An immodest proposal: The cannibalistic core of American public education. A reponse to Tyack’s “The One Best System”.

Collected notes from a paper I wrote last fall. It is a bit “jumpy” thematically.  The core discussion was influenced by Tyack’s and Zimmerman’s work in History of Urban Education.

Of course: the primary influence is directly from Jonathan Swift’s “Immodest Proposal”  a la Adult Swim’s internet flash game “Orphan Feast”. The game can can be found here: http://games.adultswim.com/orphan-feast-adventure-online-game.html.

Despite the figurative language. Swift’s social criticism is mostly spot on.

Introduction: A Best System?

It may be overly obvious to state the following:  public education throughout American history has served a certain Native White Protestant bias and has historically relegated the poor, the immigrant and the emancipated slave to a role of ‘servant’ of this overly powerful minority. But it needs be said, constantly. History has a way of forgetting its past mistakes. Turning the tragedy of history into a farce or at least a passionless comedy.  Urbanization and modernization were used as a tool to ‘intertwine’ corporate-bureaucratic interests with the Native White Protestant ideology to build a foundation for cultural consolidation through education across the entirety of the country. According to Tyack (see Tyacks The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education for an expanded account of the history of “social efficiency” models in urban education) , this ‘one best system’ has ill-served the pluralistic character of America and has failed to systematically reflect the goal of ‘equal education for all’.  But it is not obvious how public education, despite this innate hegemonic bias, has actually and successfully served the polyglot under-privileged or if it has, in fact, served them at all.

Building the Education Meat-grinder

It is hard to imagine  the explosive transformation of a rural and agrarian society to a massive, industrial urban complex would not warrant some sort of educational reform.  The urban environment became a pluralistic archipelago of ideology, religion and morality—most of which were opposed, on some level, to the Native Protestant way of thinking.  Individualistic and independent, the growing American city was fractious and decentralized.  The economic interests of the privileged and powerful fueling the industrial machine required centralized efficiency.  As politics moved the cities away from the pluralistic Ward Archipelago to the central authority of city halls, the same principles of social efficiency were applied to education.  Something, as they say, had to be done with the children.

The general organizational reforms in education were a natural outgrowth of the industrial apparatus and the inherent desire to emphasize efficiency and maximize production. This move to bureaucratize education opposed the local scale with the cosmopolitan, replacing layman educator with the ‘professional’ ruled by progressive administrators, removing the rural social identity with ‘the creeping menace of unification’. The rapid urban growth created a vacuum of insecurity among the middling class and social elite. In order to promote an efficient and well oiled industrial future, steps were taken to use public education to socialize and commodify these poor and wayward youth to newer, more industrial modes of production. Attuning them to the social hierarchy. Ultimately, the goal was to transform students into future cogs of a modernized economy. The public school was used to enculturate children into the ‘factory model’ in order to minimize any class-consciousness or group-think that would pose a threat to the Native Protestant social order.  Therefore, any notion of public education as ‘serving’ the under-privileged should be taken in the literal, Twilight Zone sense of the word.[1] The minority privileged Native White Protestant hegemony used a properly utopian core of ‘American values’ as a meat grinder with education reforms ‘serving’ the now processed poor to the industrialized machine.

Mint Julep Curriculum

Zimmerman (See Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools) suggests the ‘culture wars’ for control of curriculum in public schools is unavoidable, social groups will ‘promote their own opinions rather than a discussion of competing ones’. When a small fraction of a rapidly expanding society controls a preponderance of the political capital and agency, ‘almost always’ they will use such power to ‘serve’ their own ends.

Education became a ‘bland affirmation’ of freedom, democracy and the meritocratic myth of the ‘American Dream’, with any ‘alternative narratives’ tacked-on to save face value. A sort of historical anti-depressant to gloss over the systemic state of exception of actual history: the bitterness, oppression, slavery and violence indicative of the actual Native Protestant narrative.[2] While a mechanism and agency allowed minorities and marginalized under-privileged to obtain some form of control of curriculum, Zimmerman has proposed that this widening of the ethnic lens bred a concomitant narrowing of the critical lens. As long as no violence was done to the ‘core’ history of American democratic destiny, these changes were tolerated.  History wrapped in candy coating serves only those who have something to gain—namely the ruling minority—by denying students and future citizens the mechanisms to wrestle and negotiate with these historical ‘states of exception’.[3] Without the light of criticism to guide our way, the very individualism we may seek to promote and venerate is inhibited, ‘serving’ to protect the ‘pragmatic standards’ of the Native Protestant ideology at the expense of our truly natural resource: our own plurality.

