The workshop begins erratically. Thirty minutes late, time already runs down. The first impression is, wow, mostly young ladies attending — somehow a bit of a (nice) surprise, given the techiness of the subject.
We end up at a rather raucous student march through the city, well, not raucous, maybe noisy, around five hundred students. They marched from the Parliament to the University where they push their way into the administration building and barricaded the university professors in their offices. This for the fact that the professors did not oppose governmental changes to the free education system. I believe it all stems back to the Bologna Accord which seems to bring much harm to the system. Although as we later talked about, the system of standardization can bring systems lower than the standard up to a higher standard. It’s all relative. In general it appears that the Lithuanian system is a bit at a bottleneck, with younger students expecting more than their professors can offer in terms of open-ness and progressive thinking. And, following the lead of the Accord that is bringing all schools into a bachelors-masters-PhD sequence like the US, so the neoliberal ideology of the US is perhaps bleeding into these newly reconstituted and impressionable states.
Will reactions to the Bologna Accord finally bring back some serious student activism in opposition to its blatantly globalist/capitalist view on education? It’s not clear, forty years after the ’68 movement. They need a more effective theoretical platform to work from in terms of the broader view of what education should be, compared to what it actually is. so it goes.
In the evening we are brought to a hot gallery opening — clearly a scene, to be seen, to see. Brazen and blatant art market-ism at it’s very pretentious worst. I won’t even repeat the name of the gallery or the curator, for to name is to bring more attention to the blighters than they deserve. And clearly the local art/culture consumers are mesmerized by the imagination of London come to Vilnius. uff. This can only have a negative effect on the local cultural community.