V.3               Ruinous Restrictions in Education

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental.                                                      W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1965)

In the past one hundred years, the inventive mind of humanity has given us the means [productivity, birth control, health care, universal education] to make our lives worry free and happy. However, this potential has not materialized. . . .
     The resistance against absolutely necessary progress is rooted in the unfortunate traditions of nations that are passed on through the educational apparatus like a hereditary disease from generation to generation.  
                                             Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
 
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
                                   Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
 
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
                                     Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
 
 
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
                                               Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
 
Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing."
                                                George Orwell (1903-50)
 
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
                                   James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987)
 
We should be teaching students how to think. Instead, we are teaching them what to think.
                                       Clement and Lochhead (1980)
 
Although mental poverty is pernicious and could be readily eradicated, it is self-servingly promoted by powerful institutions, maintained by tradition, taught by economically dependent educators, promoted as bliss by some religions, and unknowingly accepted by the multitude.
                                                               This writer
                                                               
Introduction
A. Factors Responsible for Restrictive Education
B. Consequences of Mental Poverty
 
Introduction
It is the birthright of every mind to have the opportunity for developing its full potential. Part of this endeavor is that education satisfies the mind's natural desire for knowledge of the universe and the human condition as well as the thinking skills to apply this information. "Where this is denied," an observer notes, "morals suffer with the injury that is done to the intellect."
     To the detriment of universal freedom and well-being, however, the beneficiaries of unearned profits, power, prestige, and other privileges, uphold the self-serving, ancestral status quo through maintaining mental poverty. Coerced by their power, instructors have the dilemma to choose between teaching impotence by withholding intellectual skills, the social truth, and prostituting themselves by teaching muddled thinking, the trivial or irrelevant, and even social falsehoods.
     As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the "antisocials" are a calamity to humanity because their brutish behavior, while a source of fabulous wealth and power for a few, withholds the means for a quality life from the many. The elimination of their existence and practices may be accomplished once mental competence becomes available to the many when genuine education replaces the widespread indoctrination by schools, colleges, and universities. These institutions often promote the social acceptance of the unscrupulous, selfish practices of these powerful players.
 
A.        Factors Responsible for Restrictive Education
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) summarizes the key motivation for restrictive education concisely when he explains that the cave man's hostility toward the stranger is retained in our times by the hostility toward:
. . . . strange and unusual thought, nay, even of thought itself when it follows truth beyond the boundaries delimitated by the requirements of a given social order. Thought today is only too often compelled to justify itself by its usefulness to some established group rather than by its truth. Even if revolt against misery and frustration can be discovered as an element in every consistent work of thought, instrumentality in bringing about reform is no criterion of truth.
Researchers from the Foundation for Critical Thinking confirm this when they point out:
Concerning schools
Schools traditionally function as apologists for conventional thought; those who teach often inadvertently foster confusion between convention and ethics because they themselves have internalized the conventions of society. Education, properly so called, should foster the intellectual skills that enable students to distinguish between cultural mores and ethical precepts, between social commandments and ethical truth. In each case, when social beliefs and taboos conflict with ethical principles, ethical principles should prevail. 
Concerning teachers
Unfortunately, in philosophy* and the social sciences, most instructors play it safe and remain in the realm of the abstract. Students will thus not acquire the content or logic of the abstraction. The often unjust status quo is thus maintained and the college or university fails one of its fundamental functions, namely, to act as a catalyst for progressive social change.
 

Concerning self-government: Free self-determination or autonomy--reliance on one's own judgment--requires a sound mind in a sound body through a sufficient amount of educational and material goods. But both of these goods are now zealously withheld by special interests. As Diana T Meyers contends:

One point is indisputable, however, and that is that current educational practices and social economic arrangements are not designed to enhance autonomy. . . . it will be necessary to dismantle those social and economic institutions that depend on docile acquiescence in preordained roles. Rather, socialization practices aimed at awakening and cultivating autonomy competence must be coupled with a social and economic climate that supports the exercise of this competence.

For an analysis of who these autonomy-withholding special interests are, and how they accomplish their deeds, see the other chapters in The Abysmal Antisocial.

 

*Concerning the current teaching of philosophy: There is a world of difference between what academic philosophers can teach and publish and what we encounter in the real world. By aspiring to theory, modern philosophy has distanced itself from practice. Practice can survive without theory, but philosophy without considering practice becomes irrelevant without the nourishment of practice--it lacks nutritional value for the pragmatic life. With respect to philosophy's neglect of holding up a mirror to society, Abraham Kaplan (1918-93) notes in his work The Pursuit of Wisdom:

There remains to be considered the criticism of philosophy as essentially an acquiescence in things as they are, bad as they may be. . . . The charge of quietism against philosophy has some substance. It is the business of philosophy to focus attention on predicaments, which are precisely those features of existence that cannot be altered. . . . But the charge of quietism must really be laid at the door, not of philosophy itself, but of those unreasoning or confused philosophies which present as predicaments what are only the problems arising from human ignorance, folly, or vice. . . .

By contrast, the ancient Greek philosophers faced life honestly: Although their knowledge by today's standard was limited, they gave free play to the facts of this world, the social truth, and reason. This approach yields genuine philosophy because:
It makes education intelligible because it makes life intelligible; and it is welcome by every unperverted mind  because it answers to the desires of the mind . . . . It desires to do what is right for the sake of doing what is right; to know the truth for the sake of knowing the truth . . . . Without this knowledge our teaching must be dull and incoherent and unconvincing, and our children will rebel against it, as, indeed they often do. . . . [Often] They may not ask philosophical questions of their teacher or themselves; but there is a philosophic curiosity unsatisfied in their minds which causes them to be unsatisfied with all that they are taught.
                                                   A. Clutton-Brock (1868-1924)
 
B.                       Consequences of Mental Poverty
Physical fitness centers everywhere,
for about the body most care a lot.
Mental fitness centers nowhere,
for about the mind most care not.
                                This writer
 
At the high school level:
Since most high school students do not go to college, a satisfactory educational preparation for life should be completed by the time they graduate after 12 years of education. However, a large majority of students do not acquire this competence on account of restrictions in the system. These individuals are kept:
  • From becoming autonomous, that is, acquiring the skills that make a citizen fundamentally competent and informed to make sound decisions on a personal level and on matters which effects society, for instance, voting.
  • From acquiring intellectual skills including those offered by the scientific method.
  • From a mind-liberating/mind enabling education that would facilitate inferential, and evaluative reading. For reading 'between" and "beyond" the lines requires a relevant knowledge base and critical thinking.
  • From connecting crucially relevant knowledge into an objective worldview.
  • From moral thinking grounded in ultimate values and the means to achieve them.
At the high school and college level:
There is a lack of intellectual honesty and relevancy to real life in subjects where the truth could be corrective or even detrimental to the unjust status quo as maintained by economic, political, and religious ideologies. This prevents the social truth from surfacing in subjects such as economics, philosophy, sociology, and psychology. Goethe's dictum:
    None are more hopelessly ignorant than those who falsely belief they are educated
applies to many who hold high school and college diplomas. Moreover, it includes many of the instructors since they are the product of this traditionally closed system.