Culture Against Critical Thinking: Help Wanted

Walter C. Veit

The crisis in American education is nowhere more apparent than in the entering college student's colossal ignorance of basic political and economic facts. Otherwise intelligent and eager students fall flat on their faces when examined for their knowledge of simple facts about the American economy, much less that of other countries. Recent history might as well be that of the ancients. Their inability to locate place on maps is scandalous, if not dangerous. One is tempted to go on and on reciting the dismal statistics, but what is the point?

On the other hand they know an enormous amount about popular culture, MTV and the like. They are, as one critic wrote, society smart, but not school smart. They are not genetically inferior to their counterparts in Westem Europe as one student seriously, if somewhat apologetically, stated, or generally lower in native intelligence, but they are dumber. Why should this be the case?

I think that the answer is painfully obvious, if somewhat unpopular. I believe that we have systematically dis-informed our young, building in, as Thorstein Veblen observed, a trained incapacity. It isn't a simple passive stupidity about social, political and economic institutions, but rather deliberate neglect. Schooling has systematically weeded-out the critical, penetrative and analytical components of what an education has to be if it is to be worthy of being called education. There is hardly a day that passes without reading about a book-banning by some very local school board. This amounts to politicization as surely as if it had been done at the hands of a political party. In lact, even before the fundamentalist right organized itself to capture control of many school districts, the very nature of the local board insures that an intellectual blandness would prevail. I would be tempted to think that our problem is simply one of letting mass education attempt to do what it is not capable of doing, but a comparison to successes in other world-wide settings puts that idea to the lie. Political control of the schools may be inevitable, but it becomes a special problem when the political possibilities are as narrowly focused as they are here in the United States. Consider, for example, the fact that political participation in the U.S. has declined to levels of 30-40%, which guarantees that participation is reserved for elites. Consider also the fact, and this is the most significant point, that our political system makes for extreme stability at the cost of new political initiative or ideas. Furthermore, we have a set of historical circumstances that has virtually eliminated the informative function that a genuine left would bring to the political debate. Our reliance on a center-right common sense creates a mind-numbing consensus that results in mediocrity. The really exciting issues are barely imagined.

The long history of popular animosity to critical questioning of American institutions is bound to have had a dampening effect on the teaching of history, economics, political science and the social sciences in gencral. Americanism, for example, which was a part of the curriculum in Florida high schools through the 1960's, was an unthinking reaction to the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped this country fiom the 20's almost to the present day. That such jingoism should have been a part of the curriculum seems hard to believe until one examines the stated purposes that were given as a rationale for such a program. To clearly and unequivocally prove the superiority of the American way of doing things, (read: free enterprise system) was the unashamedly chauvinist defense of such a mindless curriculum. When seen in the context of the traditional purposes of the social studies, which were expected to indoctrinate Americanizing values, it becomes understandable. But that such simplistic and intellectually insulting values should be still abroad in the college population seems an anachronism. The Cold War is over. Viet Nam is on the verge of becoming a vacation destination, and countries previously identified as "developing" are surpassing our academic productivity, their economic development notwithstanding.

On the other hand, our critical press has never been more healthy. I get a solicitation to subscribe to magazines and journals on both the left and right of the political and economic spectrum every time I open my mailbox. We haven't had any academics burned at the stake for some time now, and even the attempt to demonize the tepid liberalism of some democrats by the present congressional majority isn't getting much of an audience, except perhaps in the politically born again South. Maybe this is the legacy of the armistice in the Cold War. Academics may be more free than they have been in some time to pursue truth for the sake of truth, to really exercise the practice of academic freedom, (except, perhaps, in Newt's classroom). Such conditions should make us more able than we have ever been to develop the critical faculties of our students, but I don't think that we are approaching any critical mass in this regard. Where is the obstacle?

