Peter Fraterdeus
Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:53:02 -0700
Martin Buber on Education The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda. Education means teaching people to see the reality around them, to understand it for themselves. Propaganda is exactly the opposite. It tells the people, "You will think like this, as we want you to think!"
Education lifts the people up. It opens their hearts and develops their minds so that they can discover the truth and make it their own. Propaganda, on the other hand, closes their hearts and stunts their minds. It compels them to accept dogmas without asking themselves, "Is this true or not?" The trouble is that this is not only a conflict of ideology. It is a conflict of tempo. The tempo of propaganda is feverish, nervous. It is the pace of television and radio. It is the pace of the newspaper headline, the cry of the vendor in the street. Whereas education goes at a slow pace. It is the pace of teachers talking with their students. It is the pace of a man reading by himself in a room. It cannot be hurried or speeded up and remain education. ********** I found this quote in an old notebook (I'm catching up with about two decades of disorganization in my library), written in my own hand. I have no idea where I'd read it originally, but a bit of digging on Google led me to "Encounter with Martin Buber" by Aubrey Hodes (The Penguin Press, London 1972) Buber is widely known today as the author of "I and Thou", and as the translator of the Tales of the Hasidim, a body of apocryphal stories about the origins and early teachers of this Eastern Jewish mystical tradition, but he is also remembered, or should be, as a prophetic voice regarding the urgent need for all the peoples of Palestine (before the State of Israel's creation) to be respected and honored. He remains an inspiration for Israeli 'doves' even today. He knew Tagore, and Gandhi, Einstein and Schweitzer. ********** Hodes opens his chapter "The Teacher" with the above passage, and writes, following: "Buber often returned to this theme of the struggle between education and propaganda. He saw clearly that it was a struggle for control of communications, between those who wanted to use the new technology to encourage free expression and debate, and those who wanted to use it to impose a higher kind of electronic authority, And, as always, he was for the open against the closed, for the stammering question against the packaged answer." This was written in 1972, but it's obvious that not much has changed in the meantime, and the message is as urgent as ever. Buber was a tireless advocate for reconciliation between the adversaries in the Middle East, very often going beyond the pale of his Israeli countrymen. He taught always that an eye-for-an-eye eventually leads to a world of unseeing horror. He was possibly the only Jew to argue against the execution of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's architect of the "final solution". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber ********** Recent updates at fraterdeus.com "The Atmosphere of Desire" -- a poem from my 1996-97 notebooks. "What I want..." -- a more recent poem from 2007 "Liberal Renaissance? Perhaps..." -- a short essay on the Democratic 'revival' and the primaries Please visit http://fraterdeus.com Subscribe to Parlortricks - http://www.eiotx.net/mailman/listinfo/parlortricks -- AzByCx DwEvFu GtHsIr JqKpLo MnNmOl PkQjRi ShTgUf VeWdXc YbZa&@ {ARTQ: Help stop in-box bloat! Always Remember to Trim the Quote!} ExquisiteLetterpress http://www.exquisiteletterpress.com -:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-*-:-* Peter Fraterdeus http://www.alphabets.com : Sign up for "MiceType"! Galena, Illinois Design Philosophy Fonts Lettering Letterpress Wood Type Dubuque, Iowa http://www.fraterdeus.com Photography Irish Fiddle Political Observation http://flickr.com/photos/pfraterdeus http://youtube.com/user/pfraterdeus _______________________________________________ ParlorTricks mailing list ParlorTricks@eiotx.net http://www.eiotx.net/mailman/listinfo/parlortricks