When we learn psychology, education, therapy or medicine from a patriarchal institution, what are we actually learning?

When we learn psychology, education, therapy or medicine from a patriarchal institution, what are we actually learning?

How to teach, heal, hold, shape and guide? Or how to follow the rules that keep everyone in the ‘correct order of things’?

I mean, it might seem a radical thought, or a philosophical thought or something that only a trouble maker would lean into. But honestly, if we aren’t questioning the systems and structures that collectively bind us, are we even attempting to make the world safer for the majority?

And if we don’t then raise our gaze (or lower??) to the peak of the self imposed hierarchy of colonial structure, then we genuinely aren’t asking the right questions.

Which makes this then a practical and needed thought.

If ‘University’ was a person it’d probably look like someone in a grey suit, white skin and white hair, male of course, older in age, controlled, neat, and not smiling in pics.

Is there a single reader here that personifies ‘University’ in a rainbow dress? Or as a child? Or as multiples? Gender non comforming? A Grandmother?

Or Even A Teacher?!?!?!!?

(Honest questions, please let me know in the comments.)

There has been no cultural exchange on these lands of so-called-Australia. No opportunity for the sharing of information, deepening of knowledge by combining ways of things, listening, learning from or collaborating. Instead, these lands have been colonised. Attempted erasure. Attempted replacement.

Yet despite the ongoing colonisation that continues to this very day First Nations Culture thrives. It lives and breathes.

And thank fuck for that.

Because as far as I can see this is the one fact that, if we could just let it, could topple University from it’s pedestal and let it crash to the ground into a million pieces of HECS debt shaped splinters (and please let someone film that and turn it into a reel for future gens to restack.)