{"id":2353,"date":"2012-07-01T11:03:13","date_gmt":"2012-07-01T17:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/?p=2353"},"modified":"2014-09-12T11:50:41","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T17:50:41","slug":"what-it-means-to-be-truly-educated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/2012\/07\/01\/what-it-means-to-be-truly-educated\/","title":{"rendered":"What it Means to be Truly Educated"},"content":{"rendered":"Approximate Reading Time: <\/span> 4<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

This is an older article posted on FB by Ian Bogost<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He’s right. It is worth the read. It gives a very good account of what is happening to teachers in the US. Some of that inevitably spills over here too.<\/p>\n

The paragraphs below particularly caught my attention:<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they\u2019ve removed students\u2019 aptitude and motivation as factors,\u201d said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. \u201cThey seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class\u2014an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,\u201d he said, \u201cthey have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it\u2019s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It\u2019s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors\u2014poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition\u2014are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.\u201d<\/p>\n

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one\u2019s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals\u2014themselves.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,\u201d Socrates said.<\/p>\n

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love\u2014love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you\u2014but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside\u2014including religious laws\u2014are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe greatest evil perpetrated,\u201d Hannah Arendt wrote, \u201cis the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say \u201cI can\u2019t.\u201d We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe greatest evildoers are those who don\u2019t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,\u201d Arendt writes. \u201cFor human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur\u2014the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

via Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System | Common Dreams<\/a>.<\/p>\n