[Peace-discuss] WaPo: Liberals, Dems, Women Abandon Afghan War

Fri Aug 21 11:31:12 CDT 2009

The blame - and there is enough to go around - indirectly belongs to
educators along with the public.  The direct blame is probably more
appropriately assigned to  the Education Departments in academia when it
comes to the dumbing-down in primary and secondary education.  These
departments for years have focused on pedagogy and not on substantive
content and on administration rather than teaching.  Like in higher
education, the career ladder tends to be via a route that travels the
administrator path rather than one that goes the teaching path.  Many
persons known to me were trained to be administrators and after a few years
in the classroom - if they stay in education - become administrators because
that is where the better pay and benefits are and where the power and
authority within the system lies.  I am not sure if this is cherry picking
of a sort leaving the less competent and brilliant  to do the teaching or an
instance of incompetence and lack of skepticism and creativity rising to the
top; but the net result is to produce a tendency toward conformity and lack
of ball s to be skeptical and create problems - be they practical,
political, intellectual, or academic.

Since teachers are the ones who for the most part teach the next generation
of teachers who eventually will replace their teachers, it is easily to see
how an the educational system works to perpetuate and maintain the
dumbing-down process.  A second factor is certainly the propensity of the
public to view all levels of academics to be not only training as opposed to
education but practical training rather than intellectual investigation; and
this has discouraged critical thinking & enquiry and focused on memorization
of facts and techniques, practical problem solving and methodological
recipes (e.g., skill sets) for employment in industries of the adult working
world.  This is coupled with the publics' use of primary and secondary
schools as daycare centers and babysitting services for parents who are too
busy working or doing other things or as locations for teaching citizenship
and civics where youth are to get their parenting rather than the parents
having to actually do the parenting themselves.  Like the police, schools
have become the catchall institution for providing all kinds of services
which may be tangential to the core missions but now had supplanted the core
missions.

Even the products of our art schools and schools of design have become
focused on pedagogy and the uncritical  apprenticing of students to the
styles and techniques  and tastes that the mentors deem fashionable and
demand.  They teach their students to be art teachers and administrators in
art education first, curators, administrators, and art critics (i.e. talking
heads in art) within the art establishment  secondly, writers on art  and
art history and criticism thirdly, and servants to the corporate world's
advertising, marketing, and public relations needs designing either graphic
art projects that help identify the corporations and/or market their
products and services, commercial objects de art to sell to consumers, or
decorative work to hang in the offices and lobbies, be installed in lobbies
and courtyards, or fine art pieces to show the status of the corporation or
the corporate establishment's elite and serve as investments or tax breaks.

At the university level, education has become the handmaiden of corporations
and industry for the most part training students to be good corporate
citizens who conform to and follow the dictates of the corporate culture, to
have the skill sets that the corporate world wants and needs, to do the
research that is wanted and used by the corporate world (usually at public
expense) to generate corporate and governmental services and products that
make them a profit, and to become the next generation of replacements for
the current faculty and administrators.

From: E. Wayne Johnson [mailto:ewj at pigs.ag] 
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 8:22 AM
To: LAURIE SOLOMON
Cc: 'Morton K. Brussel'; 'Peace-discuss List'
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] WaPo: Liberals, Dems, Women Abandon Afghan War

The dumbing-down, Mediocritization, and hypnotizing of Americans has been
going on for years.

I agree with everything Chomsky is saying except for blaming it on the
teachers.

It's the sheeple who are at fault.

The poets and the painters can make them feel but its really hard to make
them think.

On 8/20/2009 9:19 PM, LAURIE SOLOMON wrote: 

But Mort I was a teacher for several years albeit at the Jr. College and
College level and not at the primary and secondary school leave.  My
experience was one of extreme pressure by  administrators and colleagues to
tone down my expectations and demands of the students, to teach in a
non-controversial manner material that did not challenge convention, and to
teach practical  things and not indulge in non-practical theoretical
speculation and critical questioning of established beliefs and principles.
Many potentially good creative skeptical teachers either buckled under due
to not wanting to fight the pressure or left teaching out of frustration.

As for your having a couple of good skeptical teachers, no one said that
they never existed and do not now; and yes they do leave lasting
impressions.  As you note, "even so, 'delicate' questions were and are too
often avoided."

From: Morton K. Brussel [mailto:brussel at illinois.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 6:09 PM
To: LAURIE SOLOMON
Cc: 'C.G.Estabrook'; 'Peace-discuss List'
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] WaPo: Liberals, Dems, Women Abandon Afghan War

So, become a teacher!

I've had a couple good skeptical ones in American history classes in both
Junior HS and HS, and they made lasting impressions. Even so, "delicate"
questions were too often avoided. 

On Aug 20, 2009, at 4:49 PM, LAURIE SOLOMON wrote:

Ah; but the rub is that students grow up to be the teachers.  As teachers,
they perpetuate the non-skeptical and non-questioning attitude, which now is
replaced with real professional and economic vested interests in not
questioning as opposed to when they were students and it was a matter of the
authority and power relationship between student and teacher that kept then
uncritical vessels for the ranting of their professors.  It would appear
that each generation of teachers teaches the next to be less and less
critical and more and more accepting of the established discourse.  Each
generation of teachers teaches the next generation of teachers to be dumber
and dumber relying more and more on a highly in-the-box technical
perspective with great reliance on technology over critical intellectual
thinking. The more things change the more they stay the same.

From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net
[mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Morton K.
Brussel
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 3:08 PM
To: C.G.Estabrook
Cc: Peace-discuss List
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] WaPo: Liberals, Dems, Women Abandon Afghan War

Chomsky not so infrequently over reaches, as in the assertions below. 

Chomsky puts students on the same level as their teachers; most students do
not have confidence enough, knowledge enough, or are not well read or
experienced enough to challenge what is being told to them in their classes.
They do not have enough self command to say to their teachers: That's a
ridiculous lie. You're an idiot . 

Perhaps Chomsky is projecting onto others his own experience, but I don't
believe that that's an extrapolation that should be made. 

But yes, I would agree that students generally do not have enough skepticism
inbred in them in their prior lives.

One should also be skeptical of Chomsky, all the while respecting generally
what he has to say.

--mkb

On Aug 20, 2009, at 2:32 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

I don't think he goes far enough. I'd say there are certain things it
wouldn't do to think. A good education instills in you the intuitive
comprehension--it becomes unconscious and reflexive--that you just don't
think certain things, things that are threatening to power interests.

Not everyone accepts this. But most of us, if we are honest with ourselves,
can look back at our own personal history. For those of us who got into good
colleges or the professions, did we stand up to that high school history
teacher who told us some ridiculous lie about American history and say,
"That's a ridiculous lie. You're an idiot"? No. We said, "All right, I'll
keep quiet, and I'll write it in the exam and I'll think, yes, he's an
idiot." And it's easy to say and believe things that improve your self-image
and your career and that are in other ways beneficial to yourselves.

  _____  

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