How To Radically Revamp Our Schools, Which Breed Mental and Political Passivity
By
David Gottfried
When I was in the 8th Grade, one of my subjects was social studies. The topic for the year was the history of the entire world from the nascence of civilization until the present day.
I clearly remember our study of Ancient Greece and the section on philosophy. The book told us that Greece had philosophers, who were known as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, and that they were great. Our teacher even helped us remember who came first, second and third by telling us to think of the word Spa – and so Socrates came first, and then Plato, etc.
Of course, when you are supposed to study the whole of human history in one year’s time, you really don’t have time to study much about anything.
But you do have time to learn one word: Great.
I was taught that Greek poetry, drama, pottery and Greek everything was great. (But they didn’t tell me which Greek diners had the greatest Moussaka)
Our classroom reminded me of a Television commercial airing at the time in which a cartoon character, “Tony the Tiger,” shouts that Kellog’s cereal was GREAT. Ditto the study of Rome and China and Great Britain. Everything was great.
I learned that I had to remember the names of things that were great without ever learning why they were great. And this made me furious. Why should millions of young people have to memorize the names of people who were supposedly great when they were given no evidence of their greatness. And the more we exalted these Great, great men, the more we felt small because we were told to honor these men without being told why they were honorable.
After one has spent the entirety of the eighth-grade learning that the entirety of human civilization is very, very greet, and that you are very, very small, one will fall in love with Alice Cooper’s rock song, “School’s out for summer.”
I luckily did not succumb to anti-intellectualism. In large measure this was because when I was ten, in 1968, I was very attracted to the rising and rebellious youth culture, and this fueled my interest in politics, and after becoming engrossed in political conflict, one cannot help but begin to ponder the history that preceded and provoked the conflicts.
In other words, I saw history as having real life consequences. I understood that French colonialism in Indochina led to the Vietnam War which led to the spectacular anti-war riots I witnessed, and longed to participate in, on my television screen.
In schools, however, history is bled dry of everything that is vital.
For example, we are taught that this is a wonderfully free country, and this impression is given even when teachers are ostensibly radical because their leftist critique is so tepid and tamed. Our teachers never make an effort to challenge the benighted conception that at heart America is as good as gold. I wonder if most high school graduates know that until the first part of the Twentieth Century, most American elites thought that democracy was a bad idea; that until recent times not only blacks and women, but also white men without property, were not allowed to vote; that criminal convictions, through most of our history, were obtained by getting confessions by brutally beating prisoners; and that until the Bill of Rights was deemed binding on the States pursuant to the incorporation doctrine of the 14th amendment, individual states were free to act like, and often were, police states. Hell, before the 1920’s, the first amendment was not deemed binding on the States and it would have been perfectly legal for the State of Alabama to declare that the official religion, in Alabama, was Baptism.
But there is a way to make the teaching of American history and government meaningful. For G-d’s sake, if the class coincides with a presidential election, bring the presidential election into the classroom (That, in part, is how I got hooked: I was in awe of both Bobby Kennedy and Eugene Mc Carthy during the presidential primaries in the Spring of 1968.) If a republican candidate says that a particular issue should be left to the states, you can edify your students with the ceaseless conflict between Federal power and state power and its origins in the constitution and the Civil War.
Sometimes, I think that classes are designed to make the citizenry passive, pliant sheep. For example, while students are taught a lot of mushy, meaningless molasses about the right to vote, they are continually disenfranchised by political machines. And most people don’t know a thing about this.
For example: Until 1976, in Democratic Presidential primaries in New York State, the names of presidential candidates were not on the ballot. So in 1968 you would see neither Kennedy’s name on the ballet nor Mc Carthy’s name on the ballet. Instead you would only see the names of the delegates who were pledged to support Kennedy or Mc Carthy, and other candidates, and there was nothing on the ballot to indicate who those delegates supported.
The politically connected bastards knew the score, knew which delegates supported which candidates, and they dominated the show. Most Democratic voters never, ever voted in Democratic Presidential Primaries. Some Democrats walked into the voting booth, and upon finding that the names of the Presidential contenders were not on the ballot, felt like they were idiots and never voted again.
If a social studies class discussed how people are fooled and flummoxed by our Undemocratic democracy, course work about democracy and liberty will seem contemporary and vital.
Of course, there are other things to teach besides history or that amorphous thing that is now called social studies. Consider psychology and how that might be introduced to students.
Don’t give them a survey course which will have one paragraph summaries of 500 different psychologists. And by all means don’t give them some politically correct balderdash in which certain vague and vulgar words, such as sensitivity, consciousness, pro-active, and life-affirming, are uttered ad nauseum. Instead, give them Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Contrary to what your professorial political commissars might have you think, it is not a tedious, heavy-handed recitation of patriarchal dogma. It is, instead, a little bit like the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in that it shows you how A really means anti- A, how things are not what they seem. It is deliciously destabilizing.
Likewise, when one teaches philosophy, don’t give them the sickening survey course in which all the philosophers will come together into one amorphous, ugly, grey blob reeking of stereotypical academic impotence, awkward and imprecise language and incontestable irrelevance.
Sometimes, by delving into the specifics of a particular philosopher, one can learn how a great, great man was really, in some ways, a goddamn shlemiel and this will remind students to think critically and never assume that every dead guy was great.
For example, when I was in Hebrew School, they told us, all the time, that Maimonides was a great Jewish sage. Why was he great. No one seemed to know.
When I was an adult, I read Maimonides. Two examples of his anti-diluvian thought: A) He said that infant boys had to be circumcised because the penis is an organ of aggression, and by cutting the foreskin, we are symbolically chastising male aggression and cutting macho down to size. (He sounds more anti-male than stereotypical Amazonian dykes on motor bikes.) B) Maimonides was hailed as a great doctor as well as a religious sage. As a clinician, he was a real fuss pot. He said that one should not eat solid food, and then consume a beverage, and then eat solid food again, and then drink a beverage. Like some crazy Jewish momma from a Philip Roth novel, he said that eating, and then drinking, and then eating again “confuses the system.” He said one should eat all the solid food, and then drink the entirety of the beverage. Or drink the beverage and then eat the solid food. He sounds as obsessive as a kid who is terrified of walking on the cracks on the sidewalk.
If you want to familiarize students with philosophers who burst with brilliance and glamour, give them one dazzling work written by just one philosopher. For example, imagine what could happen if students were assigned Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s prize-winning essay of 1750 on the arts and sciences. (The Academy of Dijon had offered 1000 Francs for the best essay on what the arts and sciences had done for France.) Rousseau said that the arts and sciences made life worse. He dared to say that the arts had “strewn garlands of flowers round the iron chains of tyranny.” Yes, the Baroque era had lots of gorgeous art, but that gilded world was propped up by the auto da fe, the inquisition, the rack, the lettre de cachet. They wanted you to marvel at the art so you would forget that the crown and the clergy, which justified Kingly sadism by means of the “Divine Right of Kings,” starved you, raped your children and consigned you to an early death. And the arts and the sciences in the aggregate take us away from nature, from that which is vital and real, and keep us suffocated in a surreal world where young men appear to have white hair because they wear white wigs. Give that book to your students, and they will meet the scholarly equivalent of the Rolling Stones song, “Street Fighting Man,” and they will never hate learning again.