Spitting Into the Wind

Professor J,

"You are wasting your time thinking about the ideas.  Just spit back what they tell you." It is easy to imagine this advice being given to people living under totalitarian regimes or trying to survive as prisoners of war. I wonder how many students might tell us that that is indeed how they feel about their schooling much of the time.  This has become the theme of our modern education system. Who has time (or increasingly, the inclination) to think about ideas? Especially big ones. We have, as a society, allowed our children to become slaves to grade point averages and acceptance letters. What kind of culture tells its young people that they are wasting their time thinking about ideas? Shouldn't one of the main priorities of civilized adults be to get the young people that they can influence, to think, and to ask questions? But add to the current trend overworked distracted parents who may fear losing their own jobs to outsourcing or outright elimination, and they are likely to encourage their high school and college aged children to steer clear of classes they may be passionate about. A young person may have to fight an uphill battle on several fronts to get the education he really wants and be true to himself. An artist? A philosopher? An anthropologist? Just as you say, Professor, everyone wants to know how those things translate into making a living.

"The flight from the humanities has become a flight from conscience."  How convenient. Those disciplines that cause us to ask hard questions of ourselves about what we think and believe and why, are being pushed aside at a time when we need very much to be asking just those things. We need to be grappling with the law and thinking about whose interests it most often serves, or where the proper balance between individual liberty and communal responsibility is.  We need to be imagining if past mistakes by other people in other times similar to ours might have had different outcomes had they taken a different course. (Can we learn from them and avert disaster?)We need to be encouraging people to embrace their passions outside the little boxes the current system wants to force them into, Procrustes style. We need to be able to ask what our moral obligation is to our neighbors and communities. We need to ask what kind of world is it that we want to live in and leave behind? We need to think BIG, but super focused specialties and small mindedness are the winning the battle. The lack of vision we are perishing from, is a big bold one. One with a conscience. It seems more that people aren't so much fleeing the humanities, as being DRIVEN from them by those in charge.

"Our elites--the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street, and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools--do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one."  (p.111) So the multiple paradigm shifts that we are in need of are not going to come from the top down. Those who hold positions with real power not only are not interested in creating substantial change, but because of how they've been educated, may be incapable of envisioning the real solutions that need to take place.  It isn't going to happen. They are, for all their lofty speeches and feigned intellectual curiosity, incompetent. The things that are necessary at this point are beyond them and they have no desire to rock the yachts they are so comfortably riding in.  Change is going to come from the bottom. To quote Christopher Gardner, “The cavalry ain't coming. You have to do it yourself.”

"The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. As Immanuel Kant wrote, moral autonomy is possible only through reflection, self-determination, and the courage not to cooperate." (p.112)  Good for the TEA Party protesters and the Occupy Wall Streeters. But we can also individually refuse to cooperate. When we stop buying what they are selling, whether it is a well marketed substitute for an education or the next "must have" product or event that is being sold with hyped up frenzy inducing advertising, change will happen.  You cannot have massive collective change without masses of individuals who are willing to ask the tough questions and face the equally tough answers. It isn't enough just to ask them of those in charge (Hedges has shown us why that is likely a losing battle). We have to start asking them of ourselves. Only then can we hold anyone else accountable.
 
Hedges makes it clear that we have got to stop expecting anything more of the elites than what we've been getting: "Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege, comfort, and entitlement. The education they have obtained has served to rigidify and perpetuate social stratification. These elite schools prevent, to use Arnold's words, the 'best selves' in the various strata in our culture from communicating across class lines." (p. 113) The average American may not be able to pinpoint the problem or articulate it as well as the author but the nationwide disgust and anger is due to the fact that people know that for the most part, there isn't any real choice come election time. These people in power, with the names of ivy league universities on their resumes, who look more and more like they don't have any real answers, only fuel the anti-intellectual sentiment among the populace.

"The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse."  Is it any wonder? They can't have too many Neos unplugging at one time...

Owning Education

Madame M:

Little stomach turning in Oil!  In fact, it takes about 100 pages before you get hooked, because the pattern (and the points) don’t begin to become clear until about then.  Or maybe my cerebral fluid was a moving a bit slow when I read it, lol.

Education has become a servant of money.  School districts have banners in their gymnasiums that read “Coca-Cola (or Pepsi-Cola, or any of a number of corporate purveyors of non-nutrition) is THE (my emphasis added) proud sponsor of the X School District.”  (And for those who think this is not a general phenomenon outside education:  How many corporate named things in/on PUBLIC buildings (or even the buildings themselves) are there if you think about it, let alone campus ones?)

Kow-towed college and university teachers are increasingly powerless cogs in the corporatized machine.  Their administrators are like politicians, who spend anywhere between 1/3 and 2/3rds of every typical day having to raise money (and we wonder why they don’t get any of OUR business done, assuming they would even want to do OUR business)—college officials have to keep the money coming in, along with the prestige, attention, “modernization,” and other aspects of the corporatization of education.   The supposed goal of EDUCATION takes a dim, name-only backseat (WAY in the back) of the education bus to moneysville.   Places around the country differ from Penn State only perhaps in specifics, not in underlying causes.

