Against
the tide to privatize education and enslave teachers, this is a victory
Here
is a battleground we in this nation run from only to invent stories about
freedom and democracy that are not substantiated by reality
What
remains is another story with a set of ideas more in keeping with the agenda of
the bourgeoisie
Our
brand of totalitarianism - or elimination!
Imagine
you are a young Latino in a classroom in the
While
those at the bottom worry about survival and remain silent, those at the top of
this order look away - but never down
Neutralization
is normalized
It
will take hard work to untangle ourselves from the Empire’s web of innocence
488_ror_education
BlackCommentator.com: American
Education: Reform or Revolution - Represent Our Resistance - By Dr. Lenore J.
Daniels, PhD - BC Editorial Board
American
Education: Reform or Revolution
Represent Our Resistance
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels,
PhD
BC Editorial Board
…We
all know the same truths and our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.
-Woody
Allen, Woody Allen: A Documentary
Ignorance
is a cure for nothing.
-W.E.B.
DuBois, “Letter to a Negro Schoolgirl
Like
most concerned citizens, I followed the Chicago Teachers Union fight against
the liberal Democratic Machine in Chicago and the market capitalists. Born and
raised in Chicago, I am a product of both the private and public institutions
there, having graduated from a Catholic elementary school, and after attending
two dismal years at a Catholic, all girl-finishing school, graduated from a
public high school. I received my undergraduate degree from a four-year
institution but my master’s degree from a public institution, and finally my
doctorate at a private institution.
Having
been a college teacher for 25 years, I know the plight of teachers, and I have
had my experiences with unions…
The
Chicago Teachers Union strike was a victory for the students, the parents, the
teachers - and the union. The union and supporters claim a labor victory. I
will take their word for it. It was a victory for labor. Against the tide to
privatize education and enslave teachers, this is a victory.
Well,
I am all for labor union victories. Historically, and certainly in my personal
experience, unions mirror the hierarchical structure of the State and, and to
keep the profitable peace with the State, sell a large portion of its
membership down the river. No, education is my concern. I have these strange
ideas and pose a different set of questions. What is this thing called education
today? What are students learning? What is the content of this thing called
education? Specifically, what ideas are disseminated and regurgitated?
Are
the battles in education about reform or revolution?
Let
me step back and tell this little story. It is an old story, one the author
William Faulkner[1]
articulated in the 1930s. It is about a 14-year-old girl, Rosa Coldfield, who
one day has a glimpse of the idea she had only been told by parents, teachers,
and community. Spying through the wisteria vines of a nearby plantation, she
observes a lovely scene: a young couple seems to be embracing each other. The
idea, romantic and chivalric, is something she vows to serenade and cultivate.
A
few years go by, and Coldfield is a young woman now. The smoke settles, the
cannons cease to blast, and the last soldier hangs up his uniform and puts away
his bayonet. But Coldfield hears the echo of a shot from the plantation laced
with wisteria. She tells us how she ran, running full tilt to the house and up
the flight of stairs where is comes to a halt before a figure, a coffee-colored
Sutpen - but not him, not the slaveholder and owner of the plantation, not Col.
Thomas Sutpen but her - a daughter!
Instinctively
Coldfield knows what lies beyond the door behind this “daughter.” In the room
lies the murdered “son,” and it will be the same room, years later, in which
the idea itself lies, a murderer, returned to yellow and decay, no longer
chivalric or heroic.
All
will be lost if she enters this door now where the murdered lies, but she can
remember. She, of a privileged race and class and as poet laureate, can
remember the idea as she perceived it, as innocence, as the location in which
occupants such as her see themselves as free.
Coldfield
runs back down the stairs, vowing now to contain the contamination. The idea
remains, fortified, institutionalized, charged with eradicating any form of
resistance.
I
suspect this little story has relevance today. It re-creates the tragedy of
American culture: the door no one wants to enter, the idea that seems to be
decaying at every turn only to be revived again and again, even if the origin
of the idea was shaky, except that it was imaginative - but nonetheless based
on ignorance of reality.
This
little tale itself is hidden, as they say, in plain sight at most public and
private libraries and educational institutions, among countless other stories,
similar in kind. The book in which this narrative is contained is itself,
metaphorically, a door few enter. This is the catastrophe we face not just when
we try to tackle the problem of education but any social problem, health care,
housing, poverty. Here is a battleground we in this nation run from only to
invent (as a humanitarian effort, of course) stories about freedom and
democracy that are not substantiated by reality.
To
challenge these stories with their ideas is to subject oneself to the cannons
and bayonets of those in the 1% and 99%, regardless of gender or political
affiliation.
Students
need books, starting on the first day of classes. Music, art, and language
skills should never have been reduced or eliminated from the curriculum, and
teaching staffs should be diversified. Learning is not constant testing, and
teachers should not be evaluated based on test scores. The pressure from
administration is more than “bullying” (see “Chicago Teachers Union Ends
Strike,” www.fightbacknews.org/2012/18).
