People are the worst and the world is going to hell fast. What can you do? It’s a difficult situation. Things aren’t going to get better until we get better, but how can we get better? I don’t think it would be particularly effective, nor does any complex reasoning or scientific research show that people are likely to be happier if a particular reform is put in place. .
In the 5th century BC, Socrates and Confucius, the earliest systematic political thinkers we know, attempted to describe an ideal society. The poignant question posed to both men was, given the flawed material of which human social systems are made, how could we get to a better place from here. The young man Socrates speaks to is initially skeptical that the utopian society he describes is actually possible. That is, we need to remanufacture citizens through education.Or as Heather McGee and Richard Ray said new york timesThere was a flurry of opinion articles about what education is these days. “Public schools are for making Americans.”
Make us American! On that, apparently, everything is agreed upon. But there’s been a lot of disagreement about what exactly we make, when and how we make Americans out of the tender flesh of toddlers.
Well, but education is also about ‘financial mobility’, ‘care’ (day care, health care, emotional support, etc.), ‘learning to read’ (weird past article by Emily Hanford), ‘nature connection with” (unlikely), “achievement”, “hope”, etc. Socrates said that it can inculcate the virtue of selflessness (by teaching lies, if necessary). needed, they argued. As the cliché says, education holds the key to the future. It may not really fund us. But it will have us fighting over it until the end of time.
It’s ridiculous when you think about it. The people in charge of making better people will become the bad people of today. That is, we. In the next generation, we will reproduce all true values, even the values we profess and the empty and glittering abstractions people follow. Times leading the discussion. The fundamental problem of Socrates and Confucius was, more or less, how a perfectly structured and permanent hierarchy of power and resources could be maintained. Teaching children was the answer. Honestly, it’s still the answer.Socrates and Confucius argued that the main goal was to make people follow the experts. Times Writers agree on that.
In this sense, I am skeptical of the transformative power of education. I don’t think it will work. You might think this is a hopeless attitude: if education cannot create a better future, how can we create a better future? think. Because even if you turned all your children over to me and the Ministry of Propaganda, you’re saying there’s a limit to the adaptability of those little idiots. I guess. In other words, we are all willing to do what we are told. This is a version of what Maggie and Ray call in their article the “solidarity dividend” of education, a non-beneficial feature of education. To create social cohesion.
But I don’t think education can completely subjugate and remake human beings. That is why children are the hope of the future. Their individual heads are never completely isomorphic to the system of power into which they are embedded.
One of the reasons this doesn’t work is that schools are trying to teach our kids “who we are,” says McGhee and Ray, and incessantly Biden, and (especially) that we’re Americans. But as you may have noticed, the question of who we are and who we are not as Americans is at stake. Different Americans, different regions, different political action committees have very different ideas about this.
People with this level of rhetoric don’t want to debate what we should be in the future or what policies we should put in place. Arguments, in all cases, take the form of both or all sides telling us all. Who are we. And it proceeds by trying to recreate us, perhaps as usual.
Everyone wants to control their child’s curriculum and thus has the delusion that they can control their future. They want to control what is in the library. They want to control bathroom signs. They want to connect every child’s mind to whatever their little vision or whatever their passionate political commitment dictates. There is no “America” in this quaint sense, because there is no agreement as to what
This “we as Americans” thing must go. Just because “as Americans, we are all already X” doesn’t mean we have to be X. How much effort do you have to make to create antecedent facts? So take a moment to make sense of it. And if I was looking for someone to tell me who I am, American or not, it wouldn’t be Biden or anyone else at his job. We are ambiguous, fragmented, chaotic and subjective. Too complex and too empty to be motivating or informative.
A troupe of manipulative applause as a basis for guidance or otherwise. You’re outspoken that you’re here to tell my kids who they are. There is some comfort in not knowing how to do what you are trying to do. Perhaps learning to read is a more plausible, less aversive and riskier goal than crafting an identity.
— Follow Crispin Sartwell on Twitter: @CrispinSartwell
Comments
Post a Comment