The Cannibalistic Core of American Public Education

The growth of the industrial-economic apparatus was used by those in power as a justification for ‘control’ and ‘management’ of children through public education. Overtly or not, the ruling classes sought to indoctrinate future citizens by stratifying privilege through ability and IQ testing, using these tools to ‘diagnose’ and ‘prescribe’ the most adequate fit for each individual in the massive machinery of industry. Under the aegis of ‘meritocracy’ and suiting the needs of the student for the future,  these high stakes assessments sought only to pigeon hole the under-privileged into education tracts suited for the ‘dirty’ and ‘dead end’ occupations of the factory system. These problems were pronounced among African-Americans who were generally pushed towards unskilled labor in jobs ‘no one else wanted’. Considering this, we cannot ask ‘who does education serve’ without implying the figurative cannibalism inherent with ‘serving’ poor as fodder to future industry. But how do we break this food chain? Zimmerman proposes in order to truly use education as ‘service-for-others’ and not ‘service-of-others’ we need to widen the lens of criticism and challenge these rosy colored narrative ‘myths’, emphasizing inquiry and investigation over ‘efficiency’, ‘control’ and ‘management’.[4] Effective education reform, according to Tyack, will also require a critical reassessment of these ‘cherished convictions’ and the ‘familiar patterns of power and authority’ that have governed the growth and development of the public school. Otherwise, we are all guilty of cultural cannibalism in the name of ‘efficiency’ and the ‘American dream’: a dream that is not truly a dream, but rather a frightful nightmare, a nightmare that will haunt us throughout this rosy colored history.

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[1] Rod Serling. “To Serve Man”, The Twilight Zone. Season 3, Episode 89. Sorry the example is just too evocative to pass up. This notion is not new. Take Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal for instance and his tongue and cheek idea that the poor Irish would easily assuage their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the wealthy British gentry.

[2] Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised. Vintage, New York: 1979. This is an apt metaphor, historical inclusion as ‘happy pill’. 

[3] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Standford University Press: 1998.  Our marginalized voices find themselves submitted to the ‘sovereign’s’ state of exception, and while the marginalized are human and therefore deserving of human rights, they instead are treated as Homo sacer, a human with no political significance.

[4] ‘Service-for-others’ and ‘Service-of-others’ being, of course, my words used to describe the theoretical distinction.

Madness and the Desert of the Real: Quoting The Savage Detectives.

The abyss of madness stalks the deserts of Northern Mexico.  Roberto Bolaño’s The Savages Detectives represents a literary/oedipal quest for the eternal mother.  A vagabond world of poets, pimps and provocateurs . A world where art has been rendered absurd and poetry doubly so.  Bolaño writes with an unhinged insanity that speaks more “truth” than the cold empiricism of the contemporary “scientific moment”.  When the “Real” of human nature unfolds, the only remainder are discarded corpses, wayward hipsters and mumbling sociopaths.  The Savages Detectives, in its round about way, chronicles the end of literature  as a metaphor for the pure apocalyptic moment of “being human”.  Roberto Bolaño’s writing inspires madness and conspiracy while concurrently renewing our position in the precarious incertitude of daily life. We are a fickle, savage species. A wounded species. A fragile species.

There is  beauty in his pages. But with all true works of literature, it requires an investment both mentally and emotionally. A mutual act of diablerie. A blood pact between author and reader, the author bleeds for his art, and the reader feasts at this unholy communion of words. The process of reading Bolaño is a process of morbid change. His writing changes you, the words rupture your sense of space, time, morality. The world of knowing is left a barren and vacuous desert that somehow strengthens our human desire for life. Or at least opens the asylum doors and welcomes the madness, insanity and conspiracy into the day-to-day normalcy of “just being” human.  We are savage. We are fragile.

Notable quotes:

I like to write notable passages down. It exposes my mental state as reader vis-a-vis the act of reading. Why of all the words in a work of this length and substance did these few passages speak to me?

Pg.114: “The problem with literature, like life, is that in the end people always turn into bastards”

Pg. 314: “Ah, what a relief to come into the light, even when it’s a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it’s clear.”

Pg. 355: “Stop moping, all poets get lost at some point or another”

Pg. 400: “Freedom is like a prime number.”

Pg. 420: “…the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it’s purposeful, we can fight it, it’s hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less.  If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. “

Pg. 421: “If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it.”

Pg. 451: “Poets are dazzled by the spectacle of wealth.”

Pg. 466: “Someone has to defend the murderers, the crooks, the men who want divorces and aren’t prepared to surrender all their money to their wives; someone has to defend them.”

Pg. 488: “The search for a place to live and a place to work  [is] the common fate of all mankind”.

Pg. 500: “I felt like the Nude Descending a Staircase, although I wasn’t descending any staircase, not that I recall.”

