08-16-2020, 02:05 PM
(08-16-2020, 11:15 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Part of civics is learning to reject demagoguery, including identity politics at their worst. Much of the mass appeal of Donald Trump is his strident vulgarity. Although people must learn economic functions they must also learn how to live.
Civics is arguably the most boring class in K-12 education... but people must learn it if they are to avoid falling for people who would steal our liberties in the name of 'faith', 'prosperity', and 'national glory'... and the 'faith' is in something absurd, the 'prosperity' is for someone else to enjoy while we are shut out of it, and 'national glory' is wars for profit in which soldiers are cannon fodder.
Back in the 1970's I remember reading Crime and Punishment, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Why I Am Not a Christian, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, and Lord of the Flies as if such were acts of rebellion. Don't forget Mad Magazine. I got some telling lessons from those books... maybe the educational Establishment of the time wanted such to seem acts of rebellion.
Mark Twain once quipped that "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics". OK, figures don't lie, but liars can figure. Note also that Mark Twain missed the era of totalitarian politics, maybe not quite getting the extremist currents in Russia as Dostoevsky did (Dostoevsky was born about a decade and a half before Mark Twain, but he was in Russia and Mark Twain wasn't). The age of totalitarianism in politics begins with the founding of the Second Ku Klux Klan, which took on many characteristics of fascism before Mussolini used the word Fascismo to describe his vague beliefs at the time. Twain obviously missed the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism... people can use statistics to refute dubious statistics, as statistics is the easiest class in college-level mathematics. But Orwellian Newspeak is a monster, a destroyer of language and its capacity for subtlety and clarity of expression essential to honest politics and even something so basic as romantic love. People need recognize the ways of Newspeak when it emerges from the moral cesspool of totalitarianism and find it repugnant if they are to keep their Republic.
We need expand education from K-12 to K-14 just to teach people how to avoid being cheated out of a good life. High school may have too many legitimate objectives to offer the survey courses in economics, philosophy (especially formal logic), and psychology that one needs so that one can avoid getting snookered. Cinema is the legitimate new art form of the last century and a half, and it is a melding of literature and image... and even if it is only slightly and erratically verbal (silent film) then it has its own special means of non-verbal communication. Art and music appreciation? Those can enrich life greatly. People who know genuine music recognize rap as ugly noise and practically all country music as witless drivel. (OK, Roy Clark was a genuine virtuoso, and Johnny Cash did show some conscience... when his music took more of a folk direction).
The school system in this country doesn't serve children and our future at all, it's just a way to keep the teen unemployment figures down. The disastrous way it's run definitely makes this seem like the case anyway.
I agree with you that civic education is severely lacking. Everywhere I go, it does seem to me that this country is a cultural vacuum, with people equating hedonistic entertainment with culture and vacuous expression with art. I too fall prey to this mindless drivel, losing hours of a day to reading and watching these things when I could be appreciating more intellectually stimulating media. I'm beginning to suspect that our culture as a whole (at least right now) cannot support intellectual enlightenment, given that people are too stressed out making ends meet to even have the mental energy to appreciate something greater. All they want is to put on another mind-numbing episode of their favorite TV show for 20 mins of escapism.
I think for this to happen we need a collective cultural awakening, a reevaluation of our values, that life is meant to be lived, not consumed. Our neoliberal values makes this impossible, where the ultimate goal is to climb the job ladder, drive the most powerful car, own the biggest house, run in the rat race. In many cases this isn't even possible, with crippling student debt being the ticket to the race, and expendable workers stopping anyone from getting far ahead at all.