“When I
think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at
all”
----Paul Simon “Kodachrome”
“I’ve discovered later in life that, with the possible exception of basic reading and mathematics, most of what I was taught was most assuredly wrong."
----from "The Quotations of Chairman Joe".
Nineteen
years ago I found myself substitute teaching in what is now called a “middle
school” (formerly a Junior High) a class in sociology, which had become the
format for teaching a combination of sociology, history and government. In the course of the conversation a rather
perceptive student opined that he thought that schools were nothing but indoctrination
centers. I was a bit taken aback by the
observation, but I recalled reading in my history that the French Minister of
Education proclaimed at the end of the 19th century, as the state
had wrested nearly complete control of education from the church, that “now we
will make good nationalists of
them”. I found myself unable to mount
an effective reply and simply nodded in agreement. It is hard to see it in any other way.
From making
‘good christians’ to making ‘good nationalists’ the educational system is
designed to meet the demands of a certain agenda, whatever that agenda may
be. It may be parochial, or it may be
public, but whatever it’s agenda it is certain to entail the adoption of some
belief system leading to the veneration of certain established institutions
otherwise known as the “Box”. To think
outside the “Box” is to risk heresy, ending in certain chastisement,
marginalization or outright banishment.
To that end, certain forces are at work to see that the material is presented
in an ‘acceptable’ if not official manner.
In the United States, agencies like the Texas authorities comb every
textbook to see that they meet their preconcieved ideas of what the true
history and governance of this country is, reflecting true ‘American’
values. It is like that in every
country. And so atrocities, betrayals, chicanery, and outright mendacity are
expunged from every textbook leading the young to believe that theirs is a
‘chosen’ lot in life be it Divine Providence or the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the
nation into which one is born.
I first
became aware that something may be amiss when I visited the “Farm” in my
youth. In previous posts (see “Northwest
of Custer” and “Return to Custer”) I have mentioned that visits to my
grandparents were seen by the ‘folks’ as much as an opportunity to teach as it
was a time of reaquaintence. During one
such visit my great Uncle Lionel closely questioned me concerning what they
were teaching at my parochial school. I
could tell by his body language and the nature of the questioning that he was
dismayed if not appalled. It was the
complete rejection of Natural History, I would later come to appreciate, as
well as the implied war on science that he could not sanction. I returned to
school with, I think, a greater peripheral vision but when I answered a
‘science’ question stating that the world was 4 billion years old, I was not
only marked down but singled out for reprimand.
And so began
my long questioning of what were presented to me as established ‘truth’. I remember the tirades against the forces of
‘evil’ prominent among them were the works of Marx and Nietszche. I began to suspect the interpretation and,
when I emerged from my ‘studies’ later in life, the first thing I did was
purchase a copy of every work still in print by these two writers I just had to see for myself.
As I
suspected, what was presented to me so authoritatively turned out to be a mere
characterization of their works, betraying a blinding ignorace of what these
people were trying to say. I suspected, even as a boy, that perhaps the truth
was more encompassing, now I found myself face to face with the genuine article
and it was revealing.
Nietszche in
his work “Thus Spake Zarathustra” has the protagonist coming from the mountaintop
and dispensing his newly formed observations concerning the human predicament
to anyone who will listen. Soon he
gathers a group of followers who take his every utterance as nearly Divine
Revelation. Zarathustra becomes uneasy,
continually protesting that “I have not been understood”. Finally, in exasperation he warns his
followers that one should not be about the business of erecting monuments lest
one be slain by a falling statue. And so
it is. Every writer, every thinker, must
be painfully self conscious. Every
philosopher or theologian must be continually vigilant lest he be laid waste
not only by his opponents but by his very adherents.
Nietsche
warned his readers that he was not the answer, but possibly only a steppingstone
in the long quest for truth. “To
disagree with him and to know why”, as Kaufman his translater would so
succinctly and aptly put it, is the real challenge facing every reader. It is the real challenge and the real
pleasure in reading any great work. To critique
it instead of blindly and submissively accepting
or rejecting is the great treasure. By reading such works with such an
approach one can engage in a kind of dialogue with the greatest minds of
humankind. But alas, that is not how one
is taught to read in any school I’m familiar with.
Indeed it
gets worse. I am currently near the end
of reading Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire.” I found a complete set of this work at a bookstore in
Winder Georgia and had to lay my hands on it.
