DEHUMANIZED – when math and science rule the school
by mark slouka
harper’s, september 2009
in this excellent analysis of american education (and its effects on america’s much touted freedoms and democracy), mark slouka talks about today’s essential drama: “the unqualified triumph of a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value. it’s about the victory of whatever can be quantified over everything that can’t. it’s about the quiet retooling of american education into an adjunct of business, an instrument of production.”
as the arts and humanities have become marginalized, we are increasingly trained in what to think but not in how to formulate our own world view. “in a corporate culture, hypnotized by quarterly results and profit margins, the gradual sifting of political sentiment is of no value; in a horizontal world of “information” readily convertible to product, the verticality of wisdom has no place. show me the spreadsheet on skepticism.”
what we teach in school is a good measure of what we value as a society. but real debate on this important subject is stifled by orthodoxy, and “whether that orthodoxy is enforced thru the barrel of a gun or backed by unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.”
“in our time, orthodoxy is economic. popular culture fetishizes it, out entertainments salaam to it, our artists are ranked by and revered for it. everything submits, everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including – in the last analysis – our own.”
capitalism has been extremely successful in co-opting the educational system, but “by downsizing what is most dangerous (and essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens.” our priorities have become inverted. “our primary function is to teach people, not tasks, [but how] to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. it is only secondarily about producing workers.”
the case for the humanities is not hard to make. “the humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like frost’s momentary stay against confusion. they are thus inescapably, political. why? because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. because they grow in uncertainty. because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion) , even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed thru questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms.”
how can education in america produce citizens necessary for the survival of democracy when “values” have become off limits – confined to the home and church? “how does one “do” the humanities value-free? how does one teach history, say, without grappling with what that long parade of genius and folly suggests to us? how does one teach literature other than as an invitation, a challenge, a gauntlet – a force fully capable of altering not only what we believe but how we see? the answer is, of course, that one doesn’t. one teaches some toothless, formalized version of these things, careful not to upset anyone, despite the fact that upsetting people is arguably the very purpose of the arts and perhaps of the humanities in general.”
as the “market for reason” is slipping away, it is perhaps not too late to “invest our capital in what makes us human.”