Tag: Education

Chris Hedges: The Pedagogy of Power

[Headline image: Plato and Aristotle debate in the school of Athens]

Chris Hedges’ latest article at ScheerPost offers a great explanation of why we need to strengthen liberal arts education in this country, not gut it as is currently happening everywhere.

All across America, history, English, and philosophy departments are being downsized or eliminated altogether.

Conservatives want to reduce higher education to streamlined vocational training, while liberals want to sift it through the latest, reductionistic filter of identity politics. Both are equally ruinous.

Thomas Jefferson is purported to have said that democracy’s survival depends on having an educated populous. Truer words have never been spoken, as the current state of American politics attests.

Check out this excellent essay at SheerPost written by Chris Hedges about the foundational significan of education for a functioning democracy:

Here is an excerpt:

Plato

The ruling classes always work to keep the powerless from understanding how power functions. This assault has been aided by a cultural left determined to banish “dead white male” philosophers.

I am standing in a classroom in a maximum security prison. It is the first class of the semester. I am facing 20 students. They have spent years, sometimes decades, incarcerated. They come from some of the poorest cities and communities in the country. Most of them are people of color. 

During the next four months they will study political philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli,  Friedrich  Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Locke, those often dismissed as anachronistic by the cultural left.

It is not that the criticisms leveled against these philosophers are incorrect. They were blinded by their prejudices, as we are blinded by our prejudices. They had a habit of elevating their own cultures above others. They often defended patriarchy, could be racist and in the case of Plato and Aristotle, endorsed a slave society.  

What can these philosophers say to the issues we face — global corporate domination, the climate crisis, nuclear war and a digital universe where information, often manipulated and sometimes false, travels around the globe instantly?  Are these thinkers antiquated relics? No one in medical school is reading 19th century medical texts. Psychoanalysis has moved beyond Sigmund Freud. Physicists have advanced from Isaac Newton’s law of motion to general relativity and quantum mechanics.

You can read the entire essay here.

Inventing the Novel and Human Rights: What Happens When the Image of God Reads Compelling Fiction

Where did the belief in universal human rights come from?

Why did western societies ever begin to write documents proclaiming that “all men (and women) are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”?

What was the original spark of humanitarian instinct that eventually gave rise to a document like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

The Judeao-Christian belief that all people are created as the Image of God certainly had an important role to play. But many “Christian” societies have embraced this biblical doctrine without any practical implementation towards eliminating torture, injustice, or discrimination.

So how did the broad-based, societal belief in establishing “human rights” for everyone equally as a matter of law spring into life?

Professor Lynn Hunt teaches modern European history, specializing in the French Revolution, at UCLA. She has written a fascinating book called Inventing Human Rights: A History (W. W. Norton, 2007) where she argues that the impetus towards universal human rights arose with the creation of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century.

It is difficult today for us to imagine a time when the fictional novel was a new invention, a new form of literature. It is also difficult to understand the novel’s wild popularity among the masses.

Almost everyone who could read consumed them whole. And many who could not read had someone read the latest novel to them.

One of the major social benefits of this craze was the rise in empathy for others, especially others who were not like you, others whom the reader did not know personally, first hand.

An important question this book raises for me concerns the possible connection between American xenophobia, and our hard-heartedness towards warfare and the suffering of “foreigners” and the decline in American literacy.

Nearly 1/3 of American’s did not read a single book last year. Only 20% read

for pleasure on a daily basis. When we do read, it is on average for 17 minutes per day.

Below is an excerpt from Inventing Human Rights (emphasis mine):

(Novels) drew their readers into identifying with ordinary characters, who were by definition unknown to the reader personally. Readers empathized with the characters, especially their heroine or hero, thanks to the workings of the narrative form itself. Through the fictional exchange of letters [the epistolary form of novel was especially popular] taught their readers nothing less than a new psychology and in the process laid the foundations for a new social and political order. . . Novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy. In this way, reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative. Can it be coincidental that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century – Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761) – were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of “the rights of man”?

