This article also originally appeared in Examiner.com. While I stand behind what I wrote below, and believe that what I wrote is essentially accurate, I may have overstated the anti-college opposition of the KI EcoCenter participants; but that was because the presentation was so incoherent, so definitely below the usual high standards of KI forums, that I may have given more coherence to what was actually said than it deserved. I may have read coherence into what was just confusion, and thus the participants' stated objection to me, that they "didn't completely say that," may be somewhat true due to this incoherence and confusion--GF
Last Tuesday,
October 28,2014, a group that I’ve usually admired, the KI EcoCenter (KI) of
Indianapolis, Indiana, http://www.kiecocenter.org, held a public forum, “College Isn’t the
Answer,” in which the various panelists advocated directly for—let’s face
it—ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and giving money to black people as
“reparations” for slavery instead of intellectual improvement of the black communities
of Indianapolis and the U.S., by coming out squarely against college education. But
that’s putting it generously, as my thumbnail description of the forum gives
the “discussion” that ensued by the panelists and the approving audience
participants a far greater coherence and understanding of the issues than
actually ensued. In reality, what
transpired was incoherence, intellectual confusion of the worst sort, constant
comparing of the proverbial apples to oranges, massive tendentious omissions, lack
of a truly serious approach, and significant omission of data and
evidence. Instead what was proffered—in
all seriousness!—was a pseudo-populist “left black nationalist” exercise in derision and self-abnegation, a
rather hypocritical posturing by black college graduates themselves on how they
were supposedly duped by becoming college-educated; a masochistic display of
anti-intellectualism by the panelists made all the more pathetic by the basic
fact that, without their supposedly worthless college educations, they would’ve
lacked even the basic erudition and coherency to present their own
presentations against college!
Yes, their very
articulateness (such as it was—really not at all at the high level KI panel
participants have presented in the past) in arguing against college, and thus de facto for ignorance, would not have been possible even at this
disappointing level had it not been for the panelists’ own college
educations! Their position, as presented
by these three college-educated African Americans, became simply a whining
complaint of “Don’t go to college! We’ve been there, it’s not worth it. Savor your mere high school-educated
ignorance instead, despite our token lip-service to the general notion of
education. Do as we say, not what we ourselves
did!”
This display of
articulate self-abnegation by the three black panelists was of course echoed by
the one token white panelist (himself hand-picked by KI and given a voice, I
take it, in name of “diversity”), who himself was also another self-abnegating
college graduate. This panelist offered
to entertain us by deliberately tearing up his college diploma that evening;
but that was a “promise” left unfulfilled (undoubtedly for the better).
These four
panelists—the three African Americans Paulette, Imhotep (usually referred to
simply as M.) and Khalil, along with the token white panelist, John—are all
people I’m acquainted with as an active supporter of KI in the past, and it is
no pleasure for me to trash them. But I
feel obligated simply because I am a lower-rungs-of-the-socio-economic-ladder
college graduate myself, a working-class white man who worked hard to achieve
my degree; a college degree and educational immersion I myself find invaluable
in enabling me to do my avocation of writing prose and poetry for publication,
something that would not have been possible without it. And so, while my degree has not paid off for
me economically in terms of a good job, it has contributed immensely in
granting me a sense of self-worth, in giving me a fulfilling life, and making
me a positive contributor in the cause of social and economic justice for all,
African American, Hispanic, other ethnicities, as well as my own white working
class—all those excluded from the American Dream by the 1%, whose domination of
our lives the Occupy movement made us so rightfully aware of. Getting that degree (Bachelor’s in economics
from Indiana University, supplemented by later paralegal training) gave me an education in the broadest and most
proper sense, it opened for me the vast realm of knowledge, enabled me to
commune with the greatest minds of humanity past and present—something that
would not have come about had I remained a mere high school graduate, or even
as someone with only some college.
This, and more, I
tried to articulate in the technically open and extensive, but actually
perfunctory and limited, audience discussion of the panelists’ remarks. Needless to say, my remarks in favor of
education were completely ignored by the panelists themselves, who were too
absorbed in promoting their own anti-intellectual shtick to “bother” with me. But I was “answered” with vociferous
objection by audience members who had only high school educations themselves,
or who were disgruntled college dropouts, themselves inadvertent advocates of
the value of higher education through their own angry denunciations of that which
they didn’t have themselves, but which they disdained because they lacked it.
Confirmation of a positive good by denunciation of it as worthless by those who
had never possessed it in the first place!
Or else, trashing at the hands of those who failed to realize the value
of what they themselves did possess, resentful discarders of the gold at their
feet in favor of the tawdry glittering tinsel of ignorance their pseudo-populism
inclined them to embrace in its stead.
