- There have been some negative reviews of Bri Lee's new book, for example this one by Beejay Silcox in the Guardian. But they are wrong. Straight up and down wrong.
- What Silcox fails to recognise is Lee's ability to felicitously combine informality - walking around Oxford with her friend Damien for instance - with informed critique.
- She has the ability to cut through ‘how we envisage power and intelligence’ by personalising the story with anecdotes and reflections, bringing more power and meaning, and investing it with a lot more oomph. This is her talent. It is what made her first book Eggshell Skull such a huge hit. Combined with the clarity and lucidity of her prose and her often deliciously funny knifings of her enemies ('This may be the dumbest paragraph I've ever encountered'), her overall argument is brought vividly to life.
- She didn't set out to write an academic treatise or indulge in the tedious journalistic cliche of interviewing and editing random individuals or 'experts'. She's primarily writing about her own thoughts and experiences.
- What we're offered is a skewering of a huge variety of subjects, policies and debates, all to do with the racist and colonial legacies embedded in our elite educational institutions and related social and political structures. Her inspiration comes from multiple sources: Omid Tofighian, translator of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains, and the concept of Kyriarchy as defined by theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, being just two of them. She brings a highly informed, coherent and logical perspective to it all. Her critique is unapologetically left wing/progressive all the way.
- I thoroughly enjoyed her exquisite demolition of the the Ramsay Centre and its ambitions and key supporters: Howard, Abbott, Jim Wallace, Lyle Shelton, Greg Craven, George Pell, and other reactionary Christian conservatives. She sees through their bullshit. And she seethes with anger at the very mention of the name 'Tony Abbott'.
- The chapter on schools is superb. The privileging of the private schools and the declining funding of public schools is clearly outlined. Gonski's bold recommendations on 'sector-blind funding' were just too bold for our politicians. A re-worked Gonski 2.0 still upset the Catholic schools. One Catholic academic wrote: 'Only by focusing on issues of quality are we going to address inequality'. Lee erupted ‘This may be the second-most stupid thing I’ve ever read’. Today ‘taxpayers fund about 80% of the cost of educating a child in the Catholic school system'.
- There's a lot more delicious stuff in this hugely enjoyable book, including topics like intelligence, learning a foreign language, slavery, women and power, women and medicine, COVID support discriminations, Chinese students, and Australia's anti-colonial movement.
- Lee has written a stunning, highly enjoyable book. Surely there's a follow-up in the works: Who Gets to be Dumb. At one point she reflects: It is necessary to ask oneself what one considers the opposite to 'intelligence'. Options of varying severity include: stupid, dumb, naive, foolish, idiotic, slow, thick, moronic, vacuous, and dim-witted.
- She names and shames plenty of these types in Who Gets to be Smart.
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