The War
Against Learning
Never let school interfere with your
education.
~ Mark Twain
A recurring theme in my writing is that the most
important question confronting mankind is the
epistemological one: how do we know what we know? If we
are to live well, we must learn not only about the nature
of our world, but how to function effectively within it.
How do we organize our experiences, and who helps us to
do so, and by what criteria do we seek reliable patterns
of understanding for living in a complex world?
In an institutionally-dominated world, it has largely
been taken for granted that institutions should direct
the education of children, so that they will grow up
conforming their lives to the interests of the
established order. Chapter 12 of my book, Calculated
Chaos, provides a detailed exploration of the processes
by which government schools help to politicize young
minds.
Beyond the more obvious rituals and catechisms by which
children are conditioned in the religion of statism
(e.g., saluting the flag, reciting the “pledge of
allegiance”), there lurks an even more sinister
premise that is utterly destructive of personalized
learning: the idea that knowledge is a quality bestowed
by some (i.e., teachers) upon others (i.e., students).
Learning becomes not something you do, but something done
to you. Your purpose in being in school is not to enhance
your creativity and understanding of the world, but to
adopt “success” as your motivating standard.
“Success,” of course, is measured in terms of
how well you have internalized the institutional mindset.
Children who stay away from school because they do not
find it consistent with their interests are labeled
“truants,” to be hunted down and – along
with their parents – criminally prosecuted. Children
who attend school, but find the teacher’s
pedantically-delivered agenda of less interest than a
subject-matter of their own choosing, are diagnosed as
having an “attention-deficit disorder,” the
remedy for which may include behavior-modifying drugs. In
trying to figure out why so many children find
forced-schooling not to their liking, the child becomes
the focus of the problem. It is never the school system
that is at fault, or whose underlying premises need
questioning.
Recent news stories illustrate the problems that can
arise when the state – or any other institution
– presumes to direct the course of learning. One
report focuses on the policies of a Virginia middle
school that prohibit students from having any
“physical contact” with one another. The rule
includes not only fighting, but shaking hands, hugging,
patting a friend on the back, holding hands, and giving
one another “high-fives.” One school official
defended this “no touching” policy on the
ground that, while schools can teach students an abstract
principle of “keeping your hands to yourself,”
there is not always an adult present to direct the
student as to how to implement the rule in a given
situation.
No more telling admission of both the absurdity and the
failure of vertically-structured learning can be offered.
No better expression of the need for children to learn
how to negotiate their relationships with one another on
their own, without state-licensed school teachers and
administrators patrolling the halls on the lookout for
“delinquents” who hug! (Will the offense be
refined to include “suspicion of intent to show
affection”?)
One of the most important things children have to learn
in growing up is how to deal with one another. If Mark
goes too far in giving Lisa an unwanted hug, he might get
his face slapped, a consequence Mark will register in his
thinking about how to deal with girls. If Sally becomes
too gossipy about her friends, she might discover a
dwindling number of peers who want to associate with her.
Through the responses youngsters make toward one
another’s conduct, they learn to distinguish a
friendly push from a more aggressive shove and, in the
process, modify their behavior.
But the institutionalized enunciation of precise rules
eliminates this negotiation process. Like economic
transactions, the presumption is that external
authorities must direct conduct. Once the policy has been
announced – as the aforesaid school administrator
tells us – there must be someone (i.e., school
officials) to tell the students how to implement the
rule. To think otherwise, is to put upon individual
students the burden of discriminating among various
behavioral options. Discrimination involves the making of
individualized distinctions, a practice which, by its
nature, involves personal choices to be made in the face
of concrete circumstances. But, as we know,
“discrimination” – being an individualized
act – has become one of the cardinal sins in the
statist religion. In a collectivistic society, all
expressions of individualism must be eliminated; general
rules, applicable to all – no matter their absurdity
in given circumstances – must be rigidly enforced,
lest even the faintest impression remain that there be
some realm within which individuals are responsible only
to themselves. As I write this article, a blogger informs
me that in the grocery store where he shops, he saw a
checkout clerk ask a man – in his mid-60s – for
identification. A state law makes it unlawful to sell
alcohol to a minor, and this clerk was unprepared to
distinguish a teenager from a man of retirement age!
Perhaps this clerk had learned, through his school
experiences, the importance of making robotic responses
to abstractions. People are not to be allowed to
discriminate as to which criteria are appropriate grounds
upon which to discriminate.
In a collective world, “liberty” and “free
choice” represent “loopholes” needing to
be filled with more rules.
This war against learning infects virtually all areas of
childhood activity. Even play is being taken away from
children. I have long been a critic of adult-organized,
adult-run, adult-coached, sports for children. Play is an
important activity of childhood, and yet most adults
think it appropriate for them to usurp and manage this
otherwise spontaneous and autonomous activity. I was
fortunate enough to have grown up before the days in
which “little league” baseball, football,
soccer, basketball, etc., took over children’s parks
and playgrounds.
Like the government school system, adult-run sports use
children for adult purposes – however well-intended
those purposes might be – to which the children are
expected to be subservient. The official motto of Little
League Baseball is “Character, Courage,
Loyalty.” Is play now intended as a means for
reinforcing the pledge of allegiance upon the minds of
children? Is this why uniforms are consistently adorned
with American flags? In my youth, we played our games
purely for the fun of it. None of us thought that, when
we gathered for a game on Saturday morning, we were
making a political commitment.
