Quoting Christoph Reuss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> <<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.>>
[snip]
Just to clarify: You aren't implying that the internal
totalitarianism of traditional education, which makes the
student learn lots of "stuff" and then get punitively
graded on how much of that "stuff" he (or sometimes she...)
has memorized and can regurgitate in a test booklet,
was good, are you?
I think that if the students aren't learning anything today,
that is perhaps at last the exhaustion of the
war of the school against the student that goes back at
least to Peter Ramus, and probably back much further.
Schooling == trench warfare on The Western Front.
I think we have to look to the "Schools" of ancient Athens,
or, better, to the occasional private tutoring of the children
of the aristoi (e.g., Montaigne), to find any real education
(personal cultural self-formation), except
via the inevitable exceptions which prove that the
rule is just that: a coercive social measure to
try to make everybody do something nobody would
do of their uncoerced free will.
I went to schools where we memorized facts. I remember
thinking that I was living in the modern age,
because the school had recently moved from a building
in which light bulbs hung from the ceiling
by wires instead of in fixtures. But we still
called the teachers (at least one of whom was a failed
vacuum cleaner salersman...) "Sir", and they were referred to
as "masters".
I also recall that
a large part of the hidden curriculum was
repression of healthy sexuality, combined with
generating huge amounts of aim-inhibited homo-erotic
energy to drive the school spirit, competitive sports
teams, etc. Nobody was monitoring, much less
dismantling this program of WMD production.
Where the student does not learn that he or
she is a judge of all things, including the school, and
come to appreciate rich criteria for making such judgment, you
may have training of the most rigorous (AKA tedious) kind, but
not education. Where the faculty and administration are
Christians, they should consider that Judgment is The Lord's,
and stop grading the students (which is
God's perogative) and start praying with the students.
If the faculty and administration are secular,
they should start building democracy in the place
where they are currently imposing a totalitarian
dictatorship of the professariat.
Never again.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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