Wednesday, October 20, 2004

The Higher Edukayshun

Rullsenberg has a splendid piece on the student as consumer. It's almost as if there were a need for an updating of On the Poverty of Student Life
Once upon a time the universities had a certain prestige; the student persists in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he came too late. His mechanical, specialized education is as profoundly degraded (in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture)(4) as his own intellectual level, because the modern economic system requires a mass production of uneducated students who have been rendered incapable of thinking. The university has become an institutional organization of ignorance. “High culture” is being degraded in the assembly-line production of professors, all of whom are cretins and most of whom would be jeered by any audience of highschoolers.** But the student, in his mental menopause, is unaware of all this; he continues to listen respectfully to his masters, conscientiously suppressing all critical spirit so as to immerse himself in the mystical illusion of being a “student” — someone seriously devoted to learning serious things — in the hope that his professors will ultimately impart to him the ultimate truths of the world. The future revolutionary society will condemn all the noise of the lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but verbal pollution. The student is already a very bad joke.
What was that again
someone seriously devoted to learning serious things — in the hope that his professors will ultimately impart to him the ultimate truths of the world.
No. Many students become students so they can jump to the next stage of life as a young professional. The professor's job is to spoonfeed them knowledge so they can get the grades required for the fast track into middle class careerdom. They have no interest in "learning serious things".

Grumble. Grumble. Young people of today. When I was a student we were occupying the Winter Palace and storming the Admin Building. That Bronstein,... what ever happened to him?

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