Luciana Bohne: "Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash"

http://www.marchforjustice.com/awarenessforum.php

 

"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 the Pinochet 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 the 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 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 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.

---

No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.2196 / Virus Database: 2437/5185 - Release Date: 08/07/12