Another vital article by Henry Giroux. - Molly
A deep-rooted crisis in education, and a long cultural and political decline, is what got us here. There's hope!
By Henry A. Giroux / Salon
Donald
Trump’s ascendancy in American politics has made visible a plague of
deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for
reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering of
civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and
the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. As Trump has galvanized his
base of true believers in post-election demonstrations, the world is witnessing
how a politics of bigotry and hate is transformed into a spectacle of
demonization, division and disinformation. Under President Trump, the scourge
of mid-20th century authoritarianism has returned not only in the menacing
plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, threats and humiliation, but also
in an emboldened culture of war, militarization and violence that looms over
society like a rising storm.
The
reality of Trump’s election may be the most momentous development of the age
because of its enormity and the shock it has produced. The whole world is
watching, pondering how such a dreadful event could have happened. How have we
arrived here? What forces have allowed education, if not reason itself, to be
undermined as crucial public and political resources, capable of producing the
formative culture and critical citizens that could have prevented such a
catastrophe from happening in an alleged democracy? We get a glimpse of this
failure of education, public values and civic literacy in the willingness and
success of the Trump administration to empty language of any meaning, a
practice that constitutes a flight from historical memory, ethics, justice and
social responsibility.
Under
such circumstances and with too little opposition, the Trump administration has
taken on the workings of a dis-imagination machine, characterized by an utter
disregard for the truth and often accompanied by the president’s tweet-storm
of “primitive
schoolyard taunts and threats.” In this instance, George
Orwell’s famous maxim from “Nineteen Eighty-four,” “Ignorance is Strength,”
materializes in the administration’s weaponized attempt not only to rewrite
history but also to obliterate it. What we are witnessing is not simply a
political project but also a reworking of the very meaning of education as both
a crucial institution and a democratizing and empowering cultural force.
Truth
is now viewed as a liability and ignorance a virtue. Under the reign of this
normalized architecture of alleged common sense, literacy is regarded with
disdain, words are reduced to data and science is confused with pseudo-science.
All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture as ignorance
becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance,
two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in
schools and a majority of Republicans in Congress do not believe that climate
change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughing stock of the
world. Politicians endlessly lie, knowing that the public can be easily seduced
by exhortations, emotional outbursts and sensationalism, all of which mimic the
fatuous spectacle of celebrity culture and reality TV. Image-selling now
entails lying on principle, making it easier for politics to dissolve into
entertainment, pathology and a unique brand of criminality.
The
corruption of both the truth and politics is abetted by the fact that much of
the American public has become habituated to overstimulation and lives in an
ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has
the time to crystallize into mature and informed thought. Opinion now trumps
reason and evidence-based arguments. News has become entertainment and echoes
reality rather than interrogating it. Popular culture revels in the spectacles
of shock and violence. Defunded and corporatized, many institutions of public
and higher education have been all too willing to make the culture of business
the business of education, and this transformation has corrupted their mission.
Please go here to continue this article: http://www.alternet.org/education/manufactured-illiteracy-and-miseducation-long-process-decline-led-president-donald-trump#.WVJewoBVGEI.facebook
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