Monday, March 21, 2011

What's With the Politicization of Education

One of the easiest ways to oppress a people is to systematically deny them a quality education. One of the easiest ways to systematically deny people a quality education is to defund education. One of the easiest way to hide the racist/classist/elitist motives behind defunding education is through subterfuge and opacity. Thus, we have the modern-day American educational system.

N'gugi wa Thiong'o once said that after the canons of the night came the chalkboard of the morning, and of the two, clearly the chalkboard has been most effective in colonizing the mind. That may be true of the British colonial educational systems left behind in Anglophone Africa and Caribbean nations. America, however, operates by a different strategy. Simply keep people stupid. Keep people stupid concerning the real history of America. Keep people stupid concerning how policy eventually effects the pocketbook. Keep people stupid by using confusing and emotionally-charged rhetoric that will guarantee the person using it that he/she will get poor white people to vote against their own interests.

So far, this has been the Southern/conservative/Republican strategy. There is a reason why they always rally against the national department of education -as if it matters in the first place. Heaven forbid if the American public receives a real education and political discourse must be elevated past anti-intellectual gabble. How would they ever win office? Would the governor of Wisconsin have won office had he explained that he'd be a union-busting corporate pawn? Probably not. So he used flowery languaged and slipped one past the people of Wisconsin, and now they are sorry.

As a person who is pursuing a degree in the humanities, I am also the victim of Americans' beliefs that the only professions are in law and medicine. When was the last time you saw a riveting television drama about a history professor? An English degree? It's just a big waste of time, and I feel that from most of my friends who are outside of the humanities. I have a friend who is an education major that I love dearly, but every time I talk to him concerning what it is that I do, I get a hint of condescension from him. They feel that our degrees do nothing practical. I say that they have everything to do with practicality. It's the reason why humanities professors, and not business, law, or education professors, are perpetually listed by Conservative think tanks as the most dangerous intellectuals in America: we PURPOSELY expose the politicization of America's educational system. When we see the state of Texas literally try to rewrite American history, stripping it of the ugly truths it contains, we are not afraid to say that the educational system here (sadly) serves the same purpose as those of the imperialist European nations: to keep certain races and classes at the bottom, and to maintain an elite hegemony.