School's Purpose

School's Purpose: Pogrom from the Populace

The more words that go up at InfoAll.org, at Knatz.com, at Macroinformation.org [all pk domains censored, deleted, destroyed in 2007], the more embarrassed I become at how incomplete it all is. It isn’t just that the zoo is never the environment, the terrarium never the forest; I leap to start first tier ideas, then leap to jot stuff for the second, third ... tenth tier. The nth tier is a lot easier to write for than the top. The top is so complex, so full of uncertainties, so embarrassing. And dealing with it at all, even thinking of dealing with it gets one into so much trouble. Isn’t it bad enough that I’ve already been ignored, fired, beat up, shunned, misunderstood, lied about ... for most of the past half century?

I posted a section to gather thoughts on the purpose of school soon after posting a home page. Most important, it mentions Lauter and Howe’s 1969 analysis. Equally important it mentions Illich’s 1970 analysis. It mentions that Lauter and Howe quickened my receptivity to Illich. I have never doubted that Illich knew the Lauter and How material: they all published in the NYR. But my own additions quickly became, and remain, a mess: despite numerous starts at improvement. Indeed, one of my thoughts in starting this blog was to provide an easy place to straighten out my School’s Purpose section.

Women proposed Ms. to replace Mrs. and Miss, but instead of one title they wound up with three. Here I intend to simplify, to coordinate, but at the moment it’s just another damn file.

I want to emphasize two points, to blend them, to relate them to all else. I don’t have the time to see where I’ve already made these points or to coordinate them all. There is no final variorum edition of human learning; just ever more rubble. Yet understanding, learning, even wisdom, is possible. But you have to do some of the work.

No culture will allow political leaders to be chosen by a robot simply selecting the highest IQ, the most compendious learning. Schools, including universities, express a culture’s homeostasis: we want to nourish these ideas and starve those, we want to reward this behavior and punish that. At no point are the standards objective. A scientist can scarf public funds and get tenure falsifying obscure technical theories, but not popular beliefs. The public will tolerate the honing of technique -- build bigger bombs, seek bigger, quicker profits -- but will tar and feather any individual or group that threatens to become too wise for the entire group’s comfort or convenience.

We say that schools pursue excellence: we leave out the necessary qualifiers: in some things.

And that’s why unemployable, never rewarded pk (what more can you do to me?), more and more inventories well know exceptions: from Jesus to Abelard to Galileo ... to Reich, Leary ... Illich, pk.
If the group sandbags you, you’re in elite company.

Any university can display a stack of geniuses it honored. What we need to see, next to its list, is an inventory of genius it was blind to. Who did it ignore? Who did it fire? Whose work got subverted, smeared, invidiously caricatured? Ditto any institution. Oh goody, Olympia published Lolita when no one else would (one of the great modern novels, THE quintessential Twentieth-century love story); what DIDN’T Olympia publish? Oh, goody, the MLA published this and that, supported him and her; but the MLA rejected Henry Adam’s Mont Saint Michel et Chartres!

Some network is currently featuring "good news" on the news: common people "trying to make a difference." In 2005 no news organ has yet given honest coverage to 1970’s FLEX!

Everyone pretends not to notice the fart at the wedding. When Illich’s work got near the heart of our dilemmas, suddenly his fortunes reversed: the world’s most famous priest disappeared, right before our eyes: a conspiracy of the craven. The public can doubt the Warren Commission, but the public must never doubt itself: no matter what crimes its commiting. We’ll die of stupidity before we’ll admit to stupidity.

Driving a couple of students to go skiing back in 1968 they were grousing about the college interfering with their liberty to smoke dope, to fuck in the hallways. I assured them that the in loco parentis the-hell-with-due-process administration was the only thing keeping the whole campus from getting burned to the ground by the good witch-hunters of Salem. The college knows how slippery its foundation is. A little bit of flouting the culture is OK, so long as the students are branded as YOUNG, so long as they’re unemployed, so long as they’re cloistered. But the privileged-to-be-useless Mandarin larvae had better leave their Saturnalias -- and their thinking -- far short of the threshold that will trigger a pogrom from the populace.