Linked to reading for my upcoming OU module this week I decided to do something that I haven't done in well over a decade. I bought a DVD.
The disc in question is a 2013 BFI production of 'The Stuart Hall Project', a New Left intellectual and former Open University and his life story both before and after his arrival in England in the 1950s, his childhood in the Caribbean and the challenges faced in fast changing post-war Britain.
It's fair to say that if you like a Marvel blockbuster, this probably isn't your oeuvre.
But it is thought provoking.
In archive interviews Professor Hall reflects on the experiences of, in his words, 'young coloured people' of the 1950s and 60s saying that the same question faced them as it did all young people regardless of ethnicity "who are they going to be?"
He says "Young people are going into a world of their own but in a real sense they are trying to get out of someone else's world."
It struck me as particularly pertinent as this week I'll be dropping my youngest son off to start a new life at university and realised that is exactly what he and thousands of others will be doing - trying to get out of a world that parents and peers have made and in many ways messed up.
Getting out of someone else's world
Linked to reading for my upcoming OU module this week I decided to do something that I haven't done in well over a decade. I bought a DVD.
The disc in question is a 2013 BFI production of 'The Stuart Hall Project', a New Left intellectual and former Open University and his life story both before and after his arrival in England in the 1950s, his childhood in the Caribbean and the challenges faced in fast changing post-war Britain.
It's fair to say that if you like a Marvel blockbuster, this probably isn't your oeuvre.
But it is thought provoking.
In archive interviews Professor Hall reflects on the experiences of, in his words, 'young coloured people' of the 1950s and 60s saying that the same question faced them as it did all young people regardless of ethnicity "who are they going to be?"
He says "Young people are going into a world of their own but in a real sense they are trying to get out of someone else's world."
It struck me as particularly pertinent as this week I'll be dropping my youngest son off to start a new life at university and realised that is exactly what he and thousands of others will be doing - trying to get out of a world that parents and peers have made and in many ways messed up.
I wish them all well.