Modern Sodom:
Anomie, Egoism, Stupidity, Boredom, Pleasure-seeking ->
Anti-social Behavior
1.de Toqueville.
I am convinced, however, that anarchy is not the principal evil that
democratic ages have to fear, but the least. For the principle of equality
begets two tendencies: the one leads men straight to independence and may suddenly drive them into anarchy; the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but more certain road to servitude. (Alexis de Tocqueville. From Democracy in America, Volume II. 1840. p. 305)
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If no one can be better (more virtuous, intelligent, stronger) than another, then everyone’s opinion carries ______weight .
And if everyone’s opinion carries ______weight, then no one really has greater auth______.
And if no one really has greater auth______, then what we have is a mass of citizens with no moral or intellectual lea_____s.
And therefore, really stupid decisions are likely to be made by the equally ignorant (but highly self-regarding) mass.
Eventually the masses will be in such a jamb that they will welcome or want a strong ______.
And that will be the end of free____.
How does this help to explain the increasing power of state and federal education bureaucracies, high-stakes testing, and talk of a national curriculum?
2. de Tocqueville.
It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. (Alexis de Tocqueville. From Democracy in America, Volume II. 1840. p. 335)
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1.Have you lost liberties in the name of some alleged good?
2.Were you complicit in your own subordination?
3. de Tocqueville.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.
The power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like
the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual
childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they
think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government
willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter
of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their
necessities,facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns,
directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides
their inheritance: what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking
and all the trouble of living. Thus it every day renders the exercise of the
free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will
within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.
The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits... Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. (pp. 336-337)
[Alexis de Tocqueville. From Democracy in America, Volume II. 1840]
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1.List as many education organizations and activities that are allegedly designed to assist you. What useful information have you learned from them? What in you have they weakened? Was this (latter) price worth it?
2.Why does this field have so much “tutelage”? Are we that stupid? Have we been made ignorant? What does this field need to make us more independent of the always-willing-to-tell-us-what-to-do tutors?
What do physicians have---what do they all agree on? [Hint: they use it to make decisions.]
4. Montesquieu. Spirit of the laws. 1748
Just as the purpose of education in monarchies is to ennoble men's hearts, so its purpose in despotic states is to debase them. In despotic states education must be servile. Even those holding power benefit from such an education, for no one can be a tyrant without at the same time being a slave...Absolute obedience presupposes ignorance in the person who obeys; ignorance is presupposed as well in the person who commands. For he need not deliberate, doubt, or reason; he has only to will...Thus education is in one sense nonexistent. Everything previously known must be wiped out, so that something may be taught. It is necessary first to make a man into a bad subject in order to create a good slave.
[Montesquieu. Spirit of the laws. 1748]
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1.Would you say that the leaders of Edland are knowledgeable, sharp, logical?
2.Are teachers harder to sell and to control if they know how to examine research, or how to evaluate curriculum materials? Explain.
5. Max Weber. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. 1904-(W)hen asceticism was carried out of the monastic cells into everyday life,
and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now
bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production
which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into
this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition,
with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton
of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods
should lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be
thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become
an iron cage. Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work
out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and
finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period
in history. To-day the spirit of religious asceticism--whether, finally, who knows?-- has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests
on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of
its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading,
and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost
of dead religious beliefs... No one knows who will live in this cage in the
future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely
new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals,
or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of
convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." [Max Weber. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. 1904-5]
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1.Does the operation of public education thwart a teacher’s passion for teaching as a calling? If so, by what is the calling replaced? What is the teacher to be?
b.Is being duped into a fad that promises the teacher that he or she is a creative artist, really the same as working in a calling? Or is the teacher being exploited?
6.Neitzsche.
The "contemplatives" are a hundred times worse: I know of nothing that excites such disgust as this kind of "objective" arm-chair scholar, this kind of scented voluptuary of history, half person, half satyr, perfume by Renan, who betrays immediately with the high falsetto of his applause what he lacks, where he lacks it, where in this case the Fates have applied their cruel shears [thus the high falsetto! mk] with, alas, such surgical skill! [Nietzsche. The genealogy of morals. Third essay, section 26]
I do not like these whited sepulchers who impersonate life; I do not like these weary and played-out people who wrap themselves in wisdom and look "objective"; I do not like the agitators dressed up as heroes who wear the magic cap of ideals on their straw heads; I do not like these ambitious artists who like to pose as ascetics and priests but who are at bottom only tragic buffoons;... [Nietzsche. The genealogy of morals. Third essay, section 26]
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How many of the postmodernist/marxist “theoreticians” (e.g., Apple, Giroux, McLaren)---have ever helped in the classroom, or taught kids in the inner city or the trailer parks to read?
7. Max Weber. "Politics as a vocation." Speech given at Munich
University. 1918.
This problem--the experience of the irrationality of the world--has been
the driving force of all religious evolution. The Indian doctrine of karma,
Persian dualism, the doctrine of original sin, predestination and the deus abscondus, all these have grown out of this experience. Also the early
Christians knew full well the world is governed by demons and that he
who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means,
contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good
can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the very opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant...
Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness
and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where
there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his
rights. [Max Weber. "Politics as a vocation." Speech given at Munich
University. 1918]
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1.Some so-called “new age healers” prescribe coffee enemas and a vegetarian diet for “healing the body of cancer.” Many patients go for this----and die.
In what way are these patients “medical infants”?
2.Apply that to education. What would Weber say about the effectiveness of a principal of a failing school who always tries to please parents, teachers, and other staff?