As I stated above,
I’ve long been a supporter and enthusiast of the KI EcoCEnter, which I first
encountered at a community jobs forum it held in October 2012, and on which I
published a very extensive-praising post in my “Politically Incorrect Leftist”
BlogSpot blog, http://politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=7. But lately, KI has allowed its ideology of
“black cultural nationalism” as articulated by Maulana Karenga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maulana_Karenga), to weaken the quality and multiracial
appeal of its earlier work and public forums; most recently it has focused less
on its organizational philosophy of “social entrepeneurship” and
“bootstrapping” as positive aids to the empowerment of the primarily
working-class African American residents of Indianapolis’ Near North Side
neighborhood where it exists, and more on being an angry, and at times highly
incoherent, megaphone of black grievances against what it claims is an
all-encompassing structure of “white privilege;” something this decidedly unprivileged member or the
white working class finds very much at variance with actual reality, and who
objects strongly to Paulette’s and M.’s insistence that I, struggling just to
get by, also partake of. This vague,
generalized, all-encompassing “white privilege” so “politically correct” to
assert, but which is so factually compromised, truncated and rebutted by so
much of white working-class reality. This “privilege” I allegedly have despite only my receiving Social
Security standing between me and homelessness—something I’d hardly call a
“privilege”!
Sadly, I find KI
moving from being “pro-black,” which it should be, to being more openly
“anti-white,” except toward those whites who uncritically subordinate
themselves to KI’s “cultural nationalism.”
To me this is a disservice to what was so positive in KI’s earlier
activity, and which garnered my strongly admiring allegiance and support in the
first place. I feel uncomfortably on the
receiving end of “reverse racism.” Not
that whites, and especially my own white working class, haven’t done a lot to harm
African Americans; they certainly have.
But they themselves are also Bob Dylan’s “pawns in their game” who ride only
“the caboose of the train;” they themselves are also the inarticulate and
dispossessed victims of whole hierarchies of economic, social and institutional
power held by the overwhelmingly (but not entirely) white ruling 1%, which
oppresses and subordinates both white and non-white in very similar ways, and
increasingly, to very similar, if not exactly identical, degrees. While white people can be said to have a
relative “advantage” in many (but not all) cases vis-à-vis African Americans,
this is far from an absolute “privilege” that ensures whites always come out on
top, are always psychologically satisfied, materially sated, and economically secure,
no matter what their socio-economic status.
And yes, while
whites too often can be openly racist, and even virulently so, this is far from
being a “benefit” to them, is far from a “psychological bonus” they not only
receive but profit from; rather it is a liability, a delusional sense of
superiority, a pernicious illusion that blinds them not only to the
commonalities of oppression they share with their brethren of color, but makes
them dupes of Occupy’s 1% (really 0.01%).
The 1% (or rather, 0.01%) who comprise those corporate and financial
elites and their satraps who manipulate far too many ordinary white people as
puppets, who set them against people of color as (often eager) attack dogs, but who are still tightly leashed by the 1%. “White privilege” is thus an
often-unacknowledged liability that undermines the white working class every
bit as much as it oppresses African Americans.
But back to the
“College Isn’t the Answer” forum. The
forum based its anti-college position on two very bad articles which appeared
in the Washington Post (a dead
giveaway in itself of how the anti-intellectual initiators of the forum
themselves profited from their own college degrees—knowing about these
articles, knowing about the Washington
Post as a primarily college graduate-appealing elite source of information
and opinion in the first place): “sociologist
and writer” (nothing more) Tressie McMillan
Cottom “No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/no-college-isnt-the-answer-reparations-are/?mc_cid=a19a9ef833&mc_eid=[UNIQID]&mc_cid=9f4ac1282f&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) and Valerie Strauss’s blog, “No, algebra isn’t necessary — and yes, STEM is
overrated,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/no-algebra-isnt-necessary--and-yes-stem-is-overrated/2012/08/26/edc47552-ed2d-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_blog.html) which reprints a New York Times Op-ed by one Roger C. Schank, described as “a cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence theorist, and education
reformer.” These
two articles are at best but half-truths zealously
overstated.
Cottom tries to make a case that only reparations are the
solution to the problem of glaring economic inequality (as though it were only a problem for the black community,
which is blatantly false), and counterpoises reparations for the past
enslavement of African Americans to African Americans today getting a college
education, which she sees as just another way of perpetuating black inequality
through substantial black college-graduate unemployment. Which is an undoubted
fact of our economy still not overcoming the Recession of 2008 (Cottom is
correct here), but which has also meant high rates of unemployment and
underemployment for college graduates as a whole, not just for African
Americans (and which is really a problem that goes back to the 1970s and has
continued since, only exacerbated, but not created, by the ongoing recession).
