zhounder

This was just a place for me to vent to the world. Now it is a place where I can try to carry a message of anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-sexism and anti-idiot. Unfortunately there are plenty these people in this world. This is my corner of the world where I can say what is right. That gives me the power to say it and live it in real life too.

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August 23rd, 2012 at 10:55AM

Corporate culture, which now dominates higher education, shares the predatory culture of the military. These cultures are about subsuming the self into the herd. They are about the acquiring of technical, vocational skills to serve the system. And with the increasing budget cuts, and more craven obsequiousness to corporate donors, it will only get worse. These forces of conformity are hostile to the humanities that teach students to question assumptions and structures, that prod them to seek a life of meaning and an ethical code that challenges the blind, utilitarian obedience to power and profit that corporations and the military instill. We will, I fear, continue to turn out the intellectually stunted and maimed, those who know school football records but no philosophy, drama, art, music, theology, literature or history. The goal of an education is not, in the end, to tell students what to think but to teach them how to think. —

Mercifully, as a professor, I can say that many if not most of us ascribe to Hedges’ views on education. Sadly, students have entered universities over the past two decades with a single goal: get out and make a lot of money. I teach social work. A student once came up to me at orientation and asked, “Can I make a lot of money in this?” I told him, “No. But you can ease the suffering of many and contribute to the making of a better society.”

Chris Hedges (via thereisnogod)

(via oldenough2burmom)