Socialized to obey?  Of course! It’s not JUST that students are processed instead of educated, or that their curiosity is stunted, or that their critical thinking skills are undeveloped.  Teachers complain that “students don’t ask questions,” but when you have a culture and a system that discourages doing so (or at times even makes it irrelevant!), it shouldn’t be so surprising to those teachers.

Yes, Madame, yes!  Your paragraph on the humanities should be pasted on the front cover of every humanities textbook in the country!  Here’s a star of the humanities with words to emphasize your point:  “We begin to die when we are silent about the things we believe in.”  Martin Luther King Jr.

Education has become, like many things in this society, about manipulation.  The test-prep business is instructive (pun intended).  It’s all about the APPEARANCE.  Manipulate the process to make it to the next step.  Hedges found that out when he was having his son prepare for standardized testing.  “The tutor told my son things like ‘stop thinking about whether the passage is true.  You are wasting your time thinking about the ideas.  Just spit back what they tell you.’”  (101) It worked, proving that those who can afford tutors and other manipulators (such as daddy donors who can make big contributions and so can get their kid’s application skid-greased) get the “elite” education.

But as Hedges says, it merely fills these “elite” (yes, I’m increasingly choking on the word) classrooms with large numbers of drones.   And yet these drones will go off to Wall Street or Corporate America/World upon graduation, many with beginning salaries of $120,000 or more.  Did they earn these salaries by truly being exceedingly keen and proficient?  No, Hedges says, they merely showed they could do large amounts of work (regardless of whether it was meaningful or insightful, which it probably wasn’t, and with no real evaluation of results) and faithfully regurgitate information.  They have little recognition of, or regard for, concepts and systemic effects.  Their intelligence and proficiencies are narrow and selective.  They cannot see (indeed, probably have little ability to do so) themselves as they truly are, or their culture as it truly is.  They swim in narrow currents in their minds—currents that deal largely only with their personal situations and those of their immediate families, plus the problems and opportunities of their business “profession.”    “They do not see their own biases” and “are blind to the gaping inadequacies in our economic, social, and political structures and do not grasp that these structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster.” (102-103) Social intelligence, emotional intelligence, moral balance, true creative ability: all stunted.  This culture determines worth—both business and institutional—by wealth.  It’s all about winning (and especially winning monetarily), with no thought of (or concern for) the cost to other individuals, or to the society.

Pointing out the exceptions to the above only serves to prove the rule.

Students who want something different find themselves feeling like freaks, and the isolated feeling is reinforced by the system.  The decay in the culture has left them with fewer places and people where they can hear and discuss big questions.  Largely gone are the days of discussing those questions in church groups.  And literary societies and debating clubs of the kind produced in scenarios like Dead Poets Society are no longer vibrant on most campuses, and many are effectively coma-like.   That the Humanities are so disparaged (“what can you do with that?  Worthless!”) is evidenced by the stat that only 8 percent of graduates now choose to attain such degrees. (108)

"Frank Donoghue, the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, writes that liberal arts education has been systematically dismantled for decades.  Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished.  Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite.  They do not know how to interrogate or examine the economic system that serves the corporate state." (108-109) As Hedges says, this includes many students who are otherwise very bright, and these go on to work for their unexamined corporate masters.

The list is long about why the Humanities are so important.  Hedges has given us one reminder, from Matthew Arnold’s piece of 1869: “’the best that has been thought and said,’ would provide standards to resist the errors and corruptions of contemporary life…But Arnold’s eloquent defense of knowledge for its sake, as a way to ask the broad moral and social questions, has been shredded and destroyed.  Most universities have become high-priced occupational training centers.  Students seek tangible vocational credentials.” (109)  This credentialism has become so intense that it often becomes THE objective of everything connected with “education.” Actual functional ability (and let’s completely forget about knowledge, awareness, or conceptual understanding) becomes nearly irrelevant.

The corporate capitalists that directly or indirectly run most everything convert all to the bottom line of “profit” and usefulness to business.  This, Hedges says, creates an anti-intellectualism, a distrust of intellectual inquiry. “And as small, liberal arts schools have folded—at least 200 since 1990—they have been replaced with corporate, for-profit universities.  There are now some forty-five colleges and universities listed on the NYSE or the NASDAQ.  The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit school with some 300,000 students, proudly calls itself on its Web site: ‘Your corporate university.’  The only mission undertaken by for-profit universities, and increasingly non-profit universities, is job training.  And as universities become glorified vocational schools for the corporations, they adopt values and operating techniques of the corporations they serve.  It may be more cost-effective to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts and whittle down or shutter departments like French or history that do not feed vocational aspirations, but it decimates the possibility of a broad education that permits students to question the assumptions of a decaying culture, reach out beyond our borders, and chart new alternatives and directions.” (110)

When money becomes everything, when Mammon sets the effective curriculums and effective paths, education is transformed into a processing function to churn out unquestioning systems managers—and make maximum money doing so.  The frenzied pace of society, along with credentialism, then leads to more demand for online classes, as they cost the least and are the most profitable (one reason because they can draw from a wide geographic area).  These online classes are rarely evaluated for true results, because the results would often be glaringly bleak, and besides, nothing must get in the way of profit.   Online classes are what people want, because they need a “convenient” way to get a degree, and institutions want to “give them what they want,” primarily because the classes are so profitable.  Sure, there are exceptional classes and exceptional instructors, but most online courses are sub-par at best.  They give the illusion of education, and the customer and the provider are largely happy with that illusion.  They may not quite be degree mills (yet), but they are on the road.