Schank states baldly, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” “You
can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about
macroeconomics or trigonometry…,” and
that our supposed societal obsession with math and STEM all goes back to a
claim made in 1892 by the president of Harvard University of what should be
taught in high school. As with Cottom, Shank is half-right (but remember, half-right is also
half-wrong!). Yes, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” but
that’s really a problem more than a superfluity, a problem well-articulated by
1920s iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken, “No one ever went broke
underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” The same with “You
can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about
macroeconomics[.]” All we have to do is
look at the level of public political discourse and electoral appeals in this
2014 election to give the lie to the beneficence of these statements of
fact. The simple fact of the low level
of political discourse, open demagoguery, and statement both of half-truths and
outright lies in the 2014 electoral appeals, plus the facile (but fallacious)
appeal of free market-fundamentalist economics making supposed experts out of
people such as Paul Ryan and even Ayn Rand, shockingly exposes how We, the
People are directly harmed by voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who
vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics.” Voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning”
and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics” frequently determine through their ignorance just who our political leaders
are—and through them, what social and economic policies are put into practice! Proof positive that ignorance is far from
bliss, though ignorance may be popular, deliberately promulgated and disseminated,
and even celebrated (the Tea Party being a stellar example of the last).
As one who studied mathematics
extensively, I myself can attest that its value lies not so much in the
mathematical formulas taught but in its overwhelming value as a heuristic,
i.e., as a means to understand and practice the daily art and science of
problem-solving, something that confronts each of us every day. Through mastery of math we come to mastery of
logic, of logical inference and deduction, how to employ reason correctly, and
what is valid and invalid, relevant and irrelevant, evidence on which to base
our solutions, our daily decisions. That
is math’s overwhelming strength in “practical” affairs, and is precisely why
algebra, plane geometry and trigonometry are taught in our high schools, or
should be; and why, given our reliance on statistical information today,
statistics and probability should also be.
If that’s “elitist” or not narrowly “practical,” so be it! As a person of the left who considers the
Jeffersonian ideal of “An aristocracy of talent in a democracy of opportunity”
to be one of the hallmarks of a good, just and equitable society, I say the
teaching of “abstract reasoning,” math, and yes, even “macroeconomics,” is necessary
to move us forward in the “democracy of opportunity,” made more of a reality by
the Civil Rights and labor struggles of ordinary people than it was before, to become
more of what we need to be—a society where those in charge truly represent an “aristocracy
of talent” as opposed to the “oligarchy of mediocrity” our political and
societal leaders represent today.
And as a college graduate who found
specific value in that college education, I openly state that all that comes
about easier when the masses of ordinary people have access to broad means of
education, both formal education and self-education as a lifetime project,
through greatly improved primary, secondary, and yes, higher education. Yes, there are many things wrong with higher
education as it exists today—its frequent detached elitism, its cost, its
increasingly strictly vocational orientation, its often chilling effect on
imagination, creativity and independent scholarship which it should foster
instead—but the correction of these major faults depends on deepening the
educational experience, not simply throwing it out as an unneeded irrelevancy
the way the panelists did at the KI forum.
Because, for all the faults of higher education today, it certainly
beats ignorance! Which is precisely
where the panelists of “College Isn’t the Answer” would lead us—inadvertently
to be sure, but also inexorably.
Furthermore, if we wish to see an example of a society
where college is disdained, and where ignorance is enshrined, we need only look
at our own Indiana, which ranks 42nd in the nation in the percentage
of its people with at least a Bachelor’s degree, and which ranks last in the
Midwest as such. The Hoosier State is a
bastion today of poor job opportunities, abysmal social services, and extreme
right-wing politics, and these are all interconnected with our fellow Hoosiers’
lack of education; our notorious Brain Drain, where college graduates leave the
state in droves because of lack of suitable jobs for them; and our poor primary
and secondary schools, which directly impact on employment opportunities, the
lack of which, along with the state’s hemorrhaging of previously unskilled but
high-pay manufacturing jobs, has consistently caused Indiana’s per capita
income to drop. Drop so significantly that,
today, Indiana ranks 39th in the nation in per capita income when in the 1950s
it ranked in the 20s. As Philip
Powell, Associate Professor of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington told
the Indianapolis Star as far back as 2009
and which has remained unchanged since, “We’re stuck. We’re stuck because we
don’t have the knowledge base we need in the labor force. A lot of that is
because of our really mediocre primary and secondary educational system.”
(For
documentation of the above, see George
Fish and Dave Fey, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier affliction,” Bloomington Alternative, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039, and
the accompanying “Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet,” http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf;
Though some of the statistics cited there are old, sadly, the trends referenced
by them are not. For the overweening
right-wing character of Indiana politics, see,
Bryan K. Bullock, Truth-out, June 27, 2014, “The Ultra-Right-Wing State Nobody
Mentions,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24552-the-ultra-right-wing-state-nobody-mentions.)
Sadly, the KI
EcoCenter’s forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” represents just a “left-wing”
pseudo-populist variant of that virulent anti-intellectualism so continually prevalent
in U.S. society that’s so eloquently scored by noted science popularizer and
science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (himself a Ph.D. in biochemistry): “Anti-intellectualism
has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural
life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is
just as good as your knowledge.” It is unfortunate
that an organization, KI, which I have thought of so highly, decided to
perpetuate that.
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