The task of single-handedly creating a critical consciousness by educational institutions is, of course, unrealistic. Critical awareness in and about the polity has to come from political organization. Our inability to create an alternative to the Republicrats in the political arena has consequences for schools and universities that range from the radical privatizing schemes coming from the Republicans to the benign neglect of the Democrats. Schemes to reinvigorate the curriculum, raise standards for both teachers and students, and/or lengthen the school day and year, noble as they are, will not make a dent if the cultulal infrastructure hammers us with its counter-productive anti-critical messages that tell us to lighten up, lay back, and go with the flow. The current being, of course, a drift away from the hard questions on thc solid ground of ideas. Logic, reason, rationalitv and seriousness of purpose and toward the miasma ot pop culture and intellectual debilitation.

The gross defect of an unchallenged market industrial capitalism (which is the real force majeure in everyone's life) is its ability to give the illusion of social organization while all the while creating social anarchy. Sophisticated corporate organization at the top among the elites is no substitute for grass-roots political and social organization on the bottom. In fact, just the opposite is true. The industrialization of society substitutes a privatized, anti-social, individualized existence for social, meaningful possibilities. The key is to recognize the built-in prejudice against a critical political consciousness and thereby bring about a leveling of the playing field. In my own experience critical thinking begins by challenging the taken-for-granted attitudes that students bring to the classroom about their immediate and distant social relationsllips. For example:

Do they have the necessary vocabulary to discuss social class?

Do they relate their own school experiences to power and institutional relationships?

Are they uncomfortable about critical questioning of economic and social institutions?

Do they have any idea of the means by which other western social, political and economic systems operate to solve problems that may be virtually identical to our own?

Do they reflexively view economic and social criticism as an attack on the nation?

Do they demonize public institutions (i.e., government) without recognizing the consequences that global corporate organization has on their daily lives? (The Oklahoma City tragedy is a case in point).

Regarding this last point, the inevitable reaction of students to the question: "What institution(s) most attect your life?" is to cite government as the problem. No wonder we have such a dangerous flirtation with public anarchy, while totally ignoring the pervasive, intrusive and amoral power wielded by private bureaucracies. Whether or not the private sector has overtly contributed to this self interested condition is not debated. How could it be when there is no recognition of the original problem of corporate intrusion cited above?

There can be only one explanation for this culturally dangerous condition. Existing social anarchy has to be countered by political organizations that are responsive to community needs instead of distant global corporations. Indeed they need to create community first. I know that this is a circular argument, but somehow there has to be a way to circumvent logical organizational pitfalls. Are we seeing the first stages of an ultimate social collapse into a surrogate media community, with not-so-latent populist fascistic elements, for example? Such a scenario, of course, is functional to the compulsive personal consumerism that increasingly dominates life in America, much less the rest of the world that will let industrial capital in, which virtually no state that I know of is really capable of preventing anyhow.

The almost total investment in power and control that Fascism requires makes for a very hospitable climate for the grass-roots organizations that are now surfacing, mostly in the hinterlands but also in virtually every state in the nation. Such fascistic elements are the inevitable consequence of the political vacuum that we seem to be moving to when tiny minorities of the population participate in political processes. When analyses are done of the class interests represented by this participation we see that it is inversely related to wealth and income. Having destroyed the radical left by a century of union-busting and hysterical anti-communism, we are letft with no place to go for populism but to the riglht. The frustration that leads to such choices is genuine even if its ideology is false, and in a moral sense, evil.

And here we are left with a philosophical conundrum. The increasing electronic stridency from a commercial mcdia goes unanswered. It is not challellged by thc left because there is no left. It is not answered by liberals because liberalism is rooted in rationality, scholarship, reason and science, while reaction finds its origins in sentiment, tradition, belief and emotion: two opposing cultures that obey different rules. Only an institutionalized left would have the power to create economic, social and political alternatives capable of challenging the Babbitry of local school administration and its resulting mediocrity. Trying to get students to think critically about the tweedledee-tweedledum politics of America turns teachers into cheerleaders instead of critics. If any of these points is the least bit valid, we may have to see a return to the radicalism of the sixties. Perhaps the dangerous flirtation with the right will generate such a consciousness, but lets hope that the medicine doesn't kill the patient before the disease runs its course!