Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Thu, 10 Sep 1992 17:37:56 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Reply to bob pasker (3): can one tell where a shadow ends

There are but three possibilities:
(1) Things are as they seem; therefore the social scientist should ascertain
how they seem, then shut up.
(2) Superficial apperances disguise underlying realities; therefore the social
scientist should explain the underlying realities and what about the latter
accounts for why things seem the misleading way they do.
(3) This we fold in half, giving a twofold possibility:
a. There are superficial realities overlaying and disguising underlying
appearances.
b. There are underlying appearances overlaying and disguising superficial
realities. Neither of these will get funded so we relegate them to the
Philosophy Department, where they handle knowledge which costs nothing, for
jurisdictional adjudication between Ontologists and Epistemologists.

In actual social science, the investigator promises (2), which the funding
agency believes it wants, while delivering (1), which the funding agency does
in fact want. The investigator furthermore carefully does this atheoretically,
so as not to give the game away to himself or herself. Specifically, we have
thus far argued:

1. The self-evident axiom holds that academic performance is situated in the
discrete organism. It is however rather more correct to say that target level
of [the organism's] relative social Inferiority [in adulthood] determines
academic performance. This target level is implanted subculturally, mediated
via home environment, at a very early age, that is, prior to school entry.

2. Refirm of the schools is perpetually being urged as a relief to blocked
possibilities for upward mobility. Rather, we argue that parental upward
mobility is the cause of "good schools," that is, schools geared to the
hereditary transmission of high socioeconomic status, which is done primarily
by socioeconomic segregation, assuring the students that their privileged
condition is the natural order of things. Also, it is absorbed by the students
that aspiration to even higher socioeconomic status is rational, possible, and
feasible; hence there is a certain and predictable advantage in acquiring what
the school will teach. In turn:

2a. We ensure the restriction of academic competition by systematically
ensuring lousy schools for the vast majority of children, say four out of five;
and actually dangerous schools for the one third or more children destined for
permanent menial servitude or unemployability. In turn:

2b. We convey the entirely fraudulent impression that Upper Middle Class status
or higher in later life is the outcome of essentialist-based superiority of the
Successful. The alternative is to posit that we are all pretty much alike, and
that variability along the academic dimension is the outcome of prior social
selection. Or as the slogan had it in Paris, May 1968, "There is neither smart
nor stupid; only free or unfree." To put this another way, the absence of
essentialist-based superiority would account for a vast but unperceived amount
of social repression required to keep parents, schools, and children as
socially, physically, and intellectually, respectively, as we appear to observe
them as.

3. The prospect that socioeconomic status, class, and race distinctions,
fortified with such care and massive facticity, might turn out to be fake,
flimsy, and readily given the lie by the self-directed efforts of the
ostensibly Inferior themselves precludes any serious effort to mitigate or
reverse the trend toward exacerbated inequality. It also precludes any
effort to do anything about the lousiness of the schools. Which thus sustains
the illusory and illogical proposition that inequality and the schools are
causally related such that lousy schools cause inequality as opposed to lousy
schools having been caused by inequality: Get rid of the inequality; the
schools will reform themselves to ensure that hereditary inequality is
precluded thereafter.

4. The one thing we know with certainty about the optimal institutional forms
of the education industry is that hierarchization and regimentation should be
reduced at all levels. What is more, hierarchical repression to the end of
"motivating" students to learn by coercion (supplemented by bribery) will have
the paradoxical effect of inducing resistence to alienated learning by the
sence of some kind of moral obligation among students to do as little work for
their grades as possible. Getting away with it would be, apparently is at the
college level, striking a blow for liberty.

4a. Rather than that the rat, the student, should find the cheese, high
socioeconomic status, waiting at the end of the maze, the successful completion
of the formal education curriculum, it is more likely, at least it has never
been tried so cannot be argued as unlikely, to stimulate educational motivation
by the decoupling of socioeconomic status from the academic certification
attained through the formal educational curriculum. The prohibition on academic
poverty should be lifted. Recreational dilletantism should not be punished by
exile from academic life. The practice of reading books and writing for no good
reason at all should be tolerated or encouraged.(*) Secular monastic orders for
Protestants, Jews, atheists, and neathatic religions ("New Goddess" creeds
which women may from time to time invent) may be envisioned, not because we
hold any brief for "poverty, chastity, and obedience," but for the reason that
"Shopping, cleaning, and paying for the upkeep of an Upper Middle Class
standard of living with its myriads of consumer goods which must be acquired
with care and never used except for display to visitors if one is actually
working, is *too big of a hassle* and cannot be endured." (The author, Eviction
Address, 1978.)

"If the World out there is all that Real, you know, maybe *you* should go out
there and check it out." (ibid.)

(*) Note: It's the publishing part I hate.

Sincerely,
Daniel A. Foss,
who has 1 announcement and 1 question.
Announcement: That phone number I gave out? Turns out, in my part of Asia the
phones don't work either, on account of state ownership and corrupt bureaucracy
(including the manager who is Up On Charges including suppressing free speech,
which was a student leaflet calling him repressive). This part of Asia lies
between India and China, call it Bhutan, which has had numerous recent human
rights violations.

Question: If Clinton gets in, are the welfare mothers required to do Community
Service liable to be sold apart from their children?

DAF
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