The Worth of Critical Education

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”-Socrates in Plato's Apology (38a5–6)

“If we are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for educators and others to develop a language of critique and possibility.”—Henry Giroux in ‘Pedagogical Terrorism and Hope in the age of Fascist Politics’

“Axios,” (ἄξιος) means in ancient Greek, “worth,” as in “weighing as much.” And speaking of worth, I want to add two new premises to the Nature is a Machine argument. 1.) Some machines are superfluous. 2.) Superfluous things are expendable because they are worthless. I will not write the premises in symbolic form.

In December 16, 1981 a janitor at the University of Portland shot and killed an engineering teacher. There were four more shootings that year at American Universities. In the last 5 months of this year of 2019 there were 15 shooting incidents resulting in four deaths, and 33 injuries. There were 44 gun incidents at schools so far this year alone. Human life does not seem to be worth much. And if humans are machines, they are ultimately expendable. The mechanical paradigm for nature is inherently a nihilistic universe having no intrinsic “worth” including the illusory ethical concepts of the Good, Justice, Democracy, and Human. The mechanical paradigm creates an axiological vacuum in which other ideological paradigms rush in to fill the void. In the case of American education that axiological void has been intentionally filled by fundamentalist market ideology that intensifies the dehumanization of persons and existential meaninglessness. The takeover of public education curriculum is not new in American history. Before the American Revolution public schools taught religion and ethics, but after the Civil War schools taught business ethics. Today’s fundamentalist market paradigm has, in the words of Dr. Henry Giroux, “…defined education in purely instrumental, privatized, and anti-intellectual terms.”

Professor Giroux’s view is becoming more common in American academia. Yale University Historian Dr. Matthew Frye Jacobson, and former president of the American Studies Association, said in a recent interview that students have morphed into consumers, “So instead of having liberal education develop citizens or humanists, it becomes a careerist, consumerist transaction.”  Students are no longer citizens, but consumers with a careerist attitude--a strictly instrumentalist natural-scientific reductionist attitude in which the primary modes of being are domination, competitiveness, exploitation, and materialist accumulation. Education and even the students themselves are commodities—like everything else in the market place. In this social reality only “‘consumer sovereignty’ and shareholder value are the measures of what is good.” Dr. Giroux listed the new scale of virtues and values as “the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism; dehumanization; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity;[15] the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture of lies; a politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over reason, the weaponization of language; a discourse of decline, and state violence in heterogeneous forms.”

Atomistic economic individualism replaces the values of communal democracy, empathy, freedom, equality, and knowledge. The school, “place,” is now the market place. The market place draw flies. Everywhere democracy, the community, and the commons are under attack so that every aspect of life is privatized and monetized thereby destroying the very social forms that make a free society possible. Giroux writes, “In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.”  Language is a public tool to interpret our private life. A private language is a contradiction in terms. Noam Chomsky notes that we use language ninety percent of the time to subjectively talk to ourselves, and the rest for communication with others. When private legal tyrannies such as the corporate form spread sociological propaganda, they enter our private subjective inner world to influence our thinking and behavior.

“If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth. Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.”—Herbert Marcuse in ‘One Dimensional Man,’pdf., p.129).

A degree from the best American Universities can cost more than a million dollars. But I do not mean “best” as in a place to learn, but “the easiest to bribe.” Why not simply buy a degree since it is essentially only a financial investment transaction. The American University system has turned into a vast speculative market for obtaining fake identities—it is what professor Williams Deresiewicz called “credential laundering.” 

“Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”- Professor Dr. William T. Kelley of marketing for 31 years at Wharton School of Business and Finance, University of Pennsylvania

Professor Deresiewicz wrote “Excellent Sheep,” as a critique of elite universities and the inflated egos of the wealthy students with their strong sense of “entitlement.” He gives important insights into higher education “privilege laundering” in an interview with Michael Schulson of Salon:

“But what’s happened in the last 50 years is that the meritocracy has in turn re-created the schools in their own image. They have created a system that took the meritocracy from what it was supposed to be, and made it what I refer to as a “hereditary meritocracy.” If your kid is going to get into one of these schools, with some exceptions, they have to be stuffed full of education resources almost from the moment they’re born, almost from the moment they start school.”