This was another work held up as testament for the need to follow the
‘straight and narrow’. Gibbon, we were
told, was one of the truly great historians. He wrote, we were assured, that
the reason the Roman Empire fell was that the people no longer followed the
true religion and that decadence had finally been the undoing of the great
historical experiment. If only the
Romans had been faithful to the Church….. I discovered reading this work that
my suspicions were well founded for Gibbon wrote no such thing. True enough, the empire fell from within as
the people no longer felt it was worth defending against the barbarian hordes
and in fact hired the barbarians as mercenaries to defend the empire for
them. So it was, to a great degree, a
loss of faith but it was a loss of faith in the efficacy of the state, not a
religious question. To cast the fall of
the Roman Empire as a theological question, stemming from a growing
‘degeneracy’ and loss of a moral compass, is to greatly strain the historical
record.
In fact, I
was to discover later, that was precisely the theological cunundrum confronting
St. Augustine. How could it be that the
Empire began to unravel soon after the adoption by the state of Christianity as
the state religion. For Christians
everywhere this was the great paradox.
Augustine did his best to explain it away but Gibbon, I was later to
learn, never made the attempt.
So began my
introduction with historical criticism creating as it did a lifelong passion
for the subject. Entering the public
schools I was likewise harranged by my instructors concerning the shortcomings
of so-called ‘heresies’. Nietzche never
got much attention in the public schools largely because they aren’t fixated
with his “god is dead” proclamation, but Marx—considering the “Cold War” at the
time—got more extensive, if not less biased treatment. There were classes in Marxist “Dialectical
Materialism” and “Historical Determinism” and, of course, his wild
prognostications were always fodder for ridicule. We even held a “Communist Classroom”
in our “American Problems” class in High School as a way of demonstrating what
school may have been like behind the Iron Curtain. We each had to choose a ‘Russian’ name, and
sit ramrod staight and salute when called upon.
I took the name of Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov a point lost on my peers as
well as my instructor.
By reading
Marx I discovered many more dimensions.
First his historical analysis as to the orgin of modern Capital and his
statistical discription of Capitalism in Dickensonian England are worth reading
simply because they are so accurate, a point the ‘folks’ back at the farm
impressed upon me all those years ago. Of all the criticisms leveled at Marx no one
takes umbrage with his economic analysis.
Engles has been widely criticised for his methodology, not so Marx who
was the better historian and economist. Secondly, there is the Marxist Theory of Alienation,
a part of his thinking so far reaching and so penetrating so as to be at the
very foundation of his philosphy. The
alienation of man, town from country, rich from poor, even from himself lies at
the very foundation of the moral—yes moral—outrage that permeates his
work. In the eyes of Marx the Capitalist,
by appropriating a portion of the fruits of a man’s labor, steals not only his
wealth but his personhood. He is
expropriating part of the very ‘selfhood’ of the laborer. This is a deeply
penetrating part of Communist ideology, as formulated by Marx, but wholly
ignored in the treatment of it—if the subject gets any serious attention at
all—by our schoolmasters and schoolmarms.
Back in
college we were tasked with reading the ‘historical novel’ “The Sotweed Factor” by John Barth. It is an 800 page tome cast in Colonial
America (Maryland as I recall) which we had to read for one of our weekly book
quizzes. In it the Protagonist teaches
school for a short period of time observing that the mark of a good instructor
is to always be one chapter ahead of his students. I soon began to suspect that
my instructors were running the race only a mere chapter ahead of me.
And so it
is. It’s not simply that my instructors in a parochial primary school were
passing along theologically driven characterizations, its that none of them, be
they private or public, primary or secondary, or even university level had ever
read their material in the original (or translations of same). In high school history and government tend to
be taught by the coaches of the sports teams, meaning that they majored in
physical education in college and minored in the subject at hand. This means that they rarely got much past the
required ‘survey’ classes in college, putting them precisely one chapter, more
or less, ahead of the class. That’s why
Americans have no idea what a Communist is, let alone a Socialist, or
Fascist. They have no idea the
difference between an authoritarian regime and a dictatorship, let alone
between a democracy and a republic. This
is why the Teabaggers can characterize our President as a socialist, a
communist and a fascist, all in the same sentence. And this is why most Americans don’t know
that the words “Capital” or “Free Market” never appear in the founding
documents but the word “Regulate” or varients of it, do.
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