A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of a totalitarian state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and party workers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of masters and serfs.
Teachers are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at fast food restaurants. We spurn real teachers- those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential- and replace them with instructors who teach narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is my point. Education has become a fraud in itself. It works no better than a deregulated financial system.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don't want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare them for clerical jobs. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts- those who march to the beat of their own drum- are weeded out.
Up until very recently, the principal of a college was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. But now we have learnt to produce instant principals who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? What quality of leader needs a 'leadership academy' which these ignorant principals now attend? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children's colleges? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the education system and to instill fear. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and religious blockheads."
Good teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our new education system- whose primary concern is certainly not education- are delighted to replace real teachers with poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. It advocates personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
"It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything," said a teacher, who fears reprisal from administrators if they knew he was speaking out. "It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why the hedge fund managers got suddenly so interested in the education of the state? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher."
"I cannot say for certain, but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect," he added. "Within a few years, we've been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. New teachers cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination."
They try to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiotic notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these. They have succeeded in turning colleges into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it's 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 the education system. It's how you destroy one.
The truly educated are self-conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They have self-esteem. 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. Thought is a dialogue with one's inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority, who do not want to be asked. They remember who they are, where they come from and where they 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 want to live with criminals within themselves in the end.
"It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself," Socrates said.
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 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; love thy neighbor as thyself; or
Teachers are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at fast food restaurants. We spurn real teachers- those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential- and replace them with instructors who teach narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is my point. Education has become a fraud in itself. It works no better than a deregulated financial system.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don't want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare them for clerical jobs. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts- those who march to the beat of their own drum- are weeded out.
Up until very recently, the principal of a college was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. But now we have learnt to produce instant principals who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? What quality of leader needs a 'leadership academy' which these ignorant principals now attend? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children's colleges? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the education system and to instill fear. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and religious blockheads."
Good teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our new education system- whose primary concern is certainly not education- are delighted to replace real teachers with poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. It advocates personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
"It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything," said a teacher, who fears reprisal from administrators if they knew he was speaking out. "It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why the hedge fund managers got suddenly so interested in the education of the state? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher."
"I cannot say for certain, but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect," he added. "Within a few years, we've been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. New teachers cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination."
They try to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiotic notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these. They have succeeded in turning colleges into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it's 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 the education system. It's how you destroy one.
The truly educated are self-conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They have self-esteem. 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. Thought is a dialogue with one's inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority, who do not want to be asked. They remember who they are, where they come from and where they 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 want to live with criminals within themselves in the end.
"It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself," Socrates said.
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 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; love thy neighbor as thyself; or
do unto others as you would have them do unto yo, but respect for the self. 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 above or outside- including religious laws- are 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.
"The greatest evil perpetrated," Hannah Arendt wrote, "is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons."
And 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 "I can't." We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. You must fear those who cannot think and there are many such around you.
"The greatest evildoers are those who don't remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back," Arendt writes. "For 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- the 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."
"The greatest evil perpetrated," Hannah Arendt wrote, "is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons."
And 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 "I can't." We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. You must fear those who cannot think and there are many such around you.
"The greatest evildoers are those who don't remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back," Arendt writes. "For 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- the 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."
Why do I pen this? To quote Wordsworth, " I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing."
Thank you and enjoy the rest of your week,
Love,
Prof. Dr. Alex Abraham Odikandathil
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