American education has prided itself on being much vaunted and much desired around the world.  The growing elements of illusion described above are reducing that.  For example, German high school exchange students coming to America essentially give up a year of their education in coming here—American education is held in such low regard, that a student must take the year over upon returning to Germany.  Even many college bound students are electing to decline opportunities to come here and instead choose to go to college/university in their home country.

Because although it doesn’t have to be that way, “American greatness” that politicians and their rabid followers like to thump their chests about is increasingly a hollow façade.

The Holly and the Ivy (League)

Professor J,


I'm going to break down soon and read Oil!  Surely it can't be as stomach turning as The Jungle.


Hedges paints a picture of the power of money in education. If money talks it is saying very loudly that nearly everyone can be bought. It seems to be just as true in the halls of ivy league colleges as it is in the marble halls of Washington. In the case of the professors the author refers to on p. 103 (another page that needs to be quoted in its entirety) silence is golden, in the literal sense: "...professors, fearful of being  branded 'political' and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and administrative overlords who rule these institutions, did not dare draw the obvious parallels between events in the Conrad novel (The Heart of Darkness) and the failures and discontents of the Iraq occupation and American empire. They did not use Conrad's novel as it was meant to be used, to examine our own imperial darkness. Even in the anemic and marginalized world of the humanities, what is taught exists in a moral void." 


"The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities...These elites are not capable of asking the broad, universal questions, the staples of an education in the humanities, which challenge the deepest assumptions of a culture and examine the harsh realities of political and economic power. They have forgotten, because they have not been taught, that human nature is a mixture of good and evil. They do not have the capacity for critical reflection. They do not understand that for every answer there arises another question--the very basis behind the Socratic academy's search for wisdom"

As parents we begin to civilize our little darlings (who arrive helpless but soon become barbaric) right away. Our goals early on are simple but important; don't bite, the world doesn't revolve around you, you shouldn't intentionally hurt people's feelings, you must share, you can't take what belongs to someone else. The process continues and we hope that in high school and college they will think about the broader versions of those early lessons. We hope they will think about whether their behavior will "bite" someone else, that they can actually be made personally happier by helping others, and that sometimes even our unwitting actions and thoughtlessness can border on cruelty. We hope they will also learn over time that the exploration of self and the search for truth are of the utmost importance. We hope they will have teachers and other adults who will mentor and inspire them to seek to be the best versions of themselves. We hope they'll learn  that money won't make you happy and so much of what is meaningful and worthwhile and beautiful about life, are things you can't purchase. Hedges dashes some of those hopes (for parents who hope Junior is going to learn those things at one of the elite universities, anyway):

"College presidents, many of whom earn salaries that rival those of corporate executives, must often devote their energies to fund-raising rather than to education. They shower honorary degrees and trusteeships on hedge-fund managers and Wall Street titans whose lives are often examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed. 


The slavish honoring of the rich by elite schools, despite the lofty rhetoric about public service, is clear to the students. The object is to make money." (p. 104)



So at a time in life when many parents (but clearly not all, since for some these lessons ARE what they deem a valuable education) would hope that their young person is asking big questions, seeking his place in the world, and how they might make it a better place, they are in Hedges words, "socialized to obey. "  (I thought that phrase chilling.)


"The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer." (p. 105)



Which brings us back around to those humanities classes that aren't being taken, or are, but are taught so poorly that there is little chance that any established establishment ideas are going to be even internally challenged. Think what dangerous lessons might be learned! They could learn that we are following a path frighteningly similar to one others have trod to destruction, or that many of the people in history worth studying and emulating had convictions they held fast to, sought truth above all else, or (gasp!) questioned authority to the point of revolution.

The humanities are, well...humanizing.

This time of year it is interesting to see the expense people go to to celebrate the birth of one who represented the exact opposite of the selfishness and greed we are discussing here.  So this Christmas let us be reminded that while we are bringing to light people who are such clear examples of what NOT to be, that we are presented with the image of perfect undying love and grace. That is something to strive for, no matter how far short we fall.

Merry Christmas!

 

The Have Mores and Be Lesses

Madame,
And Sinclair’s expose on capitalism and “socialism” in Oil!

Hedges is an attempted product of the elite Ivy school system, from boarding school to grad school, and even some teaching at these same institutions.  He knows of whence he speaks.  He criticizes not only George W. Bush, as you have related to us, but also Bush/Cheney lackey Scooter Libby [Prof’s note; sentenced, but commuted by Bush, for violation of multiple national security laws—fall guy for Bush and Cheney], who attended the same pre-prep school as Hedges.