“… the college admission process is the way that we launder privilege in this country. Instead of saying, “You get to go because you’re born,” which is obviously unfair, we say, “You get to go because you have really great scores and grades and you’ve done a million extracurricular activities.” But the only way to get to that point is if you have rich parents. I mean, again, there are exceptions, but there are not a lot of exceptions.”

For the less fortunate education is has a predetermined course just like the student’s life is materially, and socially predetermined. Education becomes an endless series of instructions to be followed to avoid penalties without any holistic vision, or purpose except to complete a particular assignment. The teacher is merely a coercive emissary of a future employer who permanently records the student’s performance. Every activity is regimented including sports; swimming time is athletes of wartime when you attempt to drown your classmate. In short, sending your child to a public school in America is not unlike sending your child to a minimum-security prison. The end result is a well-behaved model prisoner with experience that might be useful in the future. The entire educational system is organized meaninglessness culminating in a disenchanted “withering of experience.” It is enough to make you want to put a bullet in  one's head. Tillich wrote that when the possibility of self-realization is denied, “Creativity is replaced by subjection to law—a characteristic of man in estrangement”(ST. Vol. II, p. 65). This kind of alienating environment is one of constant danger, demoralization, and depression resulting in absolute total blind rage. With such humiliating loss of human agency, it is no wonder the nihilist picks up a firearm and murders the superfluous—including one’s self. Nihilists expend the expendable. In this way the nihilist has created an identity, an immoral identity, but nonetheless a self-identity with meaning. He has beaten the competition, gained agency, and most importantly he won playing by his own goal-directed narcissistic rules. And power cannot do a damn thing about it. Joseph Stalin studied for the priesthood as a young man. The most dangerous people in the world are disillusioned idealists. This is the absurd logic of disenchantment derived from internalizing the Machine-Market paradigm as a life philosophy. 

Brother Pence, Saint Ayn Rand, and Christian Fascist Ideology in the Schoolhouse

“Donald Trump does not need to speak to the ‘Never Trumpers,’ some of my friends — or maybe former friends — who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country,”-- William J. Bennett, Reagan Secretary of Education 1985

Mike Pence is the Judas of this generation of American Christians. Just as Bennett kicked down the school doors to inject Fascist Neoliberal ideology, the Reverend Billy Graham insinuated his way into the fundamentalists churches bringing with him the pus which he presented as New Testament Christianity. The Rev. Graham publicly advocated the corporatization of Christian Churches on April 29, 1985 telling Pat Robertson’s audience on the 700 Club show that “[T]he time has come when evangelicals are going to have to think about getting organized corporately….” The Prosperity Gospel appeared as corporate Mega Churches like running sores on the body of Christ. Their theology was the same “bait and switch” used in reforming national educational policies: parrot arguments that will appeal to progressives for changing school curriculum, but switch to business rights. Instead of teaching Aristotle, they taught psychopathic Ayn Randian anti-ethics with a strong dose of uncritical naive realism.

I remember when as a member of a Pentecostal church the 700 Club program began airing on television. Little did I know this seemingly innocent religious program would become a force that Paul Tillich could described as “… demonry—if this word is to have any special content-occurs only in connection with a positive, sustaining, creative-destructive power...This is true also of the last great demonry of the present, nationalism.... National things receive sacral untouchability and ritual dignity. But just there demonization begins” (The Interpretation of History by Paul Tillich, The Demonic).

