6/15/2005, 12:01 pm
Bush's blonde-haired, blue-eyed (coincidence?) lappie
Look back through history, you'll see that every tyrant whether it be Mussolini, Hitler or Jefferson , started off by changing the education system. Indeed, public education was not invented for the people. It was invented so as to allow the establishment to brainwash the masses with bourgeois propaganda.
Since the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the creation of modern 'progressive' schools and universities, standards have improved 10 fold. Whereas in the past lecturers were obsessed with minor nonsenses such as spelling, grammer, history, and numeracy... modern schools and universities encourage the growth of the inner student, like a flourishing flower.
"Never is the question asked, is our children learning to read?"
Piaget regarded the child as a scientist 'constructing his own reality', developing increasingly numerous and sophisticated 'schemas' (cognitive mental models of the world) through the assimilation of new information, and where new information could not be assimilated, the 'accomodation' of new information through the modification of existing schemas.
Jean Piaget
Piaget argued that children learn from their own actions rather from observation and as such should be allowed to pursue tasks, rather than simply being a passive observer / listener / reader. As such, according to Piagetian doctrine, teachers must allow children to work things out for themselves, they should simply be left to 'get on with it'.
Marx did not achieve proletarian consciousness by listening to his teachers, he had to work it out for himself.
Where once the education system was part of the bourgeois ideological superstructure, so ingeniously identified by Gramsci and Pink Floyd, indoctrinating and brainwashing the masses...
"We don't need no education.
We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher, leave those kids alone.
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall."
... it now serves as a revolutionary proletarian institution, liberating the minds of successive generations of free thinkers. A classic example of the new generation can be found in the form of the REAL President of the United States, John Kerry. The product of a progressive educational golden age, Kerry, like Foucault, realized that there are no historical facts, only passing perspectives. This is why he kept changing his story regarding his medals, purple hearts, SUVs etc during his Presidential campaign. He realized that there was no grand, all embracing meta-narrative to encompass his own life experiences, only fleeting reconstructive simulacra's.
As such, every child should recieve an A regardless of what they say, do, or write on any given day. To punish them for 'wrong' ideas is akin to the nightmare world depicted in George Orwells '1984', where proletarians are imprisoned for 'thought crimes'.
But the Republicans refuse to accept this. While in the past they chuckled as working class children failed, today they sneer as the working class children suceed. Schadenfreude has faded into its happiness-hating opposite, gluckschmerz.
These kids today don't know they're born! In my day everything was harder.
Orwell once wrote: "Freedom is the right to say that 2 + 2 = 4." He was wrong. Freedom ought to mean the right to say that 2 + 2 = 5. How else will our intellectual discourse ever achieve a Kuhnian 'paradigm shift' if not from experimentation?
As Nietzsche so ingeniously pointed out (before contracting syphilis and being sent into a mental institution for bestiality) it is the free spirit, the intellectual deviant who drives the evolution of human ideas.
By shaking things up, by challenging the rules, and rejecting the accepted intellectual order, the free spirit beats his own path, and paves the way for others to follow in new, innovative directions. The Republicans fear the free spirit, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to destruction. They seek a return to the bad old days of Fascist 'teacher centred learning', and 'school discipline'. Margaret Spellings must be stopped before it's too late.