Well that Hedges has mentioned prominent Roman historian Tacitus.  This quote from Tacitus is illustrative: “The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”

Hedges is scathing in his criticisms of this system we live in: “The specialized dialect and narrow education of doctors, academics, economists, social scientists, military officers, investment bankers, and government bureaucrats keeps each sector locked in its narrow role.  The overarching structure of the corporate state and the idea of the common good are irrelevant to specialists.  They exist to make the system work, not to examine it.  Our elites replicate, in modern dress, the elaborate mannerisms and archaic forms of speech employed by calcified, corrupt, and dying aristocracies [Prof’s note: bitterly ironic for a nation founded in repulsion to aristocracy].  They cannot grasp that truth is often relative.  They base their decisions on established beliefs, such as the primacy of an unregulated market or globalization, which are accepted as unquestioned.” (98) The system and its functionaries spit out mindless mantras about “the free market.”  An extraterrestrial would remark that these wealthy, white, self-professed Christians and their lackeys cause a crisis by their criminal greed and zeal for lack of regulation, and their answer to that ongoing crisis is to have more greed and more deregulation!  As Calvin once said in Bill Watterson’s famous comic strip: “The surest sign that there is intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”  Regulations are supposed to be where the society—the public—decides that protections of the weak are needed and/or there is a desire to emplace what is just.  Yet from that public there is too often only vitriolic self-enfeebling in the interest of “getting the government off our backs,” completely ignoring the fact that the people’s government is the only institution with the potential power capability to protect, defend, and champion the interests of the non-wealthy and unprivileged.

By blindly believing in the interests of big business and “the market,” we get ready and willing acquiescence to not only defunding the government, but a transfer of wealth upward.  The Bush tax cuts blew a hole in the federal budget, drove wealth radically and ruinously upward, shrunk the real economy, and drove legions out of the middle class.  Yet what do we still get out of most business schools at the universities of this country?  “If only the government would get its meddling hands out of business and the economy, we would have financial and economic paradise.”  And even though the evidence demonstrates to us with increasingly hard-hitting forcefulness that the opposite is true, we choose not believe our senses.  And worse, we ignore—give a ready pass to—utterly hypocritical corporate welfare and subsidies  and tax breaks and other loopholes to the tune of many, many, tens of billions of dollars.  Obama is about deregulation, “free trade”, and an aggressive foreign policy in service to those things, just to a different degree than his Republican predecessors and the Republican “lackeys” in Congress and the Judiciary.  His position is largely that of an employee who often disagrees with management but does not want to lose his job, while his Republican opponents are more like either slavish, trapped, followers, or zealous, non-deliberative, fanatics.

Hedges is convinced by his experience that the supposedly “best” educations at the elite institutions will not produce the necessary transformers.  As one of Hedges’ one-time students would later remark to him, Ivy League education often merely socializes in a certain fashion, giving one the ability “to present even trite ideas well.”  So well funded are these largely private institutions is that they build an incredible number of (mostly unnecessary) buildings/complexes/centers and have begun to run out of space.  “While public schools crumble, while public universities are slashed and diminished, while for-profit universities rise as our newest vocational schools, elite institutions become unaffordable even for the [remaining] middle class.  The privileged retreat further and further behind the walls of their opulent, gated communities.” (99) Just like the Roman upper class retreated to their landed estates in the countryside, and lost touch with, concern for, or even fellowship at all with, their fellow citizens who were not so privileged.  Privilege went from being a duty, a proud responsibility to help one’s society and be seen as a model for character emulation, to selfish, dismissive, and disconnected indulgence.  No way did the wealthy want to pay ANY taxes that might support the pressing social needs, infrastructure, etc. of other Roman citizens.  And did any of those wealthy REALLY know many (or even ANY) of the unprivileged they so condemned or disparaged?  No.  They formed their condemning opinions over lavish parties they threw one another at their countryside estates, parties made possible by the wages of slavery (and other exploited labor) and manipulation of money.  They had decoupled themselves from the reality of their 99%.

Ours are little different.  “The wealthy and powerful families in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles are molded by these (educational) institutions into a tribe.  School, family, and entitlement effectively combine.  The elites vacation together, ski at the same Swiss resorts, and know the names of the same restaurants in New York and Paris. They lunch at the same clubs and golf on the same greens.  And by the time they finish an elite college, they have been conditioned to become part of the inner circle,” with a disdain for those who are not.  “They know few outside their elite circles.  They may have contact with a mechanic in their garage or their doorman or a nanny or gardener or contractor, but these are stilted, insincere relationships between the powerful and the relatively powerless.  The elite rarely confront genuine differences of opinion. They are not asked to examine the roles they play in society and the inequities of the structure that sustains them…The sole basis for authority is wealth….The gross social injustices that condemn most African Americans to urban poverty and the working class to a subsistence level of existence, the imperial bullying that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, do not touch them. They engage in small, largely meaningless forays of charity, organized by their clubs or social groups, to give their lives a thin patina of goodness.  They can live their entire lives in state of total self-delusion and perpetual childhood.” (100)

Hedges contrasts that picture with his working-class family—the plumbers, post-office clerks, and mill workers. “Most of the men were veterans.  They lived frugal and hard lives. [There] if you are poor, you have to work after high school…You serve in the military because it is one of the few jobs in which you can get health insurance and a decent salary.  College is not an option.  No one takes care of you.  You have to do that for yourself.  This is the most important difference between members of the working class and elites.  If you are poor or a member of the working class, you are on your own.” (101)

Talking about these things usually gets the hurt cry of “class warfare!” from the privileged and their lackeys.  As if merely shouting those two words is some sort of shaming hush button.  If you feel that way, gentle reader, step out of your conditioning!  Wealth does not need to be condemned to point out how it is being favored radically unreasonably.  Point out to the shouter that you will be glad to avoid charges of class warfare if only the rich and powerful would quite warring on you and bringing their ill-gotten (from you) booty back to their already dragon treasure-room like financial lairs.

