Sunday, October 11, 2015

FOOD FOR THOUGHT?

Listening to public radio a few days ago, I heard a nobel laureate assert that the most important thing an education should do is to enable one to recognize the truth. That statement gestated in my head for a few days, with me finally concluding that that is, if one is to have a primary aim, a nice, concise statement of the aim of education per se. An educated person should know how to distinguish, or know how to go about distinguishing, the true from the false, the true from, say, mere public opinion. So much of what goes a truth today is, in essence and at best, mere public opinion.*

Then, however, I also realized that the American educational system, from preschool through university, does a rather poor job of meeting that aim. Most of education, even so-called elite education, is aimed on ingraining conformity, both in behavior and thought. That is, producing a deferential and controlled citizenry, and good, reliable, content employees (e.g., practice ready). Even when, for example, there is a clamor to teach 'critical thinking,' that is not about developing truly independent thinking. One is to think sufficiently independent to come to hold and appreciate the receive wisdom, the receive truths. Yes, they want one to think outside the box, but that really means for one to think outside the size 4 shoebox but not outside the box the refrigerator arrived.

In the final analysis, if one really wants to get an education--and learn to recognize the truth--, one really has to educate oneself. That is a hard row to hoe, but it is a very rewarding row once hoed.

Here is the food for thought: 

 Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps, translated from the Italian by John Shepley (Minneapolis: U. oF Minnesota Press, 2001) (From "On Public Opinion": "The most obscure history is the history of the obvious. There is nothing more obvious than public opinion, a term that public opinion holds to be innocuous and that's come to comprise in itself huge areas of what can be said: The vast pastures of public opinion are the pride of civilization. And yet public opinion is a fearful thing, whites undergone tortuous, ridiculous vicissitudes until its triumph in the present. There was a time when philosophers used to start with facts, which have now fled among the unicorns. Public opinion remains: mistress of all regimes, shapeless, everywhere, and nowhere, its oversized presence is such as to allow only a negative theology. With the fall of divine rule and the debasement of the vicariate of metaphysics, public opinion has been left in the open as the last foundation stone t cover swarms of worms, some iguanas, and a few ancient serpents. How does one recognize it? Or rather, how does one recognize what is not public opinion? There is no map of opinions, and even if there were it would not be of any use. For public opinion is first of all a formal power, a virtuosity that grows endlessly and lacks any material. Its hoax is to accept any meaning, thereby preventing it from being recognized for whatever ideas it has to offer. Indiscriminate, perinde ac cadaver, public opinion swallow up thought and reproduces it in similar terms, only with a few slight modifications." Id. at 186, 186.).

By the way, I hope no one reading this blog thinks Columbus "discovered" America.