“Professors of American history erect Gothic cathedrals of erudition on political axioms acquired from their fifth-grade “social studies” readers.”
Buried Alive, p. 63
Walter Karp
The insightful contributions of radicals such as Walter Karp and Angela Davis bring equilibrium to a chaotic world. But unless you happen upon their work during the course of your individual pursuits their ideas will never grace the threshold of your state-furnished intellectual property.
Much is made of the failing health of education in America today but the host of its most virulent pathogen is generally given a clean bill of health. I am talking about that body of work laughingly referred to as the core curriculum.
Who doesn’t regret hours wasted memorising sterilised information required by some board of education or sitting in detention for challenging the rationality of it? Troublemakers dismissed to “alternative schools” set-up in residential homes as the district continues siphoning tax dollars as if the student wasn’t ejected by the same system. The “pupil” checks-in at their convenience and a “teacher” distributes booklets an industrious fourth-grader could complete within hours; new literature dispensed like candy after a required waiting period. If you play along you eventually receive a real diploma. No GED nation, we!
Karp viewed modern school and its overflowing classrooms as enemies of the spirit, assembly-lines designed to manufacture servants for the American nation by keeping them ignorant of the American republic. I think he would have been disgusted by the incorporation of the alternative education ideal into the very system that made its formation as a haven for the study of real historians like himself so vitally necessary. Walter Karp’s The two Americas should be required reading for Senator John Edwards and he should be quizzed often on his grasp of the subject.
Increase the salaries of teachers who have morphed into cops, whose sole purpose is to grind its prisoners into acquiring a false sense of exceptionalism, knowing full well the clay shield crumbles when held up against reality? Where is the benefit in subsidising the proliferation of weapons of mass ignorance? Pile all the outdated, anglocentric literature into one school along with the daily prayer breakfasts held over corporately preserved meals followed by govt. dictated abstinence programmes. In the other give me the lessons of Chomsky, Zinn, and Rothbard, Mencken, Karp, and Davis (the list is long). Give me poetry readings uncensored by Laura Bush and music theory that would send Tipper Gore rushing to the halls of Congress. Hook me up with an organic grocer and I would bet a life’s income the brilliance of students B would far outshine the mediocrity of A. Better yet schedule regular debates between the two if you dare.
Angela Davis’s Book TV interview prompted a caller who wondered why in her education the name Angela Davis was never mentioned. We all know why. The question is why aren’t we doing anything about it?
While over at C-Span I noticed that next Sunday Booknotes will be featuring Hendrik Hertzberg and his new book Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966-2004. George Scialabba’s review for the September 23, 2004 issue of The Nation ends on this note:
The presence or absence of profit opportunities, not the presence or absence of freedom, is what has traditionally determined American policy toward other regimes.
I am glad Hertzberg has never understood this. If he had, he would have said so, persistently and emphatically–he is morally, if not intellectually, fearless. In that case, he would have had, I suspect, many fewer opportunities to write about everything else, and the abundant harvest of graceful, amusing, discriminating and public-spirited prose collected in Politics might not have come to be.
Here’s to those who plant and tend the acres he overlooked.
Updated 10/08/04 @ 12:44pm:
LYNNE CHENEY DECIDES HISTORY CURRICULUM FOR KIDS:
Lynne Cheney has won a battle to ensure booklets designed for parents to help their children learn history emphasize “American achievements” to her satisfaction. According to the LA Times, upon Cheney’s request, “The Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies” of the booklets, after Cheney complained they included references to the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed. The National Standards for History were created in the mid-1990s by scholars and educators to help school officials design better history courses. But, at the time, Ms. Cheney “led a vociferous campaign complaining that the standards were not positive enough about America’s achievements and paid too little attention to figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, Paul Revere and Thomas Edison.” Retired UCLA professor Gary Nash, who helped develop the standards, said destroying the booklets was “a pretty god-awful example of spending the taxpayers’ money and also a pretty god-awful example of interference – intellectual interference.”