The Reagan Administration’s grunting wheezing farting galoot, William Bennett, injected market fundamentalist sociological propaganda into an already nihilistic worldview taught in schools. The Christian fundamentalists whole-heartedly embrace the mechanical paradigm of nature as much as 17^th century science. They engage in a particularly embarrassing and stupid apologetic to “prove” a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible—with religious trinkets made in China, a fragment of Noah’s Ark, a piece of ancient cloth, supernatural creationism, and other cheap money scams. Economic fetishism is transubstantiated into idolatrous religious object fetishism. Pence and Bennett advocate a heretical version of Christianity that the Nazis called “Muscular Christianity,” as opposed to “Feminized Christianity” which portrays Jesus as, in their words, “a lady with a beard.” Muscular Christianity is misogynistic making masculinity the paradigm of all virtues and women of all vices. This form of Christian fascism is a reaction against “perceived excesses in social equality and liberty.” No major fundamentalist church leader objected to the fusion of Ayn Randian anti-ethical system of “Wantism,”(“I want X; therefore, X is good) with the Fascist Neoliberal Prosperity Gospel. All the talk about ethics was designed to begin the privatization of public schools for profit that has lasted for 40 years, and we now know some results. Illiteracy is more profitable than costly education since the illiterate are more obedient employees, and uncritical consumers. The commodity paradigm is the true deity of this sickening historical form of Christian fascism: salvation is ultimately derived from high-level consumption. It’s a damn freak show.

 “Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.”—Marcuse (ODM, p. 61).

"My worthy friend, gray are all theories, and green alone Life's golden tree."-- Mephistopheles said in Goether's Faust,

Critical theory has many names such as negative dialectics, Kantian transcendental philosophy, Marxian critique of political economy and ideology, critical reason, critical sociology, and “critical pedagogy.” The key term is “critique,” as in oppositional thinking, of unveiling, and debunking. Critical theory means “being puzzled by the obvious,” although, I can attest to the fact such an attitude will get you fired from most jobs. Christian theology is partly responsible for unleashing this vexing force upon the world. Before going into that theological history we should distinguish two objects which philosophical critique has been applied:   

A. Critique as Reconstruction (conditions of possible knowledge):

1.     -Understand anonymous systems of rules (Kant, Wittgenstein).

2.     -Explains rule operation on objective sentences, generative nature of linguistic rules, action, cognitive insight, and conscious operation of human actors.

3.     – Achieving correct knowledge is the goal (Truth).

B. Critique as Criticism (system of constraints):

1.     -Liberation from particular, but not anonymous coercive illusions (Hegel, Freud).

2.     -Objectivity is questioned as having inbuilt deformity masquerading as reality.

3.     –Reveal false, or distorted consciousness (Emancipation).[1]

Critique emerged out of the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. Humanists and Reformers of all kinds used critique to study the ancient Classics and the Christian Bible. Both Catholics and Protestants applied critical reasoning to settle doctrinal disagreements, but over time this critical tool of reason became a force in itself independent of the churches and even biblical scripture. Truth gradually became defined as “rational thought,” and not what was true by biblical authority:

“The warring churches now found themselves confronted by a common enemy. A new line of demarcation had opened up between reason and revelation, and the word ‘critique’ acquired polemical overtones, which it was never subsequently to lose. ‘Critique’ came to be seen no longer as simply a symptom of the sharpening opposition between reason and revelation. It was viewed as itself the activity which separate the two sphere. It was the essential activity of reason… neither religion nor the legislature was exempt from its test. The process of critique acquired public force” (Ibid, p.16).

[1] This summary of critical reason is abstracted from “Introduction of Critical Sociology: Selected Readings,”edited by Paul Connerton, Penguin Books, 1976.

I want to describe an excellent example of a critical pedagogy that can provide a language of critique and new possibilities that will appeal to both educators and students including the religious and non-religious. Professor John Vervaeke of the University Toronto is currently giving a YouTube lecture course entitled  “Ep. 1 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Introduction.” Dr. Vervaeke is now at lecture episode 20 this Friday. I watched all 19 hours of lectures and learned a great deal so in my next post I want to briefly review his key philosophical concepts and language.

Leonard Cohen Recites "Listen To The Hummingbird"

Listen to the hummingbird

Whose wings you cannot see

Listen to the hummingbird

Don’t listen to me.

Listen to the butterfly

Whose days but number three

Listen to the butterfly

Don’t listen to me.

Listen to the mind of God

Which doesn’t need to be

Listen to the mind of God

Don’t listen to me.