One of the pitfalls of capitalism is that if its more successful members do not have deep character, they will never know the meaning of the words “enough” and “just” and “responsibility.”  And the society and all things connected to it suffer grievously for that deficiency.

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties...

It's Monday and of course you are anxiously awaiting our illustrious professor's commentary . He is however experiencing technical difficulties and will be posting as soon as they are resolved. In the mean time visit his blog where he is commenting on the last troops leaving Iraq.

Plaid Doublethink

Professor J,

One more tiny bit about literature and then I do promise to move on, though you have consoled me about my wallowing in this chapter by not wanting our readers to miss all of the treasure on p. 97. I cannot help but think what a disservice is done to the authors Hedges lists and many others. Great writers hope not only to arouse the sleeping generation around them, but to send those words like arrows into the future to be read by those who come after they're gone. Sinclair who paints for us the stench, disgust, and hopelessness of the meat packing industry at the turn of the century and Dickens who hoped to use his words as daggers to pierce even the coldest, hardest heart would be angry and saddened, I imagine, that their work has been reduced to being "mined for obscure trivia and irrelevant data."


In How To Read a Book (which we continue to recommend to the reader) Adler and Doren outline how literature as an "escape" is a better choice than most other things: "If we must escape from reality, it should be to a deeper, or greater reality. This is the reality of our inner life, or our own unique vision of the world. To discover this reality makes us happy; the experience is deeply satisfying to some part of ourselves we do not ordinarily touch." (p.206)


C.S. Lewis said that "We read to know we are not alone." (I suspect this is also why we write--is there anyone else who will understand us?) Literature is supposed to stir something deep in us, connect us, and in the cases of the works Hedges mentions, present a new and uncomfortable reality and thus, rouse the reader to action. It doesn't take much imagination to see how the current education establishment would be more interested in steering students AWAY from thinking those kinds of thoughts. Quoting John Ralston Saul (who previously called these people illiterate): "In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning,' Saul writes, 'although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality."


He depicts an Orwellian nightmare in khaki and plaid engaging in doublethink behind stone walls: "These institutions feed students, no matter how mediocre, the comforting reassurance that they are there because they are not only the best but they are entitled to the best." In reference to George W. Bush, Hedges writes, (he) exemplifies the legions of self-centered, spoiled, intellectually limited and wealthy elitists churned out by places like Andover, Yale, and Harvard. Bush was like the rest of his caste, propelled forward by his money and his connections.The real purpose of these schools is to perpetuate their own. They do this even as they pretend to embrace the ideology of the common man, trumpet diversity on campus, and pose as a meritocracy. The public commitment to egalitarianism alongside the private nurturing of elitism creates a bizarre schizophrenia." (98)


 Though the author entitled this chapter The Illusion of Wisdom he lays out a compelling case in it, that for the elites attending ivy league schools what they may indeed have is an illusion of being educated. Collegiate ambiance does not a thoughtful person make, as he points out: "There's a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love with the mystique and prestige of his own education."  They remind me of people who are in love with the idea of being in love but less so with long term commitment or the compromise necessary for a lasting relationship. Hedges quotes Elyse Graham who describes what this illusion of education looks like: "This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton nostalgia: How many famous professors can I collect?' and so on. And he comes away with not only all these props for his sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that seems to indicate wide learning." 

The illusion of "wide learning" is surely at the expense of depth of knowledge and intellectual curiosity. Of course, the facade is the thing.  


I did run across a glimmer of hope this week. For our readers who may still be confused about exactly what it is that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are concerned about, this video from the Occupy Harvard Teach-In may be of some help: Why is the U.S. F'ed Up?   So a small "rebellion" at Princeton, an Occupy Harvard movement...as you say, perhaps it will grow...


A note about your history paragraph: Everything you said cannot be overstated. When creating a curriculum for my children I designed it around history. Every single subject can be woven in by studying what was happening at a specific time in a particular place. Total immersion in a period sparks the imagination and links people, events, scientific discoveries, leaders, literature, geography, art, architecture, and anything else covered in a way that makes it stick. Biographies are the best "textbooks" early on. In high school and college the details can be filled in but only after all those delicious connections have been made and a life long curiosity instilled. Hmm...so hard to measure on those pesky standardized tests, though.

A Rain of History

Madame M:

I am not a fan of many economists, but I like this Nancy Folbre you have brought to light. Her “concerns about a concentration of economic power that unfairly limits individual choices, undermines political democracy, generates financial and ecological crises, and limits access to alternative economic ideas,” show she is not one of the usual economists (indeed, she derides them for having a herd mentality). Even with the heartening protest by economics students at Princeton, the “rebellion” (saying that brings to mind many things, the Star Wars plot among them, lol) is still small. But perhaps it will grow and sustain into the groundswell necessary to force deep change—and in enough time.