It is a form of torture meant to extract from the mind any thought of
resistance: You live or die! Your choice! Do as we tell you!
A
raise in salary for teachers is also a plus considering compensation for most
other professional employment allows a good chunk of its workers to remain
above the poverty line. Most important, a teacher’s work is never over after
the bell rings or the hours in a building are over. Teachers are students,
learners, too. To some extent, it is a way of being: teaching/learning,
learning/teaching.
While
there may be cause for celebrating the unity of union members, I see questions
regarding the books, testing, diversity of teachers, even the raises. What
books? Who will decide? What is the perspective of those in power to decide not
only the books but the content of what is to be learned?
In
Let
me point out something else that older people fail to remember and younger
people have never been taught to understand. I will use a passage from Sheldon
S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.
The
significance of the African American prison population is political. What is
notable about the African American population generally is that it is highly
sophisticated politically and by far the one group that throughout the
twentieth century kept alive a spirit of resistance and rebelliousness. In that
contest, criminal justice is as much a strategy of political neutralization as
it is a channel of instinctive racism.
Interesting
word - that “neutralization”...
Wolin
argues that under what he calls “inverted totalitarianism,” the kind the
culture here in the U.S. seems to be adopting as opposed to “classical,” that
is, Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany, “economics dominates politics - and
with that domination come different forms of ruthlessness…such as “withholding
appropriated money” or “waiving minimum wage standards.” State power is not
reduced but actually increases thanks to these kinds of strategies that “play a
major role in the incorporation of state and corporate power.”
We
do not want to talk about the political mascots (Democrats and Republicans) who
do the bidding of the corporate power and that surprising (for those least affected) number of Black Americans in
the last 30 years filling up the prisons as fast as the politicians and
corporate powers can materialize them. We do not want to talk about that
neutralizing process whereby Black children seem to jump from elementary school
or high school straight to prison. This movement of the Black population is
profitable for the corporations as well as for certain workers invested with
maintaining “law and order.” Other citizens agree: “criminals are them!”
That
is the narrative of the neutralizing process! Ideas that differ with absolute
innocence are silenced. Freedom and democracy be damned - and we know it, but
we cannot help ourselves! Ignorance is bliss and only “criminals” and “evil
doers” - the demonic for Rosa Coldfield, want to take our freedom to be
innocent away from us!
Ruthless
- you bet! You live or die! Your choice! Our brand of totalitarianism - or
elimination!
Ultimately
no one wins, except maybe the 1%, temporarily, if we do not enter that door - and
more than once!
The
kind of education our children receive - all children - matters. It is not so
much a matter of “quality” - interpreted under a certain mindset to mean, for
example, an intensive study of privileged via race of authors in literature or
scientists to the exclusion of others. Nor do I mean the other extreme where
teachers sprinkle in the curriculum cultural “difference” as if, for example, a
history of enslavement and genocide and their legacy is specifically Black or
Indigenous history and worthy of some attention by all other students. The condescending
approach is registered by Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow children as just that -
condescending - and leaves white children to believe in a hierarchy of ideas
and knowledge. (Some white liberals who came of age as civil rights activists,
anti-war activists, feminists, environmentalists etc are as terrified of those
Blacks who came of age in the “Black Power” movement as the corporate powers. They
may still admire and speak well of Malcolm X or Huey Newton, but are suspicious
of Blacks who came through the movement and still maintain an affinity to
resist the injustice of our corporate State).
And
more of the same with “more books,” “less testing,” smaller classroom, etc - is
not the answer, does not make for revolutionary change either, if the
neutralizing process is left in tact and its origins in fear and ignorance is
not confronted. It just may take a little longer for Black children to reach
their prison cells, if they are not shot dead by another child who has had
enough or a police officer charged with maintaining law and order in urban
areas.
Imagine
you are a young Latino in a classroom in the U.S. and the lesson you hear
claims not only that Columbus discovered the Americas, but also that the U.S.
geographic layout was the same as it was before 1846 - before the conquest of Mexico, that is, California, Colorado,
Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. It was unoccupied land, of course, free for the
taking.[2]
When
you have an “esteemed” professor give a lecture on the first civilization, the Greek civilization, dismissing dynasties of
African civilization, you have a problem. Worse when graduate students are
taught not to challenge authority or even to request clarification, then you
have the practice of indoctrination of ignorance, that is, absolute innocence, repression
- not education.
It
is much harder and riskier to work to abolish a set of ideas that have been
sanctioned by power than it is to win a labor victory. Down the road, things will change. But do we have time?
In
“higher education,” everyone wants more of the same - “to get ahead.” What does
it mean “to get ahead”? Get ahead of what?
The
neutralization process is being tweaked to include everyone - who wants to get
ahead!
