That makes sense. His piece on higher ed in n+1 is reasonable
http://nplusonemag.com/bad-education
but it is obviously restrained compared to his Twitter Id (could we call it a Twid for short?)
> During that notorious Jacobin debate, Harris likened free college tuition to "a reading room in a prison." That's what prompted me to make the jerking off gesture captured on video. (As the Goldman Sachs elevator tweeter said recently: "Nothing is more succinct and articulate than just doing the jerk-off hand motion.") Fucking easy for him to say. As Christian Parenti pointed out to me after the event, Malcolm X educated himself in a prison library. But Malcolm H is too busy hating old people to give a shit about that.
I forgot that was what spawned the gesture. Rightly so.
>
>> The book "Class Dismissed" for
>> instance, makes the argument that education is a poor lever for
>> correcting social inequality. It's true that even this lever seems to
>> be under attack, but perhaps its worth letting it go if we can strike
>> closer at the goal of eliminating inequality.
>
> Let it go in favor of what?
fair enough. That was cavalier of me. my thought was, well if the goal of education is general social uplift, and education is as under attack as all other social institutions, maybe we're fighting a rear-guard battle: better to just fight for expropriation then divide the spoils into renewed social institutions if we ever win. But on reflection, this makes even less sense. Education and culture are the only way to generate the appropriate response to this crisis - and keep alive the flame for the coming generation. I suppose there are a variety of institutional frameworks through which this could be provided, but something like it will probably be necessary.
This battle is sometimes exhausting: feels like triage of a body politic bent on suicide. At some point you start questioning which organs to save. It was silly to consider getting rid of the brain. I've moved back to Texas recently. Maybe it's something in the water here.
Sean