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DOREMUS OBSERVES :
MATTERS OF INTEREST
Doremus Jessup, editor of the Fort
Beulah The Daily Informer, in Sinclair Lewis'
famous book "It Can't Happen Here", at its
conclusion, "drove out saluted by the meadow larks,
and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern
Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom.....still
Doremus goes on, into the sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup
can never die."
- "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 the US, 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." 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.
Fwd.Thanks to Israel Shamir
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