Monday, February 18, 2008
Why Not Plumbing?
The insistence that education is to be defined only as college preparation comes out of postmodernists' simultaneous insistence on an egalitarian world view and their own elitism. They think plumbing is beneath them, and then they declare it to be beneath everyone else. One wonders, though, how many postmodern theorists make as much money as a plumber does. Money is not the point, I am sure they would argue -- assuming, of course, that no one could possibly enjoy being a plumber. I've met many more people who would enjoy being a plumber than would enjoy learning how to understand James Joyce's "Ulysses." Sadly, we do little to prepare anyone to do either.
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8 comments:
This is just nonsense. Show me one; just one postmodernist who has said that plumbing is beneath her. A pet trick of unemployed bloviators -- set up a straw man and then knock him down.
It's a pet trick of cowards to post petty insults anonymously instead of taking responsibility for their own opinions. The basic question is fair, but the accompanying emotional tantrum leads one to wonder whether "anonymous" really cares about the answer.
Whoever you are, you should be ashamed of yourself.
The straw man is asking for something as specific as someone saying plumbing is beneath them. I have the evidence of people's actions to support what I am saying. I have a history of schools being run by postmodern leftists and the subsequent disappearance of things like shop and auto mechanics under them as evidence of their values. I have them saying ridiculous things like "Every child should go to college." I have the fact that every postmodern leftist I have ever read, met, or listened to being elistists while giving lip service to egalitarianist ideals.
Of course, John, you're right. No amount of evidence is going to persuade anonymous, as they are not interested in rational discourse.
So your evidence is people you have met? Who are they? How do you know they're postmodernist leftists? The trend towards dropping trade courses in high school started before postmodernism was even invented. And all that has happened is that the trade courses have gone from being offered in high schools to community colleges. Do you think only postmodernist leftists think that high school is better suited for a basic education and that education for a trade is better suited for more specialized places?
You're not a very careful reader, anonymous. Nor do you know much about postmodernism or when it started. I said know, read, or heard. That covers a lot. Especially for me. Postmodernism has its deep roots in Rousseau, so it goes quite a ways back. Our problems with education also happen to start with Rousseau. And yes, I do think postmodern leftists -- including those in the Republican party -- think that high school is best suited for a general education. All of this nonsense with the standardized testing comes out of the same general world view. Please note that since that trend began, our educational system has gone straight into the toilet. General education is for elementary school. You should be prepared to enter the work force at 18 if you don't plan to go to college. I do love your "screw the poor -- let them go to community college" attitude, though. It only confirms what I already know.
Dr. T, you're hilarious. So, postmodern leftists are responsible for trades not being taught in high school. You can't (or don't) cite any authority for such an insight, you just know. And the roots of postmodernism are not in modernism but in romanticism. Rousseau, the guy who exalted getting back to nature, is actually ultimately responsible for plumbing not being taught in high school. And having it taught at a community college is screwing the poor. Never mind that community colleges typically serve more of the poor than any other educational institution. Oh, well. Bloviate away. Sorry I caused any discomfort in your little universe by suggesting that you don't have any idea what you're pontificating about.
Yes, postmodernism is in fact rooted in romanticism. I am sure it would make you even less comfortable to know that it is equally rooted in both Marxism and fascism as well. I have spent a great deal of time actually studying postmodernism, what is believed by postmodernists, and the roots of postmodernism, so yes, I do know a lot about it. If you bother to read other posts I've made about postmodernism, you would have a much better foundation in it. And yes, making the poor pay for an education that they could be receiving for free does in fact harm the poor. Surely you're smart enough to understand that. Also, if you knew what Rousseau actually said about education, you're ignorance wouldn't be quite so evident. You're causing me no discomfort -- your attacks prove which of us is in fact the one who is uncomfortable here. (You might also want to note that the title "Dr." is an actual, earned title -- one gets a Ph.D. in the Humanities by being an expert in the humanities, you know. I typically don't like to pull out the ole sheepskin, but I will do it on occasion for ignorant little snots.)
From my dissertation:
Since the Renaissance, the West has been in the Modern Era, where man is no longer a man of action, but of thought. One gets Ages of Enlightenment and of Reason only through contemplation. And the Romantics, though advocates of action, actually did a lot more thinking – this is how so many books and poems got written. Even the prime promoter of action, Nietzsche, actually spent most of his time reading, thinking, and writing. And those influenced by him mostly only wrote about the problems of thinking people like themselves: Thomas Mann in A Death in Venice, Gide in The Immoralist, Sartre in Nausea, Kazantzakis in Zorba the Greek, and Camus in The Fall. And since “the tragic world is a world of action, and action is the translation of thought into reality” (Bradley, 20), we can see the Modern Era is not an era of tragedy. We further see that Existentialism is really nothing more than a further development of the ideas of the Modern Era, and is just a restatement of Rousseau’s Blank Slate, with Postmodernism just a further development of that. If we are only products of history, language, culture, etc., then changing those things will change our nature. Such is the belief in the blank slate. The gist of Steiner’s argument in The Death of Tragedy is that “the romantic vision of life is non-tragic” (128) – and our world view remains essentially romantic. At the same time, this Romantic rebellion against Newtonian determinism that has characterized our world for so long has recently been challenged on several fronts, particularly through chaos theory – and this is the potential source of a contemporary rebirth of tragedy.
The new traditional view of the world is that of the blank slate, which has been tied in with the thinking man of the Modern Era. Throughout this period, emphasis on the Other, particularly in the German tradition, has resulted in increasing fragmentation, leading to fragmented, pluralist, multicultural postmodernism’s collage-montage approach to the world. This modernist world view resulted in the fragmentation – the splitting in two – of tragedy in Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, with the tension between freedom and necessity (determinism) being split into the Romantic story The Wild Palms and the Naturalist story Old Man. The tragic world view is shown, in this strange, bifurcated novel, to have been split asunder – it is only through bringing these two elements together again that we can get a return to tragedy. Chaos theory shows us how this is possible, by showing us the world is both free and determined, both certain and uncertain at the same time. But “fragmentary” is precisely how Doczi defines knowledge. Thus, one could classify the Modern Era as the Era of Knowledge – at the expense of wisdom, which Doczi defines as seeing the world as holistic. By seeing the world as both varied (fragmented, something that can be known), and as holistic, one, we can see the world as beautiful once again – and as tragic. This suggests that to view the world as tragic is to view the world as beautiful, as we see in Nietzsche’s view of tragedy as unifying (in an agonal way) variety and unity through the Apollonian and Dionysian – the beautiful being affirmative. Though a part of the Modern Era, Nietzsche is one of the first to act as the answer to it, including the Modernist and Postmodernist variations of that world view (who both misread Nietzsche because of their reading him through Cartesian and Rousseauean lenses).
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