War or peace with Iraq?
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Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash
An American and a working educator in a United States University
vents her anger and explains why a percentage of US citizens seem hell
bent on war.
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're about to embark on the first,
openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in theUS,
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
September 11, 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's
mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply American
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 Education 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 about to wageóan 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 will be murder ? and a war crime. And it will signal 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
workóbasically 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 Ukrainian 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 the reproduction of Picasso's "Guernica"
at the UN 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." 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
ëinstrumentalizedí to buy whatever deadens their clamoring
and
frightened senses - official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt
educations."
© Luciana Bohne author@GlobalAware.org
Permission is required from the Author to publish this text.
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