Professor
William Deresiewicz, in his article, “Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher
Education” (The Nation, May 4, 2011),
writes that he fails to understand why “debate right now about primary and
secondary education” is not extended to include “a public debate about higher
education.” His article draws attention to the horrors unfolding at colleges
and universities, surrounding this thing called “education”:
What
we have in academia…is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a
self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated
proletariat, and a shrinking middle class. The same devil’s bargain stabilizes
the system: the middle, or at least the upper middle, the tenured professoriate,
is allowed to retain its prerogatives - its comfortable compensation packages,
its workplace autonomy and its job security - in return for acquiescing to the
exploitation of the bottom by the top, and indirectly, the betrayal of the
future of the entire enterprise.
It
has been my observation that the idealization of inequality, that is not just
class based but most importantly race based, orders labor at four-year
institutions to further serve the corporations: the laborers themselves manage
the exploitation and work to maintain a purified idea of “democracy” in which
everyone accepts the conditions associated with their enslavement. In this
sense, labor’s capitulation to the market enterprise is partly to blame for the
ordering of educational workers and the ordering and ultimate elimination of
difference. While those at the bottom worry about survival and remain silent,
those at the top of this order look away - but never down.
Returning
to Deresiewicz, he points of the presence of “academic managers” at college and
university campuses along with storytellers[3]
(those Coldfields get around) who create the “literature of reform.” What are
they selling? “Online courses, distance learning, do-it-yourself instruction:
this is the future we’re offered.”
Who
do these narrators of a “vision of the future,” these managers and storytellers
serve if not their corporate bosses? Are they not “managing” the preservation
of the “
Deresiewicz,
too, asks questions we all should ask when it comes to this future we are being
offered by the corporate world:
Why
teach a required art history course to twenty students at a time when you can
march them through a self-guided online textbook followed by a multiple-choice
exam? Why have professors or even graduate students grade papers when you can
outsource them to BAs around the country, even the world? Why waste time with
office hours when students can interact with their professors via e-mail?
Students
in higher education have become “clients.” I heard this termed used in the last
10 years. Clients! These “clients” come to the college classroom already as
trained as consumers, and, as Deresiewicz writes, they are running the show,
“scouring the market like savvy” consumers. The universities response, of
course, is to offer courses that would compete for the “newly empowered 18-year-olds'”
attention and money.
It
is the “invisible hand,” writes Deresiewicz, raining down its blessings on
“education” - throughout the country from K-12 and higher.” Here is another
question that draws the link between primary and secondary education and higher
education: “Do we really want our higher education system redesigned by the
self-identified needs of high school seniors?”
Unfortunately,
the corporate-capitalists have done an efficient job of educating our society in
every walk of life to accepting its idea of life. In other words - expendables
fill cells beneath the panoptic towers and eligible clones from the elementary
and high schools already see bright, as in white, futures at the ivory towers. The
tragedy at the center of American culture remains. Neutralization is
normalized. Survival of the fittest! Politicians have come to understand this
but so have parents. As Deresiewicz writes, parents and students been taught to
move toward “the ‘practical,’ narrowly conceived: the instrumental, the
utilitarian, the immediately negotiable.”
Well,
there should not be any surprise here. This is what confronts us 24/7.
Corporate media tells us that everyone
wants to land in the 1%. You could deal drugs, dribble a basketball, rap about
bitches and whores, or model the corporate idea of beauty or you can go to
college where the mission of education today (read the ads along the side of
the buses or right there at your computer!) is perceived by students and
parents as a means to achieve financial security - not as a means to become
thinking and questioning human beings who are capable of creating and developing
ideas for the benefit of the 99%.
Who
needs alternative thinking when the corporation has the future for everyone all
mapped out? Come join us. Everyone else
has!
Political
science, philosophy, history and anthropology, for example, writes Deresiewicz,
“are not areas of state importance.” Consequently, politicians including
Barrack Obama, he continues, stress the need to improve math and science
proficiency.
Citing
Jonathan Cole’s argument in The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected
“A
scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates
citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the
world.”
So
it is no wonder that in the
And
so is resistance - hence the ruthlessness!
A
labor victory in
Totalitarianism
narrated by the U.S. Empire.
Deresiewicz
calls for tenured faculty, who “enjoy the strongest speech protections in
society,” to stand up.
Do
not hold your breath. You will get reform if they move an inch! This class has
no vested interest in the 99%. It does not matter who comes into the classroom
or what narrative they are asked to spin - as long as the pay is good and it
keeps rolling in!
The
contamination has not been from some imaginary bogey-man figure. In the
If
teachers’ unions want to be daring (revolutionary) and really challenge the
totalitarian future we are being offered, they must educate the community of
students, parents, and concerned citizenry to reject their identification with
and enslavement to the corporate idea of freedom and democracy!
BlackCommentator.com Editorial
Board member and Columnist, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern
American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.