3.Apply Weber’s lines that begin with “No summer’s bloom…” to education
8. Emile Durkheim. The division of labor in society. 1893.
(I)n the past, the family was the legislator of laws and ethics whose
severity went to the extremes of violence, at the same time that it was
the place where one learned to enjoy the effusions of sentiment... The
provincial spirit has disappeared never to return; the patriotism of the
parish has become an archaism... There is thus produced a spontaneous
weakening of the old social structure. Now, it is impossible for this
organization to disappear without something to replace it. A society
composed of an infinite number of unorganized individuals, that a
hypertrophied State is forced to oppress and contain, constitutes a
sociological monstrosity... Where the State is the only environment in
which men can live communal lives, they inevitably lose contact, become detached, and thus society disintegrates.
[Emile Durkheim. The division of labor in society.1893]
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1.How much community (“provincial spirit) is there in urban ghettos, in rural areas, in your city? Common ideals? High frequency of social interaction?
2.How does weak provincial spirit affect families’ and businesses’ participation in school? How does it affect decisions that district or school administrators make?
9. Georg Simmel. "The metropolis and mental life." 1903.
The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the
individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his
existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight
of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life...
The development of modern culture is characterised by the predominance
of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjective; that is, in
language as well as in law, in the technique of production as well as in art,
in science as well as in the objects of domestic environment, there is
embodied a sort of spirit [Geist], the daily growth of which is followed
only imperfectly and with an even greater lag by the intellectual development of the individual. If we survey for instance the vast culture which during the last century has been embodied in things and in knowledge, in institutions and comforts, and if we compare them with the cultural progress of the individual during the same period--at least in the upper classes--we would see a frightful difference in rate of growth between the two which represents, in many points, rather a regression of the culture of the individual with reference to spirituality, delicacy, and idealism.
This discrepancy is in essence the result of the success of the growing division of labor. For it is this which requires from the individual an ever more one-sided type of achievement which, at its highest point, often permits his personality as a whole to fall into neglect. In any case this overgrowth of objective culture has been less and less satisfactory for the individual. Perhaps less conscious than in practical activity and in the obscure complex of feelings which flow from him, he is reduced to a negligible quantity. He becomes a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality, and value... It need only be pointed out that the metropolis is the proper arena for this type of culture which has outgrown every personal element. Here in buildings and in educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technique, in the formations of social life and in the concrete institutions of the State is to be found such a tremendous richness of crystallizing, depersonalized cultural accomplishments that the personality can, so to speak, scarcely maintain itself in the face of it. [Georg Simmel. "The metropolis and mental life." 1903]
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1.Are you able to keep up with all of the innovations, initiatives, reforms, and publications? Give examples.
2.If not, how does this make you feel?
3.Do you think you need to keep up? Is there anything new under the sun?
4.Do we really need more, or do we need less? More or less of what?
- Theodore Dalrymple. It’s This Bad
It’s This Bad
Theodore Dalrymple
Returning briefly to England from France for a speaking engagement, I bought three of the major dailies to catch up on the latest developments in my native land. … The newspapers portrayed frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness—a most unattractive combination.
Of the two instances of serious matters taken with levity, the first concerned a 42-year-old barrister, Peter Wareing, attacked in the street while walking home from a barbecue with two friends, a man and a woman. They passed a group of seven teenagers who had been drinking heavily, one of whom, a girl, complained that the barrister and his friends were “staring” at them. Nowadays, English youth of aggressive disposition and porcelain-fragile ego regard such alleged staring as a justified casus belli.
The girl attacked the woman in the other party. When Wareing and his male friend tried to separate them, two of the youths, aged 18 and 16, in turn attacked them. They hit the barrister’s friend into some bushes, injuring him slightly, and then knocked the barrister to the ground, knocking him down a second time after he had struggled to his feet. This second time, his head hit the ground, injuring his brain severely. He was unconscious and on life support for two months afterward. At first, his face was so disfigured that his three children were not allowed to see him.
One of the two assailants, Daniel Hayward, demonstrated that he had learned nothing—at least, nothing of any comfort to the public—after he had ruined the barrister’s life. While awaiting trial on bail, he attacked the landlord of a pub and punched him in the face, for which he received a sentence of 21 days in prison.
Before passing sentence for the attack on Wareing, the judge was eloquent in his condemnation of the two youths. “You were looking for trouble and prepared to use any excuse to visit violence on anyone you came by. It is the callousness of this that is so chilling. . . . You do not seem to care that others have been blighted by your gratuitous violence.”
You might have thought that this was a prelude to the passing of a very long prison sentence on the two youths. If so, however, you would be entirely mistaken. Both received sentences of 18 months, with an automatic nine-month remission, more or less as of right. In other words, they would serve nine months in prison for having destroyed the health and career of a completely innocent man, caused his wife untold suffering, and deprived three young children of a normal father. One of the perpetrators, too, had shown a complete lack of remorse for what he had done and an inclination to repeat it.
… I cannot but conclude that the British state is either utterly indifferent to or incapable of the one task that inescapably belongs to it: preserving the peace and ensuring that its citizens may go about their lawful business in safety. It does not know how to deter, prevent, or punish. The remarks of the policeman in charge of the case were not encouraging. He said afterward that he hoped that “the sentences . . . send a clear warning to people who think it is acceptable to consume large quantities of alcohol, then assault members of the public in unprovoked attacks.” If the law supposes that, as Mr. Bumble said in Oliver Twist, “the law is a ass—a idiot.”