Good posting. Late at night or whatever. I think you are marking cultural change. Prompted by a host of factors our culture is shifting. For better or worse. Who knows. I think one way, others may think another.
arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 2:16 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Gloomy America Ed wrote: Ed> And college degrees don't seem to matter much anymore. and earlier, Keith wrote KH> Most of the population of America and the other advanced countries KH> have been dumbed down with four generations or so of state KH> education. I have the sense that I left public schooling at the very trailing edge of traditional education with traditional educational values. That this sense isn't a case of the Good Old Days being better for every aging generation is supported by the fact that I'm just ahead of the baby boom demographic by a year (or three, depending on whose model you choose.) Some of my high school classes were taught by people in their 70s and at least one man was 80. Latin was still offered and the classes were full. Greek had been dropped only a few years before. So state education as I saw it may have been a bit weak on politics but neither had classic subjects of study been replaced with life-style, life skills and other feel-good non-subjects. Every effort was made to avoid controversy in Massachusetts public schools. In retrospect, I could have done with more attention to the fascist takeover in Europe and an unbiased analysis of communism from Marx to HUAC. At university some of my friends were majoring in "education". Again in retrospect, it seems to me that they were being trained to be and do something quite different from what my high school (and junior high) [1] teachers were and did. The most disconcerting thing was that, AFAICT, nascent teachers weren't expected to to *know* anything, to be knowledgeable about anything in particular, except the for methodologies blessed with a nihil obstat from the educational establishment. I surmise that similarly trained teachers had gone forth to fill the growing demand, replace those septuagenarians, and teach the leading edge of the baby boom that followed my cohort. Well, that was 50 years ago. Henry Giroux writes here: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9865-beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-th e-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism Indeed, many institutions that provide formal education in the United States have become co-conspirators with a savage casino capitalism, whose strength lies in producing, circulating and legitimating market values that promote the narrow world of commodity worship, celebrity culture, bare-knuckle competition, a retreat from social responsibility and a war-of-all-against-all mentality that destroys any viable notion of community, the common good and the interrelated notions of political, social and economic rights. University presidents now make huge salaries sitting on corporate boards, while faculty sell their knowledge to the highest corporate bidder and, in doing so, turn universities into legitimation centers for casino capitalism. He also quotes Raymond Williams' notion of "permanent education", by which he (and RW) means not so much "continuing education" or "life-long learning" but: What it valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned, not only with continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches.... [Permanent education also refers to] the field in which our ideas of the world, of ourselves and of our possibilities, are most widely and often most powerfully formed and disseminated. To work for the recovery of control in this field is then, under any pressures, a priority. For who can doubt, looking at television or newspapers, or reading the women's magazines, that here, centrally, is teaching and teaching financed and distributed in a much larger way than is formal education. [2] In another place, Giroux writes: For the first time in modern history, centralized commercial institutions that extend from traditional broadcast culture to the new interactive screen cultures - rather than parents, churches or schools - tell most of the stories that shape the lives of the American public. This is no small matter since the stories a society tells about its history, civic life, social relations, education, children and human imagination are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy and its future. Most of the stories now told to the American public are about the necessity of neoliberal capitalism, permanent war and the virtues of a never-ending culture of fear. Now this may have a faint odor of "conspiracy theory" about it. Before you dismiss almost any analysis of social control as "just" conspiracy theory and relegate it to the crank bin, look through your collection of DVDs for some movies that involve a great many stunts and special effects and see if there's a "special feature" piece on the making of the movie. I watched the account of making Matrix Reloaded. An stunning amount of time, money, manpower, special cameras, rigging, modified trucks and cars and specialized equipment is involved in such a feat. Those guys asked around to rent a freeway to film high-speed chase- and stunt-shots but no city would close off traffic for the requisite time. So they built their own 1.5 mile freeway. One and a half miles of real 4-lane blacktop and guard rails, miles of fake concrete walls and bridges. Then they put enough cars and drivers on it to simulate urban traffic in which to do the hair-raising stunts. Okay, it grossed $742 million at the box office and they spent $142 million to make it. Watching that reminded me any corporation that's playing that price range will be prepared to spend a $100 million or so on salaries, bribes, support for favored educational or other institutions -- in general for subversion of the public interest wherever that kind of return can be anticipated (hoped for?) in the short- or medium-term future. I think I'm beginning to wander. There's a good reason why Keith writes his posts at the crack of dawn. I should do that rather than trying to marshal my thoughts near bed time. - Mike [1] I don't have a clear picture of the British school grading system, possibly because they keep changing it. Projecting my own ignorance: For Keith, jr. high embraces the 7th to 9th year of school, high school the 10th to 12th years in most of the US. [2] Raymond Williams, "Preface to Second Edition," Communications (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 15. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