Pg. 503: “But then I thought that life (or the specter of life) is constantly challenging us for acts we’ve never committed, and sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing.”

Pg. 627: “Measuring time is as meaningless as measuring eternity.”

The Apolline delusion of scientism: On building the gay science

Introduction

In his first major work The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche relates the intoxicant, ecstatic Dionysiac with the self-controlled, rational Apolline. The history of western thought, according to Nietzsche, becomes a dialectical history of opposition and heterogeneity between these two primal ways of knowing. And while Tragedy relates these two “deities” to the growth and development of Grecian culture and therefore Western culture, and perhaps even culture in general, at the core, Nietzsche’s work seeks to expose the Enlightenment and modern “scientism” as fraudulently fearful of the primeval madness of pure humanity. Nietzsche declares science a neurosis of optimism and “the modern man[i]” as the ultimate victim and thus “a [further] symptom of waning power, of approaching senescence, of physiological fatigue” (7). It is precisely the well measured proportion of this dualism of Dionysiac and Apolline, of madness and logic, of feeling and thinking that builds greatness and allows a culture to truly flourish. Otherwise, we are lost to either the encroaching flood of un-reason or the rigid artlessness “scientism”.   To frame this in less literary terms: Does the scientific process, the logic and reason of the Apolline, truly get at knowledge qua knowledge in an objective or exhaustive sense? Or is science, by its very nature as the Apolline de rigor, dependent upon self-control, logic, and reason, excluded from the epistemic totality by its very nature as rational limitation?

The Apolline deception.

Nietzsche calls the overly optimistic Apolline moment of modern scientism the “illustrious antagonist” to the epistemic totality of the tragic. Someone or something we need take seriously, not just a petty villain or a minor figure but rather an illustrious or Olympic villain, bright and prominent as the sun, just as Apollo was the god of the sun and tender of the means of luminous conveyance. There is a certain militarized regimentation to Apolline knowledge wherein “well-trained” man, through observation, both rigorous and meticulous, comes to know “absolute truth” in the form of universal scientific laws. This is “Theoretical Man” who sees human progress through empirical, measured rigor and treats art and the sublime as “nothing more than an entertaining irrelevance” (13). Art becomes less than the tinkle of bells, a harmless remedial bauble, removed from the true nature of things, something we contrast with the supposed finery of reality itself (41).  Nietzsche draws the line here. He can’t help but be appalled.  Why does science and the theoretical  take precedence over the artistic? Why can’t science be held accountable to the lens of aesthetics? The order, according to Nietzsche, must be reversed. Science should be accountable to art. Science without art becomes a lie, masquerading itself as the sole epistemic reality, a mask with a single face. Science is not a constant quest for new and radical knowledge, there is no end beyond the means, no ultimate answer to the questions posed, it is more Sisyphean. It is only toil, akin to digging into the depths of earth. No matter the time spent digging, even the span of your entire life, your hole becomes the “smallest fraction of that immense depth” (72). Science is a futile toil. This is fundamental illusion of science: despite the optimism of the “Theoretical Man” and his unwavering faith in reason, rationality and method there comes a time when this Apolline “scientism” comes face to face with the ineffable (75). A singularity where epistemic existence ceases becoming categorifiable, where the intelligible and measurable become chaotic and horrific; where the rigors of “science” break down into the monster ridden abyss of myth (24). Science, then, is an illusion that helps short circuit the mythic core of our own epistemic being. Knowledge, our knowledge, is always-already in a state of becoming. It is never “there” in the sense science construes it. Knowledge is always a process and toil, with no true reward but the toil itself. And deep within the core of scientist certainty are the dragons, demons and other ne’er-do-wells of the mythic state of being—always a monstrous core of Being.

The Apolline seeks to delude Being into thinking the abyss is fordable that we can cover it, or at least refrain from looking, while we travel to  reach the other side.  This is the true myth by Nietzsche’s reckoning: the Apolline deception. Even science has a tragic need to explain the unknowable, the ineffable, but it cannot, it lacks the epistemic tools. There is a certain amount of irony here. When the illusion dissolves and the abyss re-emerges, the optimism of science is transformed into a desire for the sublime, namely a desire for art. Accordingly, “only after the scientific spirit has been taken to its limits, and has been forced by the demonstrations of those limits to renounce its claim to universal validity” will we find the tragic nature of things (82).

