Borderland

Graham Wegner points out some problems that cropped up in the comments of a couple of education blogs. He comments on the perils of taking up heartfelt issues in blog comments, and assuming we’ll be understood.

Neil Postman’s Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk has an excerpted chapter, Propaganda [pdf], in which he argues that propaganda is a kind of stupid talk that requires an uncritical acceptance of a point of view. That makes sense, and at what point should Education bloggers recognize their own role in propanda propagation? Postman says that it’s worth making a distinction between language that says “Believe this” and language that says “Consider this.” I know I’m not bulletproof here, but I think this might be a good guideline for any of us who want to avoid getting carried away with our own BS.

According to Postman, propaganda

…is a form of stupid talk that can be, and has been, extremely dangerous. It is dangerous for two reasons. First, propaganda demands a way of responding which can become habitual. If we allow ourselves, too easily, to summon the emotions that our own causes require, we may be unable to hold them back when confronted with someone else’s causes. And second, propaganda has a tendency to work best on groups rather than individuals. It has the effect of turning groups into crowds, which is what Huxley calls “herd poisoning.”

Postman’s reference to ‘herd poisoning’ came from Huxley’s Brave New World, Revisited. We might substitute the term, ‘group think’ there. After reading Huxley’s essay, especially the chapter, Propaganda in a Democratic Society, I’m thinking about the lack of authority teachers and minority voices have in the education policy reform discourse. Huxley’s 50 year-old essay could have been written yesterday.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Public policy discourse is buried under a barrage of information. Everybody’s an expert. Alexander Russo has a theory about why no one trusts teachers. He says it’s because educators suffer from a (perceived) conflict of interest, and we should understand how hard it is for non-educators to take what we say as gospel. I agree. The question of Who do you trust? is as much about values as expertise. I had a dentist who recommended a lot of expensive reconstructive work when my teeth started falling apart. He had some theories about what would happen if I didn’t do what he recommended. I didn’t believe him, and I found a new dentist who was willing to work with me. I’m happier now, and my teeth are still in decent shape.

If anyone thinks that improving schools is going to close all the gaps they might first want to ask why obesity is now a public health issue in the US. It must be something in the water.