Education and Thought

Believe it or not, Chris Hedges wrote this in 2011, when our current political climate was nowhere on the horizon.

When you think about education and what it should do, contemplate this afresh:

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves….

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

From “Why the United States is Destroying its Education System”

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Michael
Michael
7 years ago

Hi Scott
Love this
Not heard of this author
Parallels with some things I ask my students to read.
I admire your critical spunk!
I studied w Hanna Pitkin at Berkeley-a doctoral semi mat on political theory.
She is America’s leading scholar on H Arendt. I’ve read much of Arendt’s work Few like her around anymore
Chantal Mouffe is a colleague of Michael be at Westminster university
More comes to mind, would rather dialogue than write without immediate feedback
Enjoy your day!