“The corporate con artists and economists who have rigged our financial system continue to speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists in Wall Street and at elite business schools.” (97) Credit default swaps, anyone? Even calling them Mutual Loans Insurance would not clear up the matter a great deal for the general public. As Dave Ramsey would say, don’t put your faith or your money in something you don’t and can’t understand, and don’t’ permit your money to be indirectly put at risk by those things either. Americans would be shocked to know how much their financial system lays on the edge of this sword that the banks and investment companies have come up with for their own profit and “protection.”

Academics are often little better when it comes to clarity and meaning. Hedges is harsh on English professors and their divorcing literature and society. In the objective of not wanting to excessively quote, you have given us the short version, but I believe our readers will be motivated to see the whole of Hedges’ book (yes, I can’t recommend strongly enough that this book should be on the shelves of all—at least reading—Americans) if we give them the exactness: “Writers from Euripides to Russell Banks have used literature as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect back to us, and focus us on, our hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice. Literature is a toll to enlighten societies about their ills. It was Charles Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers to the slums and workhouses of London. It was Honore de Balzac who, through the volumes of his Human Comedy, ripped open the callous heart of France. It was Upton Sinclair who took us into the stockyards and shantytowns of Chicago in The Jungle.” (97)

So, yes, I will repeat some of what you have just given us, but these jewels in the crown that Hedges emplaces for us are that important. Repetition is the mother of learning, and a little repetition won’t hurt, especially as you and I have each put our own touch on these sections:

“In the hands of academics, however, who rarely understand or concern themselves with the reality of the world [and, Professor’s note, earn the enmity or disdain of so many—and often the powerful many—who do not possess their “advanced” degrees], works of literature are eviscerated and destroyed. They are mined for obscure trivia and irrelevant data [and, Professor’s note again, those who disagree with this are dismissed as polemical or mere simpletons]. This disconnect between literature and philosophy on one hand and the real on the other is replicated in most academic disciplines. Economists build elaborate theoretical models yet know little of” clear-thinking historical economic figures and historical economic events, including the relevant intricacies and detailed root causes, including bubbles, of our own Great Depression. “The foundation of Athenian democracy rose out of the egalitarian social and political reforms of Solon, including his decision to wipe out all of the debts that were bankrupting Athenian [Prof’s note: I nearly typed American citizens!] citizens. But the study of the classics, because it is not deemed practical or useful to a digitalized world, leaves such vital lessons unexamined. Tacitus’ account of the economic meltdown during the reign of Tiberius—a meltdown that also saw widespread bankruptcies, a collapse of the real estate market, and financial ruin—is a reminder that we are not unique to history or human behavior. The meltdown during Tiberius’s reign was finally halted by massive government spending and intervention that included interest-free loans to citizens” (97-98) [Prof’s historical note: And the Romans of that period were a great deal healthier and stronger financially and economically than we are]

I am going to shout in print now, because what Hedges writes immediately following the above is that important: “THOSE WHO SUFFER FROM HISTORICAL AMNESIA, THE BELIEF THAT WE ARE UNIQUE IN HISTORY AND HAVE NOTHING TO LEARN FROM THE PAST, REMAIN CHILDREN. THEY LIVE IN AN ILLUSION.”

This willingness—nay, this ready embrace of—ahistoricity, where history and history’s examples, lessons, frameworks, and chances for us not to repeat its extremely costly and damaging failures, are not just ignored, but so utterly unvalued or even despised, that we do not know of them or even care to know of them, are sentencing us to increasing probabilities of civilizational failure.

We have been decoupled from history in general and our own in particular. The new systems managers don’t have a sufficient historical basis to know how things used to be, what is right and wrong, or what the law really means, let alone the intent.

We have forgotten, and likely never knew, that many past bubbles—all the way back to at least the Tulip Crisis of the Dutch in the 1600s—often saw people stuck with their stuff at the end of the crash, as the courts apparently would not enforce payments of contracts (possibly as a way to avert systemic failure) for “futures” and other speculative (for example, “hedging”) endeavors, as clear thinking judges of the period often regarded such debts as incurred through gambling, and thus not enforceable by law. What concepts they had back then! :)

We have also been encouraged to forget that in the 1920s here in America, the forces of plutocracy had the objective (and largely succeeded) of keeping the government (the people’s will) “out of the way” of “business” (at least, the narrowly defined businesses of the plutocrats). These plutocrats were able to reap the benefits of the APPEARANCE of an economic “boom” that was actually largely a fraud based on speculation in financial markets and borrowing by a middle class to keep up with flat or falling wages (sound familiar?). The Great Depression that followed brought the cries for reforms (and the further cries of “how could we have been so foolish and stupid?”), as well as the emplacement of regulations to put the brakes on the greed and excess that inevitably accompany capitalistic opportunity.

The way that history has been “taught” deserves much criticism, of course. The mindless rote memorization of names, dates, places, and events is divorced from meaning and relevance (and without Adler and Doren’s vital “How To Read A Book” as required preparation, the learning ground for history begins dry and cracked and will absorb little). The way history is conveyed is a reflection of its near-utter devaluing by the culture (devalued except when it can be used or twisted for various political, economic, or petty purposes). History is often relegated to coaches who consider it an onerous sideshow, and when it is not, the low pay and low prestige mean it often falls into the hands of those who are staid plodders with no connection to either material or students. Add the mania of standardized testing, and all its attendant pressures for (among many others) quantified results, and history becomes a dry and lifeless husk to be funneled aridly and received with distaste (and discarded at the earliest opportunity). Again, who does that serve? Only those who do not want the general populace to understand and value big concepts and historical lessons. How often we see people who say they hated history in their school years, but have a big interest in it now. Sure, some of it could be because they latched onto some good stuff from The History Channel, or a neat documentary, or even a good book. But much of it surely arises from how their life experience demonstrates to them the importance of history, the importance of it to them and their society, that its relevance and study and appreciation could help us so much, could get us out of the processing line for automatons.

