The New Dumbness
Ordinary people send their children to school to get
smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It’s a religious idea gone
out of control. You don’t have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of
economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much.
I won’t ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I’ll let a famous American
publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a
little while. Be patient.
Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance;
now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of
relative stupidity like "gifted and talented,"
"mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is
rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely
ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial
doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing
purposes.
Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that
prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of
schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for
yielding wholly:
Critical
judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The
individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his
thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by
propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value
judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts.
|
The new
dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already
made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on
their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain
they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They
remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate
downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious
balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan
Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true,
our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.
Ellul puts it this way:
The
individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal
questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not
comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions...Once personal judgment
and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not
simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed...years of intellectual and
spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The
propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another,
this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion.
|
Once the best children are broken to such a system,
they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National
Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a
small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down
by schooling can’t do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very
long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many
ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has
come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind
that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small
fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life:
creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the
three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy
of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you.
According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously
so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the
English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with
a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what
Dewey means by "proper" social order.
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except
kindness, because it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe
capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the
neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the
Calvinist model); or that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the
reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing
someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s
evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various
explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then
you will be forced to concur that a vast
bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would
murder us in our beds.
The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist
in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will
seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to
be imagined; it isn’t real.
Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve
valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched,
classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled,
coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a challenge, reprobates to be made
socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual
children require paid attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant
horde to be schooled one way or another.
No comments:
Post a Comment