> Learning to be stupid in the culture of cash
> by Luciana Bohne . 12 August 2003
>
> And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the
> CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's mature democracy.
My undergrads during the late 1990s knew almost nothing about the Cold War and very little about the 1980s, let alone the 1970s. But they can and do learn, if you tap into their sector of the Matrix.
> Then, one student asks, "Why?"
>
> Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world
> in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States,
> which apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the
> media, and cheered by Hollywood.
It's a little more complicated than that. First off, the mass media is the primary means of socialization nowadays, not the educational system, and the mass media is outrageously subversive these days. All the repressed political impulses are transmuted into culture: videogames and anime, hip hop and the Web. And all of these things are eminently teachable.
That said, there *is* a sense in which Bohne is absolutely right. I recently took the CSET exams, as preparation for becoming a California high school teacher (gotta pay the bills, and universities won't be hiring for decades). I passed three of the exams, but the readers failed me on the essay section. Folks, we're not talking SATs, these are seriously basic skills tests. Un-freaking-believable. Obviously, my mistake was using words, as opposed to cave-glyphs carved on hunks of granite. (It would make a great Flash skit: "Me Oog. You test. Me crush test with rock. Oog has spoken." "Get that man his credential.")
I can't get too upset, though, because those readers are probably in a high school classroom right now, doing the same thing they did to me, only to some talented young kid who will be forever turned off from literacy and reading. Can't let that happen.
-- DRR