You asked about change. Comparing it to a typical election, of the usual potential voters, 40% are traditionalists who resist change, 20% are swing voters who vote their pocketbook, and 40% are open to change, but may or may not take the steps toward it. Change in other things often follows a similar pattern.

Paradigms shift/change when those who see reality with clarity refuse to be quiet, refuse to know “their place,” refuse to “give it a break,” until the reluctant majority (the illusion embracers) acknowledge the reality and need for change, and give either their assent to changing it, or withdraw their aversion to doing so.

Sucking the Life Out of Dickens

Professor J,


You? Quibbling? :)

You are right about there being more defections among the "elites." While looking up something else (an Indian cold remedy :)) I found this article: Occupy Economics by Nancy Folbre. She has links to several other articles that are also worth reading. 


There is so much of Hedges' work that needs to be quoted and it was all I could do not to quote ALL of page 97 when he got to literature. After describing how writers from Euripides to Dickens to Upton Sinclair used their writing "as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect back to us, and focus us on, our hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice" he says: "In the hands of academics however, who rarely understand or concern themselves with the reality of the world, works of literature are eviscerated and destroyed. They are mined for obscure trivia and irrelevant data. This disconnect between literature and philosophy on one hand and the real on the other is replicated in most academic disciplines."  


We wonder then that young people lose an interest in reading early on, but much of this method of "teaching" literature is adopted long before they get to a university. We don't educate people INTO a love of the written word, we educate them OUT of it (just as Sir Ken says about creativity). A psychology professor at Samford University has a series of videos about how to study and how we learn. One of his main points is that if you can get a person to have an emotional attachment to the thing they are studying they will remember the information without really trying. Literature should be among the easiest subjects to teach then. Yet as  Hedges points out we take something that should cause people to well up with passionate feelings and inspired ideas and we drain the life blood out of it. We then fling the lifeless thing before them and wonder why they are bored to tears. Could this be the reason that the statistics for readers AFTER college are worse than for people who never attend?


Hedges moves us from literature to economics to history: "The foundation of Athenian democracy rose out of the egalitarian social and political reforms of Solon, including his decision to wipe out all of the debts that were bankrupting the Athenian citizens (We see a similar concept in the Old Testament). But the study of the classics, because it is not deemed practical or useful in a digitalized world, leaves such vital lessons unexamined. Tacitus' account of the economic meltdown during the reign of Tiberius--a meltdown that also saw widespread bankruptcies, a collapse of the real estate market, and financial ruin--is a reminder that we are not unique to history or human behavior. The meltdown during Tiberius' reign was finally halted by massive government spending and intervention that included interest free loans to citizens. Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past remain children. They live in an illusion.


I wonder how many students of history might relate that they have a distaste for that subject (and a surprising amount of people do) because of the way it has been taught. Many people you talk to about it share an experience of the trudging through the names of battles and dates and seem to know nothing of the impact of big ideas and the people who have them. They have given little thought to how things connect and intertwine, or that events seem to be repeated because people change so little and learn so poorly from the past mistakes of other individuals and civilizations. It's sad that some of the subjects that should spark imagination and even passionate debate leave people flat.


Of course when we get back to what you and I and Ken Robinson and others think education is, compared to what those who maintain and defend the current system think it is, we come to the crux of the problem. As you've pointed out, it may indeed be working very well.  Our author lists a series of specialists in various areas and then says: "They exist to make the system work not to examine it."
Only through the examination can the faults and remedies for them be found, but we must start with a desire for change. Slaves to systems rarely ask questions and muster the courage to effect the change necessary to shift the paradigm. How to tackle THAT?

"Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder."~ Charles Dickens (Hard Times)

Cranking Out The Corporate Goose Steppers

Madame M:

How telling of our society’s priorities that the top annual end of a full-time, established professor (usually 15-20+ years at the university—effectively, the very pinnacle of advancement in academia), that is, someone who is helping to form the citizens that will build and support the society by their future efforts, is only equal to the monthly compensation of a FIRED coach.

That business gets the money and the attention, and education and the humanities get neither, is further indication that producing compliant systems managers and workers is the rewarded objective, not critically thinking citizens who can save their civilization and chart a new course of sensible sustainability and visionary improvement.

I will take a moment here to quibble over semantics: “government regulated ‘morality’” about the now discarded Blue Laws, as it could imply that government is this entirely separated thing from the society. I quibble because our government is (or rather, is SUPPOSED to be) a reflection of the people’s collective will, and the laws made to benefit “the general welfare” (to use a phrase from our founding documents) are because the general citizenry believe that most people benefit (and no one is unduly punished in the process). Even if I perhaps wax nostalgic for bygone days, it is not with rose-colored glasses in this instance—it WAS a time when the people wagged the corporations and business (or at least held equal sway enough of the time), not the other way around. They even held more sway in the time of The Organization Man and Up the Organization!

