"But the detritus and debris that American education has become
is both planned and instrumental."
[ WARNING: Most Americans will NOT be able
to complete this essay.]
Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash
by Luciana Bohne
You might think that reading about a Podunk University's
English teacher's attempt to connect the dots between the
poverty of American education and the gullibility of the
American public may be a little trivial, considering we've
embarked on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure
of senescent capitalism in US history, but bear with me.
The question my experiences in the classroom raise is;
Why have these young people been educated to such abysmal
depths of ignorance?
"I don't read," says a junior without the slightest
self-consciousness.
She has not the smallest hint that
professing a habitual preference for not reading at
a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses
not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class.
She has to read novels by African, Latin American, and
Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it's just a
"distribution" requirement for graduation, and it's
easier than philosophy -she thinks.
The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's
"Of Love and Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of
Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989.
No one in the class, including the English majors, can write
a focused essay of analysis, so I have to teach that.
No one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of
general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what
socialism or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible
definitions.
No one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I
supply it because it's impossible to understand the theme of
the novel without a basic knowledge of that work - which
used to be required reading a few generations ago.
And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973,
the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's
mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-
classified documents proving US collusion with the generals'
coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende.
Geography, history, philosophy, and political science - all missing
from their preparation.
I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as
Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed
out, and that they are paying for their own oppression.
So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been
the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did
fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the
same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one
student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the
corporations run roughshod over the world in part because
of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which
apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by
the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people
read, the less they know and the more indoctrinated they become,
you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they
go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it
would be funny.
Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the
bloody work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It
permits the war we are waging - an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical,
and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our
intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of our economic
system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine,
or polluted water is a murder - and a war crime. And it signals the
impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the
bare necessities for democratic survival:
analyzing and asking questions.
Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible
in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of
this system of commerce and profit, run amok.
The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates
to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or
if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo,
as in the state school where I teach.
Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university,
servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates
who enter lower-echelon jobs in the civil service, education,
or middle management, the favored academic concentrations
are communications, criminal justice, and social work--
basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.
This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential
of the young.
It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and
interests that depend on it.
When a Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these shores,
writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English
of the class, American education has something to answer
for--especially to our youth.
But the detritus and debris that American education has become
is both planned and instrumental.
It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our
secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student
paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from
the highest intelligence sources.
It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during
his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing
the political significance of this gesture and the fascist
sensibility that it protects.
Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to thought and
cultural refinement. "When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels
said, "I reach for my revolver."
[No pointy-head intellectuals!]
One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet
regime implemented was educational reform. The
basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of
social criticism and political opposition.
The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy,
social and political science, humanities and the arts--areas
in which political discussions were likely to occur.
The universities were ordered to issue degrees only in business
management, computer programming, engineering, medicine and
dentistry -
vocational training schools,
which in reality is what American education has come to
resemble, at least at the level of mass education.
Our students can graduate without ever touching a foreign
language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history,
and political science, or economics. In fact, our students learn to
live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics - a feature the
dwindling crowds at the voting booths well illustrate.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the
industrial revolution created, people first
surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason,
then their hearts or the capacity to empathize,
until all that was left of the original human equipment
was the senses or their selfish demands for gratification.
At that point, humans entered the stage of market commodities
and market consumers--one more thing in the commercial
landscape.
Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to buy
whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened
senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt
educations.
Meanwhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the
board for all departments in the state - including education.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University in
Pennsylvania. Please send your comments/feedback/discussion on this
article to
learningfeedback@marchforjustice.com . © Copyright Luciana
Bohne 2003 For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement .
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BOH308A.html