. . . Empathy only develops through social interaction; therefore, the forms of that interaction configure empathy in important ways. In the eighteenth century, readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women. As a consequence, they came to see others – people they did not know personally – as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning process, “equality” could have no deep meaning and in particular no political consequence. The equality of souls in heaven is not the same thing as equal rights here on earth. Before the eighteenth century, Christians readily accepted the former without granting the latter.

 

Professor Hunt’s observations raise troubling questions about the demise of literacy and the liberal arts in American education.

I fear that the increasing turn towards “professionalization” as opposed to cultural literacy in education will pave the way for a harsher, more xenophobic, aggressive, inhumane vision of the world for American society.

But, then, maybe we are already there…

“The Appallingly Bad History Taught at Fundamentalist Schools”

Among the several blogs that I follow is William Trollinger’s Righting America: A Forum for Scholarly Conversation About Christianity, Culture, and Politics in the US.

His most recent post, titled “The Appallingly Bad History Taught at Fundamentalist Schools,” is a review including brief excerpts of a new book  by Kathleen Wellman titled Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters (Oxford, 2021).

Here is a brief excerpt, but I encourage you to look at the blog — or, better yet,  buy the book — to see the long list of shocking, Right-Wing punditry that passes for “objective” American history in far too many private, Christian schools:

If you know anything about history, this post will make you laugh and/or cry.

And/or make you angry. 

And the latter emotion is particularly appropriate.

In her book, Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters, Kathleen Wellman (Professor of History at Southern Methodist University) reports on world history textbooks produced by Abeka Books (published by Pensacola Christian College), Accelerated Christian Education [ACE], and Bob Jones University Press [BJU]. These textbooks are popular among fundamentalist homeschoolers and are often adopted at fundamentalist Christian schools. 

For example, the Answers in Genesis K-12 school, Twelve Stones Academy, uses the BJU text.

Wellman heroically examines these texts in great detail. Why did she subject herself to such a painful task? As she notes in her introduction, these fundamentalist textbooks

have an influence that has extended far beyond the confines of fundamentalism . . .  Their views, as indeed the textbooks insist, increasingly define American Christianity. These curricula’s narrative of Christian history has been grafted onto right-wing political and economic positions. And right-wing political interests have promoted these views. (2)

Here are just a few examples from Hijacking History:

  • “These textbooks label [ancient] Africa the Dark Continent . . . ‘the fear, idolatry, and witchcraft associated with animism’ [Abeka text] prevented African economic and cultural development” (74).
  • “The Abeka curriculum claims the Greeks made no progress in science, even though Greek scientific works set the standard for virtually every science for over fifteen hundred years . . . [More generally, Greek] civilization was fundamentally flawed, and their efforts ultimately produced no benefits.” (83)

Click here to see the entire post.

The continued replication of the repulsive racist, colonialist, imperialist trope describing Africa as “the Dark Continent” illustrates both the longevity and the currency of a western imperialist mindset in certain sectors of American society.

Furthermore, aside from the fact that the African continent was once populated by thriving, complex, urban-centered civilizations, I am stunned to discover that there are history textbooks asserting that the ancient Greeks never produced anything of “any benefit”?!

My, oh my.

No wonder Donald Trump has hoodwinked so many conservative Christians in

Raphael’s “The School of Athens” depicting Plato and Aristotle in debate

this country (many of whom are heavily invested in the Christian school and home schooling movements).

No wonder many parents are raising a ruckus and protesting at local school board meetings against Critical Race Theory and multiculturalism in the classroom.  These are the families fleeing public schools for the same Christian academies and home school networks now using horrible history texts.

And the dumbing down of America, particularly American evangelical-fundamentalism, continues unabated.

We are well into the dark ages of American cultural history.

Thucydides could teach them all a thing or two about history, while a little time with Aristotle could help them learn how to use their minds.