Education

Dear Friends,
Since my post about student loan reform generated so many comments, I have decided to continue to discuss education.  I am currently reading "Empire of Illusion - The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" by Chris Hedges.  It is a fascinating and very disturbing book.  I have not finished it yet, but I will, but it is taking a while because it is requires me to think and reread often.

The first chapter is entitled "The Illusion of Literacy".  Here is a portion of a paragraph on page 44:

Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic.  There are 7 million illiterate Americans.  Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can't read a simple sentence.  There are some 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level.  Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate--a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year.  A third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates.  In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.

Given these statistics, is it any wonder that our democracy is in trouble?  As you will recall, I agree completely with Thomas Jefferson that an educated electorate is essential to a successful democracy. 

The literacy rate is only a part of the problem.  Our education system even the elite colleges and universities are teaching skills not values and are focused on sustaining the current system instead of asking the big questions.  Quoting from pages 90 and 91of the book:

In 1967, Theodor Adorno wrote an essay entitled "Education After Auschwitz".  He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged" and that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be uncovered, examined, and critiqued through education.  Schools had to teach more than skills.  They had to teach values.  If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible...The moral nihilism embraced by the elite universities would have terrified Adorno.  He knew that radical evil was possible only with a collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and mass media that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment, and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nourish the capacity for individual conscience.  He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hypermasculinity.

It seems to me that all of Adorno's fears are being realized today.  Mr. Hedges argues quite persuasively that education system, even our elite universities, are only teaching skills and not values.  He notes that the number of students that are studying the humanities is dropping rather dramatically while the number of undergraduates that are getting business degrees is soaring.  He bemoans the fact at page 97 that

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 tool to enlighten societies about its ills.

But of course we are not educating our students to ask the big questions then literature is nothing more than something to be read.  Our education system fails to challenge the students to do the reflection and to ask the big questions.  At page 103 Mr. Hedges continues:

For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge.  To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill.  To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanistic ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals.  A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not is speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.  Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions.  They are products of a moral void.  They lack clarity about themselves and their culture.  They can fathom only their own personal troubles.  They do not see their own biases or the causes of their own frustrations.  They 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.

Mr. Hedges argues that since the elites are educated in the skills required by the system they serve, they are not equipped to solve the problems we are facing. 

They have no concept, thanks to the educations they received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one.  They are petty, timid, and uncreative bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems management.  They see only piecemeal solutions that will satisfy the corporate structure.  Their entire focus is numbers, profits and personal advancement.  They lack the moral and intellectual core.  They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships.  The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets.  The democratic system, they believe, is a secondary product of the free market--which they slavishly serve.

Mr. Hedges conclusion is that President Obama is a product of this elitist system and that he has surrounded himself with similar people.  I certainly hope that President Obama is able to break out of this mold.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal