Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Tue, 8 Sep 1992 23:26:33 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Educational reform, or the act is fat, uh, parent to the thought

Second Blow Against The Empire:
(a) If you are paying them, learn something when the teacher is not looking.
Pass it on. Don't tell how you found it out. See what they do to you. Chalk
it up as a learning experience.
(b) If they are paying you, think when the boss is not looking. That goes for
everybody, even "the girls in the keypunch room." The software is playing with
you and you can even figure out how to do something like shut it off. But not
too long, hear, because the boss needs that hour by hour keystroke count.

Many years ago, before there was the natural order of things as we know it
today, which is worse than the natural order of things as we were too young
to see was the natural order of things during the last days of High Bourgeois
Civilization, there were people called Intellectuals. The last days of High
Bourgeois Civilization were the 1950s, when we were taught that divorce did
sometimes cause the premature end of the nuclear family but there was such a
thing called Marital Therapy. Nobody asked what the disease was. But it was not
true that Charles E. Wilson, Secretary of Defense said that what was good for
General Motors was good for the country. He said that, "for years I thought
what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."

   There was a President named Dwight D. Eisenhower, still fondly remembered
well into his second term for de-Joe-McCarthification, the abatement of Right
Terror. Capitalism was still Delivering The Goods (at no extra charge), never
suspecting this very thing would be its undoing. Most observers of the social
scene were enthusiastic, but at the same time they were bored. The first social
criticism appeared to charge that there was an excessive amount of conformity
which made life miserable for people whose business was to teach what was good
and right and true. Students were called The Silent Generation, accused of
privatization and over-psychologizing. David Riesman, one of the first
sociologists to attain celebrity status, wrote a book called The Lonely Crowd
which was a sort of Grand Theory of Conformity. His book sold well, hell, it
sold Big, because in large part he replaced the vague nonsensical words
ending with -oriented to more emphatic ones ending with -directed, without
meaning anything more than they otherwise would.

C. Wright Mills was another sociologist, who had the sloganeering gift of an
advertising copywriter: "cheerful robots," "power elite," "crackpot realism."
His best-sellers, White Collar and The Power Elite, were both more vivid and
even less supported by evidence than Riesman's book was. In his memory the
American Sociological Association annually gives the C. Wright Mills award to
the promising young, that is, middle-aged, sociologist who has written the most
esttemed if boring book in the judges' estimation.

Back in school, graduate, Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse hung around the shop
a lot. Marcuse did History of Ideas. Only Goodman was the Intellectual pure and
simple, that is, one of those people you simply never had occur to you where
they taught. He wrote books students read even if not Required, which was truly
as the young people say today Awesome: Growing Up Absurd, Compulsory Mis-
Education, Community of Scholars, People or Personnel, Communitas. He was good
preparation for Bob Dylan, and there was more Paul Goodman than anything else
in the Port Huron Statement (1962).

   ****

Today, not teaching is tantamount to not having visible means of support, and
Intellectuals have been liquidated as a social category, having been sopped-up
spongistically into the Professionals. In the mess we are in today, having all
your eggheads in the basket of Professionalism is the surest possible way to
fall over the precipice into societal catastrophe: Those who combine the skills
of addressing audiences with hot tempers capable of arousing those audiences
and the capacity to inspire in the audiences that confidence in their own
stature as thinking beings *whom no natural law condemns to be forever in the
audience* are not encouraged in the schools, the Institutes, the Think Tanks.

Social movements always seem to first become manifest in schools, universities,
and in poorer countries the high schools too. This is due to the nominal role
of schools as nurseries of Thought. There is understood to exist a contradict-
ion between hierarchialism and parade-ground disciplinarianism and whatever the
school is supposed to be doing.

Learning occurs in the flatworm, the rat, and the pussycat. The human is
however so problematic, learns much and much too fast of the wrong things,
that no learning may be construed as having officially occurred without a
Teacher having observed that it so transpired and reporting this, recorded
officially upon official records, to an administrative official. That the
school unteaches certain things, and what the most desirable things to unteach
are, may be found by cursonry inspection of the Devereux Elementary School
Behavioral Rating Scale, and suchlike, all the way up to Letters of Recommenda-
tion, favourable or otherwise, on behalf of doctorate-holding job applicants.

[As the reader who has followed this column over the years already knows, one
thing taught by the school which is the presupposition of everything else the
school teaches yet is so obvious that no provision is made in the culture for
the failure of the possessor of a given formal academic credential to learn it
exists, "looking the part," is something nobody considers. Nobody needs to
worry about it. It is automatic. Except for a maximum of three people, and I
o lord, am one. "Looking the part" is the term used by John H. Gagnon of SUNY
Stony Brook. Erving Goffman alluded to "Normal Appearances," but he was dealing
with social environments and settings. Scheff would have called it something
below a certain threshold level of "residual deviance." This writer likes
"Global Behavioural Styles." There is some such thing which is meet and fitting
for the Target Level of Relative Social Inferiority which got stuck in your
head so early in life you cannot unstick it at my age while, upward mobility
being a praiseworthy thing in general, the imaginary electrode in question
may be introduced much later. How to look the part, Upper Middle Class, say,
in graduate school, is so easy that psychotics do not appear to have much
problem with it. The Severely Disturbed do it in a breeze, and this is in
some places or has been at certain times, thought an asset.]

The alienated approach to learning, you cannot by definition learn, we teach,
conduces to the implicit behavioral assumptions of hierarchized society
in the wider society: No work can occur without monitoring by management. Those
left to themselves will do nothing at best, steal the enterprise's property
more likely, come late to work even where there is no synchronized labor
process requiring arrival on time in the first place or leaving the house at
all for that matter for reasons other than social contact vs boredom, and
most certainly not do what they are supposed to do which they could not figure
out for themselves. None of this is original on my part.

Even the conservative adviser to Bill Clinton, next President of the United
States, realizes that management in business has been evolving rapidly from
the over-hierarchized state it had reached by the 1950s and 1960s to more
flexible forms. Less hierarchy, more responsibility, more reward for initative.
But he still assumes that academic credentials mean what they say, that having
a degree means you have a skill and can do something nobody without said
degree can do. Foo.

Much more likely is that the job candidate has successfully passed through a
charade which conceals the substance, "Hi there, I am Upper Middle Class,
here is the table manners, the clothes, this is a picture of the standard of
living, the Normal looking wife/husband and children for this year, the
mortgage, and the 43 closer friends." Skills may make a marginal difference
in a large number of cases, a large difference in a marginal number of cases.
The pool of applicants has been artificially narrowed by implanting a Target
Level of Relative Social Inferiority in some which is designated by shorthand
as Smart, in others by Stupid. There is very little real, essential, difference
among us. The greatest difference among us is, we do not construe ourselves as
thinking beings. Only the Upper Middle Class has been permitted to tell itself
it has minds; the rest do not.

The enterprise gets its human raw materials in a form wherein they are
amenable to getting told, "We are not paying you to think." And those they
ostensibly *are* paying to think are certainly not being paid to think after
work and if compelled to think will charge you.

The kind of school which will be needed after capitalism turns itself into a
very strange mess, continuing to make big bucks off itself until the very
last second, or however the End transpires, may have to be invented empirically
(trial and error, mostly error), because nobody has been worrying about it.
Paul Goodman is dead, never lived even.

Daniel A. Foss
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU