How corporations continue creating the next crises through our educational system.

[Metta]

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.

Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called "Education After Auschwitz." He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged."


more at http://www.truthout.org/032909C from Chris Hedges of The Nation.

[kerrywins]

1. Property Taxes are Incompatible With Our Right to Property

get rid of property taxes and you'll get rid of the federal government takeover of our schools.

[LWolf]

2. More on the higher education system:

<snip>
Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor's degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.

The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now "actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view - all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations - all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts."

[Runcible Spoon]

4. " Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed"

Ughh. :puke:

[LWolf]

5. Uh huh.

Let's face it: with the cost of higher education skyrocketing, who is going to take on that much debt for a degree in the humanities?

If you can't count on making enough money to pay that mountain of debt off when you get your degree, what then?

That, and the competitive, rise to the top by climbing on the fallen cultural ideology/idiocracy.

[Leopolds Ghost]

17. Heh. "That, and everything that was said in the OP."

:-)

[LWolf]

3. And the connections to the current state of the nation:

<snip>

The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.

Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and "leftist" professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. "He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person," Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG's Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.

"It is especially difficult to fight against it," warned Adorno, "because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids."

[Odin2005]

9. "certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids." I really need to call BS on this.

"Schizoid Personality Disorder" is a BS Freudian term used for people like myself that are now diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism. And the only one out of that group that has clearly autistic traits is Summers. That line is basically saying us Aspies are robotic sociopaths. Screw that, It's basically implying Autistic traits lead to corporatist BS.

Oh, and Kant himself is suspected by some to have had Asperger's, which makes that passage all the more disgusting.

[LWolf]

10. I didn't read anything indicating the "manipulative character"

Adorno was referring to is in any way related to autism.

As a teacher of autistic and asperger's students, and the grandaughter of a woman diagosed with schizophrenia and locked up for life so her family didn't have to deal with her, I think I'd probably notice that.

[Odin2005]

11. Sorry, I guess I was being overly toutchy.

It's just that "Schizoid" and "Childhood Schizophrenic" were the labels given to high-functioning autistics back in Adorno's day, hence my concern.

[LWolf]

12. It's a valid concern

and anyone who has ever cared about an autistic person, an aspie, or a person with mental illness might have that same initial reaction.

No offense taken.

:hi:

[Odin2005]

13. Thank you! n/t.

[Odin2005]

6. The Humanities died when they jumped on the bandwagon of Postmodernist sophistry.

Postmodernism entails the rejections of all reason as just another "grand narrative", the rejection of all objective truth, and even the rejection of the possibility of objectivity itself. Postmodernism thus destroys the rationalism necessary for a free and open society, replaced by nihilism, egoism, and dogmatism, the roots of totalitarianism, Fascism, and Fundamentalism.

[anonymous171]

7. Was Modernism even any better?

Doubtful.

[Odin2005]

8. What do you mean by "modernism"?

If you mean by modernism respect for reason and objective truth, for reasoned discussion and a skepticism towards dogma and unrestrained emotionalism then yes, modern is much better the postmodern. Postmodernism is a vicious attack by the enemies of reason against all that is good about Western Civilization.

[BlooInBloo]

16. Easy, tiger. Those fools didn't bring down the entire humanities....

And at this time, let us all go re-read the original Sokal article.

[Runcible Spoon]

21. Uhuh. I see your reading list doesn't extend beyond 1988.

Derf.

[datasuspect]

22. it's all identity politics and victim's narratives now,

[Taitertots]

14. The problem of vested interests

I think it has absolutely nothing to do with a lack of humanities degrees. It has everything to do with corporate controlled media and corporate controlled government.

[BlooInBloo]

15. (shrug) Schools are for knowledge. Values are best had through parents.

[Igel]

18. He isn't always very consistent, is he?

"We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered."

If you are trained to be critical of all cultural assumptions, if you challenge the validity of structures, then one possible outcome is moral nihilism. In fact, unless you (1) ignore what's being taught or (2) are taught it very, very carefully, moral nihilism is not going to be a rare outcome. Keep in mind what moral nihilism is: the rejection not just of traditional moral priniciples, but of any moral principles. Unless you constrain the questioning, there's no predetermined end-point for the inquiry and many paths lead to moral nihilism.

In my experience, when somebody says that education's purpose is to force "us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions" what he's really saying is "the purpose of education is to make students agree with me." Often that passes for critical thinking isn't critical thinking at all--you make a show of questioning all views, but since you're an expert at your own (and at both justifying your own and attacking others) many students won't be able to or want to mount good counterarguments. If the student winds up with a POV completely at odds with your own, for too many faculty members he's either gone astray or failed to learn what was so obvious. Fortunately, grades aren't given out for moral and ethical principles.

[Odin2005]

19. This is something that has been bothering me for a long time.

There is a very logically open-and-shut, strong argument first laid out by David Hume that to say something is good because of some objective fact of the world is always a fallacy, that is, one cannot derive "ought" from "is". This argument makes objective ethics impossible and I find it very disturbing yet I can find no good logical refutation of it, my conscience rejects it but I can't disprove it. :-(

[omega minimo]

20. "The humanities have withered" and with them, critical thinking skills have withered.

"In my experience, when somebody says that education's purpose is to force "us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions" what he's really saying is "the purpose of education is to make students agree with me." "

What you are describing sounds like the aftermath of that.