Education

Education

M

y students have been taught that absolute good and evil do not exist. Pluralistic cultural relativism predominates. There are no absolutes, no hierarchies, no transcendence, no metaphysics. Any society has the right to decide for itself what is right and wrong. When I point out the problems inherent in clinging to this poststructuralist doctrine, especially in a global context, my students become disquieted and a little resentful. Some refuse to accept what I am saying. It is always upsetting to have your beliefs questioned, especially when they have enabled you to pass examinations.

            The same applies to my students’ firm conviction that truth is subjective. There is my truth and your truth, my reality and your reality, or so they tell me. If I sincerely believe something and you sincerely believe the opposite, why, we are both right! All but those who attended religious schools were taught this simple-minded dogma before they came to university. When I point out that this leads to logical absurdities, since if I sincerely believe that it is raining in the courtyard and they sincerely believe it is not, we cannot both be right, they are perturbed. Yet none of them had had the wit to think of this for themselves, tamely accepting what their teachers had told them. But where did their teachers acquire this doctrine? From their poststructuralist universities – where else? Socrates demolished this dangerous nonsense about the subjectivity of truth two thousand five hundred years ago, yet it is still flourishing, being taught by academics who think by rote.

            Poststructuralism teaches that a text can be interpreted to mean anything one likes, since texts depend on context and context is boundless. My students have been taught this in their other courses, or learnt it while at school. Just try telling a magistrate, when you are up for dangerous driving, that Professor Fuddle has taught you that road-signs may mean anything one chooses. I once advised a class not to apply this dictum about meaning being boundless to the Ten Commandments, only to realise that some students did not know what I meant, not having seen Charlton Heston playing Moses on late-night television. I suppose Orwell anticipated this aspect of poststructuralist theory with his “Newspeak” and “Duckspeak” (“War is Peace”, etc). Of course, meaning depends on context. But context is only potentially and not actually boundless. It is the here and now that counts.

            Since the advent of the Internet, it has become almost impossible to decide whether students, especially those in the Humanities and Social Sciences, have actually written an assignment themselves, for the Net is still largely a trackless wilderness where conscienceless students can obtain essays on virtually every subject, without much fear of detection. The only sure way of deciding a student’s real merit is through examination. Until we have search engines sensitive enough to track down isolated phrases accurately and quickly, we shall have to rely on students’ performance in examinations, not in assignments. In spite of this, many overworked academics continue to set the same essay topics year after year and to allot no more than a small percentage of the total marks to examinations, if indeed they set examinations at all. I should guess that a certain percentage of university graduates owe their success, not to their knowledge of the subjects they studied, but to ingenious, systematic cheating. This may help to explain the dismaying degree of managerial and clerical incompetence and stupidity one now encounters in so many sectors of society, as well as account for the dismal performance of many teachers, especially in state schools. It may also explain why many of these teachers are reluctant to fail any of their students. They are uncertain as to the correctness, or otherwise, of their answers.

            The amount of intellectual cream available has remained roughly constant since I began teaching close on fifty years ago. The amount of milk, however, has increased. Unfortunately, so has the amount of water added to the milk in order to fill up quotas set by our bureaucracy. The whole educational process has thus been both diluted and soured.

            G.M. Trevelyan remarks his English Social History (1942) that “It [education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals”. Today, an editor would revise this to: “…able to read, but alliterate, much preferring to watch TV, and thus an even easier prey to increasingly clever advertisers”. Postmodernist editors are not allowed to believe that anything is more worth reading than anything else, which leads one to wonder why they reject some manuscripts and accept others.

            Some Australian universities, desperate for money, are increasingly reluctant to fail fee-paying foreign students. In certain faculties, even the grossest mistakes in English are ignored, ‘as long as the sense is clear’, on the cogent grounds that if these students were penalized for errors in syntax, grammar and spelling, they would nearly all fail. Such universities should learn from the experiences for the old Chinese empire. A dynasty could sell official positions without doing itself irrevocable damage; but once it started selling degrees, it was lost.

            Montesquieu (1689-1755) observed that we receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters and one from the world, with the third contradicting everything taught by the first two. He must have been singularly unfortunate in both his parents and his teachers. Normally, a child should acquire enough from these two sources to enable him to learn the bitter lessons the world imparts. If the world really contradicted everything the child had learnt before venturing into it, he would not live long enough to learn anything else.

            In Australia, about twelve percent of the population watch the ABC and about three percent regularly watch SBS, percentages that have been constant for years. The rest watch commercial TV. This three percent is a rough but useful estimate of the proportion of intellectuals in the population. No amount of education is likely to raise this figure.

            Slyness will take a student a long way in the present educational system, as it does in life. It constitutes a form of intelligence – cunning – which has gone unrecognised by psychologists, since those who possess this talent – especially politicians – are far too devious to admit it.

            “To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant” (Bronson Alcott). True! It is almost impossible to convince anyone of their ignorance, especially if they have received fifteen years of secondary and tertiary education. Should they also have acquired a higher degree or two, the task is hopeless.

            I spent twenty-one years in school and university, yet was still profoundly ignorant of the world when I finally emerged, blinking like an owl in the harsh light of reality, with my degree certificates clutched in my hand. I was not ‘street smart’. Today, ‘street smart’ is a term of praise. It means something like ‘having the ability to prosper in the rough and tumble of life”. To do this, one now needs the morals of a whore (street walker); hence the expression.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM