Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> I know we've sparred over this before, but this notion that education
> is mostly harmful just isn't true. Sure there are diamonds in the
> rough,
It also is insulting for those millions of workers who fought (and some died) for the right to an education.
Moreover, what those 'diamonds in the rough do is strive to get an education!! It happens that part of a recent pen-l post of mine is perhaps relevant. -- 60 years ago this spring I met a great uncle, who near a half century earlier yet had organized sheepherders in Montana for the IWW. He was quite cheerful despite having been losing battles all his life. His library was mostly the old Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, but also included a 2-vol edition of Emerson's essays, the CM, and Stalin's Foundations of Leninism. Quite a life for someone whose parents had kicked him out of the house and refused to send him to high school because he had rejected xtianity.-- Among those blue books were works by Voltaire, Schopenhauer, H. Spenser, etc.
Ideas emerge from human practice rather than fall from the sky or leap fullblown from someone's brain, and this is the very crucial grain (or several grains) of truth in the false proposition that they percolate from "below." Moreover, that "below" is a bit insulting to the very people it is intended to praise. In the summer of '55, right after my first semester of grad school, I worked at the Detroit Transmission Division of GM (operating a gear-shaver), and spent quite a bit of time talking to an 'older' man in the department. (Scare-quotes because from present vantage he was a young man.) I was startled one day when he launched into a short speech urging me not to drop out of school. Clearly, he had had experience (probably relatives and perhaps his own) with young men who were tempted to drop out of school as soon as they got a good job.
And still more: self-contempt is not a politically healthy emotion. It is not healthy in tenant-farmers or hotel-maids, and it is no more healthy in Ph.Ds, engineers, or accountants.
More on "filtering up." The practice, the struggles, of the peasants and peasant-craftsmen of Attica made _techne'_ pervade the very air that Athenians of all classes breathed, and techne was the generating idea of the philosophies of the Athenian thinkers -- but it was those 'educated' (and mostly reactionary) thinkers who extracted techne _as an idea_. The idea did not filter 'upwards' because no one 'below' _had_ it AS AN IDEA. It was in their practice, not their heads. Parmenides, Protagoras, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle made that practice an idea.
Carrol