You get what you pay for.
-- Ancient Cliche
One of the best things I ever learned as a conscious progressive in the early 90s was the name of Samuel R. Delany. Delany's Neveryon series made me think about learning and the value of education in a completely different way.
The Neveryon series is an extraordinary look at how a pre-literate society becomes literate. It is the story of princes and paupers, of warriors and slaves, of kings and chosen ones, of bondage and liberation of sex and of education. It conjures up a world on the brink of revolution and the vagueries of chance that make some men into legends and some deeds into obscurity. If you've ever considered the aphorism about history being the tales that survive, or that lions never have their histories, then the Neveryon series explores that in its entirety. This has always been significant to me politically and professionally, because I understand the power of narrative. Software, no matter how brilliant, has to be sold. Policy, no matter how brilliant, has to be sold. Jesus himself could not establish his Church without word of mouth. The stories of my black communities never got to any pages in the LA Times, as much as I and other local poets desired our end to be told. The very question of why bloggers matter less or more than published authors - who gets to write about Crips in Los Angeles, literate Crips or culture vultures? There were a thousand reasons why the forces that make a literate society literate and why that matters, have always been of paramount concern to me.
I can distinctly recall how Albert Murray said that literature was his religion. The moment reverbrates in my skull. If you asked me who I was in 1989, I'd tell you that I wrote for computers and people. But what I meant was that I wrote for people through computers - except at the time such a concept was unbelievable even for me. I saw myself as a writer and I saw the professional part as writing for the deterministic world and the poetic part as writing for the stochastic world. I have come to understand how much of the stochastic world is actually only comprehensible to the extent that it is determined by ideology and how much of the deterministic world is under hegemony, yet random and wrong.
Education is the series of hurdles and hoops over and through which much of our meritocratically oriented culture must jump in order to give our lack of power the appearance of consent. The fact that the overwhelming majority of that education can be acquired freely must always be considered when assessing its value.
I am not post-modernist. I understand the French intellectual approach to 'regimes of truth' and I recognize that most people function quite well, like global functional illiterates, only understanding a fraction of what it is they 'need' to know. How much of Shakespeare you can quote, even if perfectly relevant to the situation, doesn't matter if you live in the ghetto. You must have an audience receptive to your lingo, to your narrative, to the framework of the arc of your ambition. But that doesn't discount the value of Shakespeare. While he is convenient to the English language, those truths in his tales are indeed the truths of humanity. To not know those truths is to not know humanity, and yet because Shakespeare's body of work is not universally transcendent some have taken a Sapir-Whorf detour down a strange path. It is not language itself that bogs us down. Shakespeare is not a 'regime of truth', it is not relative. Those who understand it, do indeed understand human truth, those who don't do not. The applicability of Shakespeare depends entirely on the honesty and integrity of the instructor. Anyone who teaches that the value of truth in literature is relative is either morally crippled or dishonest. That is why post-modernism has produced such vacuous casuistry, and it is why the work of so many authors we endure leaves us hungry for more eclecticism. Eclecticism is a search for truth by people who have been poorly instructed or are consciously vested in multicultural gluttony. Pity those who consider themselves postmodern.
To be educated is to submit one's time and dollars to a system of instruction that makes a basic promise. The free public education we receive in our state and city schools function under the premises of the modern nation state. The modern nation state promises a set of material comforts under which the common man is to benefit. Our nation promises, military defense, health care, civic justice, property defense, free expression, unemployment insurance and employment skills. The nation state, underwriting its own survival teaches us to value our vote and to vote our values. It is the bond between the citizen and his nation.
But what does a private education promise? Moreover, why should anyone who knows how to make their own clothing, build their own shelter, defend their own property and feed their own family bother to participate in either citizenship or public education? I think that the answer is that people who do not own themselves fully have no better choice, but that our natural inclination would be to secede from this arrangement. More properly stated, the more independent and self-sufficient one becomes, the less value one puts in that system of education that can be had for free. That's why kings teach princes, and why queens teach princesses. They don't send them out to public school. This is what Delany investigated in Neveryon. What kind of individual starts a school in the first place, and what would he know worth teaching?
It makes sense to me to go to a Warren Buffett school of investing, to a US Marine school of self-defense. I would go to a school of driving taught by race drivers, to a class on computers taught by IBM. But what do I get from Kennedy High School or Lincoln Elementary? What would I get from Moscow University? What do they teach in finishing school in Beijing? If I homeschooled my children in Brazil, what would I teach them? What indeed does anyone need to know in this world and how do we get to know it? More curiously, what can we not know without specialized instruction? Aren't there a million things we don't understand for which we must defer to our superiors? How do they actually get to be superior anyway?
When I was a high school student, the scariest sentence I ever heard was "It's not what you know, but who you know." That's because I had complete confidence in my ability to learn anything, but I knew there were going to be secrets that I would not be taught and these were keys to kingdoms that I would never enter, much less rule. I had street wisdom, but I didn't want to rule the streets. So I became a scientist - a student of the natural world itself, armed with the discipline I would need to make my own observations, apply logic, derive my own conclusions. I became philosophical, concerned with the world of thought itself. I became a programmer, enamored of the ultimate tool created for the processing of logic, the computer. Eventually, I became a writer for people and for machines, ultimately for people through machines. And so here I am today, I daresay bold enough to suggest it's me that is a who worth knowing. And yet I know very well that there are men I should know but don't. There are women I might have known but didn't. There are stories and narratives, fables and legends I will never hear - words equivalent to the great vivid efficiency of the language of Shakespeare that illuminate human truth no honest instructor has ever introduced me to. Or then again, it could be my own incuriosity that has walled me off from the very truth in front of my face.
Either way, I know that it is not a matter of intelligence. Intelligence is only speed and capacity. What one genius can figure out in a day, four intelligent men can figure out in a week. But if the genius never explains it to the four, well then he might as well be a madman.
I listen to what it is that people say they want from public education. Who would bother to ask that it teach them about how to avoid the moral hazards of certain economic policies? Who would bother to ask that it teach them to avoid the moral hazards of certain entertainment programs? Of certain political philosophies? Those, I think, are not part of the public education program, and it doesn't seem to be in the interest of the nation state to educate its public about certain things for free. The shape of the nation, for the freely educated citizen must be a certain thing for citizens to be content and thus grant their consent. But we in America are something larger than that.
There is no expectation, I think, in anyone's mind that our public education might instruct us honestly on how to juggle four balls or to build a nuclear trigger. While they certainly require a certain amount of intelligence and discipline to learn it is not the matter of intelligence that excludes them from the curricula of our free schools. Rather it is the appropriateness to the premises and promises of free education. We are a society who needs a certain number of bomb engineers and buskers but they do not come from the mainstream, per se. They come from people who have decided that the free education is not enough, or from those who had the privilege to know somebody who knew something of value. More likely, in those two examples, they came from somebody who read our society, saw the inevitable need, and arranged to get themselves in the right situations.
I consider education first in these meditations about our nation state and the prospects for the market state as we are in transition (perhaps) from one set of ideas about our basic capacities and fidelities to another. Clearly we are divided, and somewhat comfortable in our divisions about what our patriotism means and how we are morally justified in our positions. I don't think that the most intelligent among us value the same sorts of education, nor do we educate ourselves similarly, and the implications for those who have not yet been educated are vast considering what they will know and whom they will know. Which of these people comprises the nation that will survive?
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