Widening intellectual training to new classes faces unprecedented adaptive difficulties

Evidence

In the future, these questions may become extremely acute and it will be necessary to resist the tendency to render easy that which cannot become easy without being distorted. If our aim is to produce a new stratum of intellectuals, including those capable of the highest degree of specialisation, from a social group which has not traditionally developed the appropriate attitudes, then we have unprecedented difficulties to overcome. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 370

Categorization

• SEED: Directly relevant to the reader’s Islamophobia field — what bodily/cultural attitudes must colonized or excluded social groups acquire to enter dominant knowledge institutions, and at what cost.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Gramsci’s “render easy that which cannot become easy without being distorted” bear on modern calls to decolonize or soften the curriculum?