The irony of Socrates

This leads us to Socrates. To Socrates only the intelligible can be beautiful. The grit of the observable world is but a mere shadow realm for the great unfathomable beauty of the ideal forms. Without reason and rational method, we cannot approach true beauty. The mimetic quality of art is not valued, as images are mere representations of a greater form. In Socrates, philosophic thought, a form of the Apolline, seeks to replace art. Socrates becomes the prototypical “Theoretical Man”. Socrates’ unshakeable belief in rational thought opposed the creative drive of artistic exhibitionism for a more internal, contemplative aesthetic. In order to become a pupil of Socrates, Plato burned his poetry and dramatic writings. There is a two-fold irony of this image of Socrates. First, we come to know Socrates only through the dramatic. Plato may have burned his early poetic life, but Plato could only bring Socrates “back to life” through the literary artifice of the dialogs.  Art is repudiated in the Socratic narratives of Plato.  We come to know Socrates the “Theoretical Man” through Plato “the tragic poet”.  And the second, despite the rationalist goal, Socrates could never remove the myth from his rational justifications of reality. There is always a sense of “something else”, something foreign to the process itself, something never fully grasped apart from the abyssal trenches of mythic language. The rational Socrates only reinforces his own un-knowledge. Myth is ultimately the Socratic deus ex machina. If reason is insufficient to the task at hand, Socrates is more than happy to invoke the artifice of mythpoeic language. Socrates becomes not only the prototypical “Theoretical Man” but also an instance of Apolline deception, when the subject-who-is-supposed-to-know fails to find logic and reason capable of explaining the essence of things.

Science as the demon’s bargain

The central delusion of the Apolline is the idea a “single image of the world exits” (102). That the orgiastic self-annihilation of the Dionysiac moment is something to be avoided, to be removed altogether, animalistic and detached the Apolline seeks to make man “more human than human”.  But this is a devil’s bargain; to become “more human” we must sell our soul, become scientist-as-demonologist and trade the Dionysiac and the “eternal delight of existence” for the Apolline security and satisfaction of logic and reason.

But here lies the ironic, once again, as our demoniac-scientist is rendered less than human or something other-than-human.  Irony seems to be the Mercurial symbol of the Apolline delusion. The voice of Irony should queue us in, cause us to pause, and perhaps reevaluate the nature of our daimonion. The truth of gambling with devils is that Hell always wins. Irony always warns of this fools bargain. It is a dragon-slayer, or rather a demon-slayer, someone who turns their back on “weaklings’ doctrines that lie within the optimism” of Apolline scientism (88).

For Nietzsche, “everything that comes to being must be prepared to make a sorrowful end” (80). The optimism of the demonological science, the restless inquiry of science, the cheerful theoretical man, all must face the reality-at-hand, the abyss on the periphery where logic, reason and knowledge become mere dust and the eye of the demoniac peers into the horrors of the night with naught but a delusion, an illusion of knowledge, to pass them through the stygian depths.

The bonfire of epistemologies: The gay science

What then are we left? The specter of infallibility of science is but an ephemeral illusion brought about by our mad attempt to bring meaning or rather to remove meaning from the existential crisis of facing reality-as-abyss (88).  The “Theoretical Man” has been made tenuous, unable to grasp his own Dionysiac core, he sells himself to an artless world, condemned by his demonic gamble to dig in futile toil, grasping for mere roots, forever to remain unsatisfied,  “a starving man’s greedy grasping for food…unsatisfied with everything it devours” (110).

Nietzsche wants to remove scientism from its pedestal and while Tragedy is about the radical becoming of the Grecian moment where Apolline and Dionysiac are made one, it becomes obvious though, any such synthesis can only occur through the re-awakening of the Dionysiac. Science has overly “Apollined” the modern man. The “glorious mixture” of tragic philosophy and tragic man awakens the “aesthetic game” with irony the core signifier, and perhaps critic, of our epistemic positionality. The rational scientist, under Nietzsche, becomes the aesthetic listener: science through the lens of art, what Nietzsche would come to call The Gay Science. This gaiety of science becomes science through music, through dance and orgy and not through the futile toil grasping at shallow roots and the digging mere holes. Only then can we begin to unravel the duality of art and people, myth and morality, tragedy and the state (111). It is the gay scientist who is the true dragon-slayer. Who faces the abyss and delights in the shear absurdity of it all. Tragedy is a call to open up the windows of epistemology, to challenge the singularity of “positive science” and oppose it. “Let each man answer the question as he sees fit: his answer will demonstrate his understanding…as long as he attempts to answer the question at all and has not been struck dumb with astonishment” (108).

References

Nietzsche, F. W. (1993). The birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music. (S. Whiteside, Trans.).

London: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1872)

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[i] I am aware of the masculine language used throughout this paper. I have decided, after much thought, to retain the gendered specificity of Nietzsche’s own language. For a discussion of gender and femininity in the context of Nietzsche I heartily recommend reading Part 3 of Avital Ronell’s The Test Drive.