Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century. vol. 1, no. 1, Fall 1994.
THE NEW QUESTION, FROM WOODSON TO WIESEL TO ORR: WHAT IS WRONG WITH OUR EDUCATION?
The central institutional mechanisms which integrate and regulate our present world system, I propose here, are the prescriptive categories of our present order of knowledge, as disseminated in our present global university system and its correlated textbook industry. How and why is this so? Paul Ricœur has based himself on the thesis of Clifford Geertz that “ideology is a function of human cultural systems,” to propose that the systems of knowledge by which human orders know themselves, must serve to provide a “generalized horizon of understanding” able to induce the collective behaviors of each order’s subjects. Since these are the behaviors by means of which each order is integrated and made stably replicable as such an order, without such horizons of understanding or “inner eyes,” no human order could exist [Ricœur, 1979].
Legesse further suggests that all mainstream scholars necessarily function as the grammarians of our order; that is, as “men and women” who are well-versed in the “techniques of ordering a select body of facts within a framework that is completely consistent with the system of values, the weltanschauung and, above all, the cognitive model” of the society to which they belong [Ricœur, 1979: Legesse, 1973]. It is only by the “trained skills” which we bring to the ordering of such facts, that intellectuals as a category, are able to ensure the existence of each order’s conceptual framework, which we rework and elaborate in order to provide the “inner eyes” by whose mode of subjective understanding, each order’s subjects regulate their behaviours, for both enormous good and evil.
So what are we to do as the grammarians by means of whose rigorous elaboration of the “prescriptive categories” of our present epistemological order, and therefore of our “local culture” [Geertz, 1983] “inner eyes,” the collective behaviours which bring the present nation-state order of the United States into being as such a specific order of reality are oriented, now that we are confronted with the price paid for the putting in place of this order of reality, as in the case of the Rodney King Beating/jury acquittal/South Central Los Angeles uprising Event? What are we, specifically as Black intellectuals, to do?
For we as Black intellectuals owe our group presence in the university system (rather than as pre-Sixties, where our exceptionality as the token Black scholar verified the rule which excluded our ostensibly I.Q.- lacking population group), to the call for a new intellectual order of knowledge that was originally made in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. This call that had been reinforced and made powerful, then too by the burning cities of Watts, of other ghettoes, as well as the uprisings after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination of the “captive population,” who, as James Baldwin wrote, normally have no means of enforcing their will upon the city or State. Given this situation, are we then to recycle the same old pieties? Shall we continue to settle for the Bantustans in which, as David Bradley wrote in 1982, we have been trapped?
Bradley had first pointed to the systemic nature of the curriculum exclusion imposed on all Black Americans as the function of the United States continuing to conceive of itself as a White and Euroamerican “Nation of Immigrants.” He had then argued that in the wake of the Sixties and Seventies social movements, Black American intellectuals had been trapped by their refusal to confront a central question. This question was that of the systemic nature of the rules which governed their exclusion from the mainstream conception of the United States, and which erased their centrality to the existential reality of North America. Bradley wrote:
“As a result of rallies we got courses in ‘black literature’ and ‘black history’ and a special black adviser for black students and a black cultural center ... rotting white washed house on neither edge of campus ... reachable ... by way of a scramble up a muddy bank ... And all those new courses did was exempt the departments from the unsettling necessity of altering existing ones, so they could go right advertising a course in ‘American Fiction’ that explicitly includes Hawthorne, Clemens, James, Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and implicitly excludes Chesnutt, Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.”
The issue here was that of deconstructing the curriculum mechanisms which expelled the Black Conceptual Other outside the “universe of obligation;” that therefore of redefining White America, as simply America. The issue therefore of a curriculum freed from the coding of race, on which it is at present instituted, and one that would have necessarily led to the asking of a central question - that of the validity of our present order of knowledge itself. This question had been raised by the Black American educator Carter G. Woodson as early as 1933 in his book The Miseducation of the Negro and has been re-asked in somewhat different but still related terms by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, as well as by David Orr, an environmentalist educator. Woodson had asked then, what was wrong with our present system of education? One whose scholarly curriculum not only served to strongly demotivate Black students, and to lead to their dropping out, but which also socialized White students to be the lynchers (and policemen-beaters) of Black Americans when they became adults. Woodson then used his analysis of the 1933 school curriculum, to argue that the demotivated and inferior intellectual performance of Black students, as a category, should be sought in the same source from which the deep-seated anti-Black phobia shared in by White students (as well as by the students of all other intermediate non-White groups) was also generated. These effects, he proposed, should be sought for, neither in the I.Q. deficiency of Blacks as an ostensibly evolutionarily retarded population group [C.D. Darlington, 1979], nor in the “innately racist” psyche, of the White lynchers. Instead both were to be seen as psycho-social responses that were regularly induced by the Systemic nature of the cognitive distortions with respect to the North American, as well as to the human past and present, that were everywhere present in the 1933 curriculum/textbooks.
These distortions, he went on, served an extra-cognitive function. This function was that of inducing the White students to believe that their ancestors had done everything worth doing in both the past, and at the same time, to induce the Black students to believe that their ancestors had done nothing worth doing, whether in the human or in the American past. One of the clues to this extra-cognitive function was that all non-Whites were not equally stigmatized. Whilst the past of all other groups was stigmatized, they were nevertheless left with certain shreds of human dignity. This was not so with respect to the 1933 curriculum’s misrepresentation of the Afro-American past and as well as its present.
Woodson’s “epistemological break” at this juncture was to see that the function of these White/Black misrepresentations was that of differentially motivating the respective categories of White and Black, in order to ensure the stable replication of the invariant relation of dominance/subordination between the two social categories as the empirical embodiment of the socio-symbolic analogy from which the genetic status-organizing principle, about which our present global national order institutes itself as an autopoetic or self-organizing living system [Maturana and Varela, 1980], can alone be generated. It was therefore the role of these systemic cognitive distortions to provide the mode of “truth” able to induce the White students (as the potential enforcers of their totemic group differential status vis-à-vis the Black category, whether as adult lyncher, policeman-beater or Simi Valley juror), to perceive it as their “just” and legitimate duty to keep the order’s Conceptual Other in its systemic place. “Why not,” Woodson asked, “exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?” “There would be,” he further pointed out, “no lynching if it did not start in the classroom.” Why not judicially “lynch” those who had been made perceivable as “no humans involved?” This all the more so in the case of the Rodney Kings, who since the Sixties have come to occupy a doubled pariah status, no longer that of only being Black, but of also belonging to the rapidly accelerating Post-Industrial category of the poor and jobless? As the category which, defined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman as that of the New Poor, embodies a plight, which like that of the ongoing degradation of the planetary environment, is not even posable, not to say resolvable, within the conceptual framework of our present order of knowledge.
Which is of course, where we come in, and the new form of the question - what is wrong with our education? Environmental educator, David Orr pointed out in a 1990 commencement address, that the blame for the environmental destruction of a planet on which we are losing “116 square miles of rain forest or an acre a second,” and on which at the same time we send up “2, 700 tons of chlorofluorocarbon into the atmosphere” as well as other behaviours destructive of our ecosystemic life support system, should be placed where it belongs. All of these effects, he argues, are the results of decisions taken not by ignorant and unlearned people. Rather, they were and are decisions taken by the “best and brightest” products of our present system of education; of its highest levels of learning, of universities like ours here at Stanford. Orr then cited in this context a point made by Elie Wiesel to a Global Forum held in Moscow in the Winter of 1989.
“The designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust,” Wiesel pointed out, “were the heirs of Kant and Goethe.” Although, “in most respects the Germans were the best educated people on earth, their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education?”