Many bloggers have commented on the pretentiousness and vacuousness of the gaggle of politicians, entrepreneurs, and hedge funders who have gathered in the Adirondacks of New York and audaciously dubbed themselves the “thought leaders” of our time. They called their meeting “Camp Philos,” to claim association with such intellectual giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their goal, they said, was to discuss “education reform,” but it is now generally understood that this term refers to the privatization and monetization of public education. They no doubt spoke of getting the nation’s children workforce-ready, prepared for global competition, primed to ace the next round of standardized tests.
What would Ralph Waldo Emerson say? Would he write about the convergence of crass values, of minds trained for profit making, of souls so devoid of ideals that they confuse commerce with philosophy?
Of everything I have read, whether humorous or serious yet, the best is the musings of a teacher named Patrick Walsh who writes the RagingHorse blog. I can give you but a sample of his critique of this circus of self-celebration and vulgar commercialism.
He writes:
“Needless to say, anyone who can convince themselves that they could place the words “Philosopher’s Camp “ before the words, “education reform” in the same breath they are comparing themselves with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson is well nigh in need of a good teacher, a course in philosophy 101, or at the very least, a dictionary.
“On the other hand the event – which achieves a kind of horrible sublimity in its sheer vulgarity — is perfectly consistent with the tactics of the long stealth campaign to privatize the school system that built America. Of the privatizers many repugnant tactics, none is more more consistent, intrinsic nor effective than the conscious manipulation of language and images. In the way does a half assed experiment, hatched up in secret by shills and testing companies and financed by a billionaire come to be known as the miraculous Common Core State Standards, the are the answer to all that ills us, the solution to all problems. In this way does the almost Biblical struggle for Civil Rights come to be employed by the privatizer’s public relations department, as a tool to strip teachers of the right to due process and undermine unions. In this way does the word “philosophy”, one of the most transcendent and spiritually charged words in any language, come to be used in Lake Placid, as a fig leaf for yet the latest episode in most rapacious campaign against a public system in American history. The privatizers know little or nothing of education but they do know, as Orwell knew ( see “Politics and the English Language” ) that those who control the language control reality.
“Cuomo, coming off orchestrating what is surely the most egregiously unfair education law in the history of New York state, is the “honorary chairman” of the philosophical retreat. It troubles the philosophical Chairman Governor not at all that no educator was invited to Camp Philos, nor even that those who attempted to attend were summarily rejected, one and all.
“Still, even as I find the privatizers among the most cynical, ignorant and narcissistic people on the face of the earth, I must admit there is one place in which I agree with them, even as I radically disagree with their methods and ends.”
Walsh agrees that American education has failed in its duty to teach generations of students to appreciate the meaning of philosophy.
He writes:
“I would define the failure as philosophical in both nature and cause. Allow me to elaborate. Education is, in its essence, a philosophical endeavor. Yes, of course we need to insure that our citizens acquire enough practical skills so that they can navigate the always unknown road ahead. Yes, of course, it means that schools must do all they can to insure our students have the requisite skills to gain employment in an ever more frighteningly competitive world in which jobs are now routinely “out-sourced” or mechanized out of existence altogether. That said, education is not job training. Job training is a wonderful thing and a necessity but education serves a much larger, deeper, and more vital role, and that is where the philosophical element, directly or indirectly, enters into the picture.
“Accordingly, in the front and center of our education system should be some variations of the following questions:
“What, as a society, do we value ?
What kind of a people are we ?
What do we really believe in ?
Do we live our beliefs ?
What kind of citizens do we wish to produce ?
What does it mean to be educated ?
What, if anything, are our responsibilities to each other ?
How are we to live together ?
“Were it within my power to do so, I would immediately and unapologetically do all I could do to introduce the study of philosophy on some level beginning in the third grade, the age of my daughter as of this writing. And I would make it an essential part of the curriculum in every grade until high school graduation. Implicit with this undertaking would be the understanding that some may not grasp the meaning of the study for years if at all but all would benefit from the exposure.
“Children would begin with a study of the word: “philo,” which means “love. “Sophia,” which means “wisdom.” Let them spend a week, a month, a year — whatever it takes – discussing and attempting to grasp those two words alone and the concept of those together, and you cannot help but have a child with an imagination larger because it is more unleashed than before. Help a child understand that this thing called “wisdom” exists and is real and has been honored and revered by the civilized since the beginning of civilization, that it has nothing to do with the accumulation of material wealth, nothing to do with power over others, nothing to do with competition or control, and you have opened the portals of the mind. And you have done something else: you have given a child a way of seeing that affords he or she some mode of mental protection against a corporate assault that, for many, begins at the moment of consciousness. Worse, the assault is designed to wed that struggling to be formed identity with a product, now and forevermore.”
He writes:
“The study of philosophy would not merely make our children “college and career ready” ( whatever those weasel words actually mean), it would help them to understand this mystery called Life in all of its paradoxical, tragic and wondrous nature.
“We now live in a nation where most citizens seem to believe that the word “philosophy” is synonymous with “opinion.” We have all heard vulgar examples in statements such as “My philosophy is to hit a guy before he hits you” or some such foolishness. It is, I would argue, the absence of philosophical knowledge that has contributed to much of America’s horrible and dangerous confusion of technology with science, data with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom. Most of all has led to the groutesques idea that knowedge is power rather than liberation from the need for power.
“This is worse than sad.. No decent society, never mind democracy, can exist in this kind of mass confusion.
And, yes, many of these same people are products of the public school system and yes, that school system failed them. And it continues to fail them.
“When I have asked my students why they go to school and why they study, overwhelmingly they reply with some variation of “ to do well on the test.” This is sick but it is hardly an accident. But why should they think differently? It is, however, a crime. It is the crime of starving the imaginations of millions of children by sheer neglect. And it is a crime that the miraculous Common Core will not only not correct but will, in fact, perpetuate.
“I do not believe in magical thinking. (I leave that for the proponents of the Common Core) I am well aware that the study of philosophy will not automatically and magically open the doors of the imagination. Pre-Nazi Germany had the most rigorous school curriculum but it did little to stop millions from embracing Hitler. Something more is needed. That said, I know this: the absence of something as immense as philosophy can only diminish this nation. As I see it, the problem is ecological. By this I mean if you deprive a child of philosophical awareness you do not get child minus philosophy. You get someone radically different and radically weaker. You get a person whose imagination, the key to all, has been severely diminished.
“The purpose of education is not to be found in the vulgar slogan, “knowledge is power” but the absence of philosophy is one reason why that slogan is so readily swallowed in our increasingly competitive, miserable, punitive land. As philosophers and artists and spiritual geniuses have known for thousands of years, education is the emacipation of the human imagination. The purpose of education is freedom.”
I will not lift all the words of this brilliant blog. I want you to open the link and read it all yourself. These are not the words of a college professor or an eminent theologian, but a classroom teacher in one of the toughest neighborhoods of New York City.
Patrick Walsh is a teacher. He can pass the tests the politicians mandate. Can we say the same of the politicians whose forte is self-promotion?