Nor did we play in order to satisfy any expectations of
our parents. Indeed, our parents would not have dreamed
of invading our playtime by showing up for our games and,
had they done so, we would have been humiliated. We
played for our mutual enjoyment and, in the course of
doing so, we learned the subtle arts of negotiation that
make civil society possible. We organized our own teams,
scheduled our own games with other teams, and even hired
impartial umpires (i.e., older kids) for the
“important” games. If such an umpire was not
available, we were honest enough to acknowledge
“balls” or “strikes” or
“outs” with one another knowing that, if we did
not, the game would quickly end. How well we did this may
have contributed to the development of our
“character,” but only as an unintended
consequence of what we were doing, not as a purpose.
Jean Piaget and others have written of both the nature
and importance of children’s self-directed play. You
may recall from your own childhood – assuming you
grew up without adults dominating your every activity and
defining your experiences for you – how the games
you played with others were conducted on quite informal,
ad hoc rules upon which you agreed. Learning how to adapt
– spontaneously and autonomously – to the
inconstant conditions of the world, provides us with a
far more reliable basis for our behavior than do
institutional mandates, crafted and enforced upon young
minds by updated versions of the Code of Hammurabi.
How do our adult lives get influenced by how we grew up?
If we failed to learn an individualized basis for judging
the propriety of our actions; if the development of a
character that was unable to discriminate between what
was factual and what was only fashionable became stunted;
if our behavior was directed by abstract propositions
formulated and interpreted for us by external
authorities, how might our adult lives be affected?
The much reported – and little examined – case
involving lacrosse players at Duke University provides
some insight. By now, even those addicted to Faux News
know that phony accusations of rape were made against
three young white men by a black woman. Absolutely no
evidence supported the charge other than the accusation
by the woman, whose story underwent constant change. A
dishonest district attorney – seeing the opportunity
of exploiting the situation on behalf of his re-election
campaign – failed to disclose exculpatory evidence
to defense attorneys, and made inflammatory press
conferences his principal prosecutorial tool. His conduct
was so outrageous that even the North Carolina bar
stripped him of his license to practice.
What was most telling about this so-called
“case” was not the dishonest nature of the
prosecution – criminal defense lawyers can provide a
litany of prosecutorial misconduct to match Mr.
Nifong’s. It was the artless response of most
members of the mainstream media, along with the knee-jerk
reaction of the Duke University administration, as well
as large numbers of Duke faculty and students, that
showed a complete collapse of rational thinking. People
who had grown up with an appreciation for being able to
discriminate between an allegation and a fact, would have
quickly asked for a showing of the evidence for this
charge. Such skills were at the base of what, in my
youth, was one of the highest compliments one could pay
to another: “you have a discriminating mind.”
In today’s marketplace of collective madness, a
“discriminating mind” stands as an accusation!
Duke University – long respected for its
intellectual excellence – suffered a blow to its
reputation from which it may not soon recover. While a
number of intellectually honest and courageous students
and faculty members insisted upon an evidentiary basis
for the charges against these three students, others
showed little attraction to the niceties of due process.
Sadly, many members of the black community – whose
electoral support Mr. Nifong cynically relied upon during
this sordid affair – failed to see how their
willingness to equate an accusation with fact played by
the same vicious and depraved rules that led some whites
to lynch blacks within this same state generations
earlier.
One might have hoped that, within the Duke University
community, reason and an appeal to fact might have
prevailed. Such was not the case, however, as these three
men – as well as other lacrosse team players who had
not even been accused – had to endure slurs and
threats from others as they walked across campus and sat
in their classrooms. Discriminatory thinking was
abandoned long ago by the oracles of “political
correctness.” In its place was erected the monolith
of the abstract principle, whose application to a given
set of circumstances was left to the interpretation of
self-appointed authorities – and certainly not to
ordinary folk who had been carefully nurtured to distrust
their own capacities for making distinctions. And so,
like the denizens of Orwell’s Animal Farm, many Duke
faculty members, students, and administrators began
parroting the crude, collective catechism “black
female good; white male bad” which, to their
reactive minds, provided a sole and sufficient basis for
their thinking.
In the aftermath of Michael Nifong’s disbarment, it
may be time for intelligent minds to ask if others ought
not be defrocked of their licenses to competently and
honestly pursue their trades. If Duke University seeks to
rehabilitate its reputation, it might want to consider
revoking the tenure of those faculty members and
administrators who so woefully failed to exercise the
barest attributes of intellectual proficiency: the
recourse to reason and evidence as the basis for drawing
conclusions.
If civilized society is to be possible, children –
whether in their pre-teenage or college years – need
to learn from themselves and one another how to negotiate
for the kind of conduct which, alone, makes decent
society possible. In the course of doing so, they require
the loving assistance of adults who teach best by the
examples they set for their own lives, and who appreciate
the importance of staying out of the way of children as
they struggle for their own independent development.
June 21, 2007
Butler Shaffer teaches at the Southwestern University
School of Law. He is the author of Calculated Chaos:
Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com
From http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer158.html
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