stupidity, culture and senescent militarism

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"Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash"

By Luciana Bohne

You might think that reading about a Podunk University's English teacher's 
attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and 
the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering 
we've embarked on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of 
senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my 
experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been 
educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance.

"I don't read," says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She 
has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not 
reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses 
not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class. She has to read 
novels by African, Latin American, and Asian authors. She is not there by 
choice: it's just a "distribution" requirement for graduation, and it's 
easier than philosophy -she thinks.

The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and 
Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style 
regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including the English 
majors, can write a focused essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No 
one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general 
information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or 
fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows 
what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it because it's 
impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge 
of that work - which used to be required reading a few generations ago. And 
no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored 
coup which terminated Chile's mature democracy. There is complete shock 
when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the 
generals' coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende.

Geography, history, philosophy, and political science - all missing from 
their preparation. I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, 
as Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed out, and that 
they are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our 
government has not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our 
government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the 
same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one student asks, "Why?" Well, I 
say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world in part 
because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which 
apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the media, and 
cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and the 
more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to 
attain which they go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, 
it would be funny.

Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody 
work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war 
we are waging - an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive war, 
which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the 
way, the creeping weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman, and 
child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water is a murder - and 
a war crime. And it signals the impotence of American education to produce 
brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: 
analyzing and asking questions.

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.

This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. 
It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and interests 
that depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these 
shores, writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English of the 
class, American education has something to answer for--especially to our 
youth.

But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both 
planned and instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's 
why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, 
claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest 
intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up 
during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing the 
political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it 
protects.

Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to thought and cultural 
refinement. "When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels said, "I reach for 
my revolver." One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime 
implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the 
university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition. 
The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy, social and 
political science, humanities and the arts--areas in which political 
discussions were likely to occur. The universities were ordered to issue 
degrees only in business management, computer programming, engineering, 
medicine and dentistry - vocational training schools, which in reality is 
what American education has come to resemble, at least at the level of mass 
education. Our students can graduate without ever touching a foreign 
language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history, and 
political science, or economics. In fact, our students learn to live in an 
electoral democracy devoid of politics - a feature the dwindling crowds at 
the voting booths well illustrate.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the 
industrial revolution created, people first surrendered their minds or the 
capacity to reason, then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until 
all that was left of the original human equipment was the senses or their 
selfish demands for gratification. At that point, humans entered the stage 
of market commodities and market consumers--one more thing in the 
commercial landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to 
buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, 
immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations.

Meanwhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the board 
for all departments in the state - including education.

Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University in 
Pennsylvania.

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