Why don’t more of us stop playing the game of the real-life Potters of the world, stop being the pliant pawns in our own self-enfeeblement and self-destruction? Hedges has already laid out answers to that, in his words about how we adapt to our place in the corporate state, in our own self-made ghettos, in being part of the momentarily comfortable illusion rather than the hard reality with a chance to change. As someone put it, it’s part of the hemlock we readily and willingly keep drinking.

You bring up good exposure on how we go along with manipulating and being manipulated, that our priorities as individuals and culture are so out of whack, with such insanity in the guise of current cultural buzzwords (“networking”), that we just further illustrate the illusionary aspects of this society. Other cultures the world over have been trying to tell us for some time: this American OBSESSION with working (and materialism) is, in the globally competitive environment, making everyone’s lives a good deal more miserable, is making changes that are good at best for only the very few (the exploiters). And are not sustainable in the long run anyway, because humans were never meant to be that way, and our deep inward selves rebel against it.

The language of our elites, and their doublespeak (let alone the assumptions!) of things like “growth,” “profit,” “earnings,” and other supposed measures of financial and economic health, are much of the time mere part and parcel of the deception, deflection, diversion, and confusion served up to keep us off-balance, not questioning, and resigned to the fates corporations and oligarchs hand to us. Another thing that Hedges pointed out in that section you mention: that a specialist services “tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been taught to question.”

Hedges says that our elites “cannot recognize the vital relationship between power and morality. They have forgotten, or never knew, that moral traditions are the product of civilization. They have little or no knowledge of their own civilization and do not know, therefore, how to maintain it. ‘One of the signs of a dying civilization,’ John Ralston Saul writes, ‘is that its language breaks down into exclusive dialects which prevent communication. A growing, healthy civilization uses language as a daily tool to keep the machinery of society moving. The role of responsible, literate elites is to aid and abet that communication.’” (96) Ours often do the opposite, and this is with this professor recognizing the complexities of our problems.

Chris Hedges wrote some powerful insights relatively recently, peeling away deeper layers than even his book. See the full piece here, and if you can, support the writing to the extent you are financially able: This Is What The Revolution Looks Like. Here in the next two paragraphs is a brief sample:

Tax havens alone cost us at least a trillion dollars every decade. “The political process no longer works in any meaningful way for anyone but the corporate elite and their allies. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. They reinvest their proceeds overseas; they don’t bring them home to help Americans or provide capital here to use.

“We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.”

Hedges has put himself on the line. He may believe that this civilization is failing, with slim chance of saving itself, but he is living the fully authentic life, an intellectual Gandhi for our times.

And he says there are some faint signs that perhaps there are defections among the elites. For example, this Tweet: “Support Occupy Oakland. Not the 1% and its government facilitators.” From Dan Siegel, the Oakland mayor’s legal advisor and friend, upon resigning.

From the business sector comes yet another millionaire who wants to pay higher taxes. When asked why, this particular gentleman replied: “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”

There’s someone who gets it. Who gets that feudalism is not really all that fun to live in, and depresses the real overall prosperity of a society.

Perhaps more will follow him.

Back to the book. The story of the protesters, who wanted to preserve a part of nature rather than surrender yet more of it to build another sports complex. How were those protesters, including a war veteran, treated by most students (and most who had never served in the military or gone to war) on campus? Hebdon tells that his “strongest memory is of a person selling rocks to throw at tree sitters. He had noticeable crowd support. When I see things like this, I think of how Berkeley, once known for conscientious objection, is training an inhumane, deeply frustrated, indifferent, game-driven people.” (95) He also goes on to remark that military service has become one of the few ways for students to pay their way without amassing large amounts of crushing debt. Hebdon decries the lack of critical thinking—ironically, bitterly ironically, in a place that hosts the annual international conference on critical thinking.

There is plenty of corruption at universities, yes, but the stale (or worse) mismanagement and ruinous policies manifest in other easily seen ways: obscenely (as we’ve shown) overpaid coaches, top-heavy, indulged, excessively bureaucratic, and self-perpetuating administrations that skirt laws and in any case care little for anyone but themselves and their image. This is obvious in the pre-occupation with fund raising—often to construct yet more buildings, complexes, and “centers” that do little if anything to further knowledge or education, but only make a name for the people who push them (or the wealthy donors who pay for them). Government (especially military and intelligence) contracts and influence are often prevalent, and the professors who once were the voices of reason and opposition are now servants of the corporate system—their research and promotion now rarely serve the general public, and are often unconnected to morality or the maintenance (let alone the advancement!) of this civilization.

It is not too much of stretch to say that the corporate state dictates the workers desired, and the educational “system” spits out some semblance of the narrow human (and perhaps narrowly human) material required. As one commentator put it, “The Humanities have been assaulted while the top universities crank out people like George W. Bush, ‘a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral core.’"

Hedges keeps beating us about the head to wake up. We can either do so and respond to the pain, or numb ourselves with more shopping, more TV, more sports watching, more escapism. What we choose determines how history will judge us as a people.

Harsh words in the midst of the Christmas season! One would think I was the veritable killjoy! :) But truth can look like that to those still enraptured by those wall shadows…