and spent the last semester back in Iceland with his grandmother. I was in an MFA program at Ryerson which gradually resulted in an irreversible disappointment with academia, I yearned to get away from what Noam Chomsky termed a „system of imposed ignorance“ and closer to a way of learning that bell hooks envisioned as „education as the practice of freedom.“ When Þórdís thought up a way for all of us to spend the spring semester together in Mexico, each of us focusing on our interests while collectively examining alternative ways of living and learning, the decision was simple.

I did my undergraduate studies in photography in New York in the 90s and, although I was very happy in school my first two years, at the end of the four year program I promised myself never to set foot in an academic institution again. Half way through the program I felt that I had mastered the technical aspects of the analog photographic process and my mind was ripe for exploring the possibilities of the medium on my own terms. The curriculum however, with its emphasis on analysis and a highly conceptual approach to the medium, felt suffocating and creatively stifling. Dependent upon my student visa to legally live in New York, and having no desire to go back to Iceland, I stuck it out but after finishing my studies I didn´t pick up a camera for couple of years.

Breaking my promise almost twenty years later, through my second attempt at educating myself through school curriculum in Toronto last year, many of my reservations about the process were cemented and countless age-old clichés about the failures of academia were proven painfully, and comically, true. In my graduate program I felt that my thinking was being institutionalized, shrink-wrapped by a system that, contrary to its stated purpose, acted as an obstacle to my learning. Some of my professors have asked if I don´t have any doubts about my decision to quit, suggesting that I may come to regret it later, but I feel an immense sense of relief, as if I barely escaped. It sometimes seems to me that most academics have found themselves a comfortable drawer in a filing cabinet and decided to move in.

It´s a bit ironic to find myself, in middle age, sharing the sentiment of our high school drop-out teenage son, for me and Þórdís have not been innocent of criticizing his choice of „giving up“ on school. But I need the learning process to be a creative one, an intuitive journey rather than a rational one, spontaneous rather than preconceived, in the words of photographer Alex Webb; „an open-ended exploration with emphasis on discovery.“ I have not found this approach within academia. It is my hope that we can explore some of these possibilities, with all our children, during our four-month stay here in Oaxaca and thereby provide them with a larger toolkit for tackling their own education and exploring the world.