“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
I have a pretty shaky educational history. I skipped kindergarten; I went to a religious grade school whose course of study was not especially rigorous; and I dropped out of high school without getting a degree. (I settled for getting my G.E.D., but not for another 26 years.) I somehow managed to sneak my way into community college, but I found it frustrating and expensive, not to mention an impediment to working on my failed career as a drunken rock musician, so I fucked around for a few years there before wasting a whole year at a crappy state university where I also failed to get a degree. That was the extent of my formal education, and the only reason I know what little I know is because I’ll read anything.
All of this is to say that I don’t have anything like a grand theory of education. I have a lot of friends who are teachers, and I hold them in something like awe; no matter where you are located on the ideological spectrum, you tend to think that education is incredibly important. Academia has always interested me as a lifestyle, but not really as an occupation, and I tend to feel a strange mix of respect, alienation, and resentment when I’m surrounded by actual academics. But I do place a tremendous amount of value on what they do, and it has brought me enormous satisfaction to see a wave of teacher’s strikes sweep the country and galvanize the left at a time when our ideas are being savagely attacked.
There are, of course, many educators and academics who do have elaborate theories of pedagogy. One of them was the late Neil Postman, who I’ve talked about here at great length. He emphasized in his great essay “Defending the Indefensible” that many of the most basic assumptions we have about education are based on entirely false premises — for example, that we believe that difficult words are long, polysyllabic, arcane ones like “centrifugal” or “proletariat”, when in fact the words that are hardest to define are short, basic ones we all think we know the meaning of but which are in fact incredibly complex and hard to define, like “true” or “bad”. He emphasized the great importance of teasing out the meaning of words, and above all else, of asking questions:
If we insist on giving our students vocabulary tests, then for God’s sake let us find out if they know something about the truly difficult words in the language. I think it would be entirely practical to design a curriculum based on an inquiry into, say, fifty hard words, beginning with “good” and “bad” and ending with “true” and “false”. Show me a student who knows something about what these words imply, what sources of authority they appeal to, and in what circumstances they are used, and I will show you a student who is an epistemologist — which is to say, a student who knows what textbooks try to conceal. And a student who knows what textbooks try to conceal will know what advertisers try to conceal, and politicians and preachers as well.
Still, good as this advice is, there is more to developing a theory of knowledge, and a good citizen equipped with it, than just asking questions. It is that the right questions are asked, at the right time, of the right events, of the right person. It has been over thirty years since Postman wrote those words, and while we have all become far more inundated with media than he ever feared back then, we have developed coping mechanisms for dealing with it as well. The younger generation is far more media-savvy than they have been in the past, and far more questioning of the motives of their elders, which is at least one reason for the rise of socialism in America. But people in the media, too, have become more skilled at manipulation, and there is a risk that if we do not develop the ability to not just ask questions, but ask the right questions, we will be wasting a great opportunity and playing right into the hands of the powers we think we’ve outfoxed.
A very obvious example of this is the question, posed frequently by neoliberals and centrists who think they’ve figured out the game because they know what opportunity cost is, of how we’re going to pay for this or that social improvement. Today, Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi asked how “we” are going to pay for leftist programs like universal health care and a Green New Deal (already we are in the realm of deception, because Pelosi, who already has health care and won’t live to see the worst effects of climate change, has no intention of paying a penny towards these goals). But, even if we accept that money should be the final arbiter of any given political issue — and we shouldn’t — these are the wrong questions to be asking. If we ask, instead, how we are going to pay for a lack of universal health care, we begin to see not an arbitrary and frangible price tag stuck on a social program, but a vast and towering pile of money (and human lives) we have already thrown away, unrecoverable and growing every day. If we ask what the cost is of not making radical changes to fight climate change, the answer is literally the entire world.
In the matter of Venezuela, like that of Iraq before it and Vietnam before that and a dozen other foreign names where America has accumulated an impressively malign bodycount, the question we are posed through accepted circles is, “What are we going to do about it?” Here, a much more germane question is, what aren’t we going to do about it? The answer to that is far simpler and ought to guide our hand in foreign policy for as long as our nation exists: we aren’t going to intervene militarily at the behest of colonial powers whose only interest is in personal enrichment and the maintenance of a murderous and exploitative status quo. We have tried that already, and it has failed every single time; even doing nothing would at least bear the novelty of the unattempted.
Another beloved centrist approach is means testing, via the construction of entirely worthless barriers of entry to social services and resources, because despite our noisy claptrap nationalism, America loves nothing more than dividing its people up into categories of those who deserve aid from the government and those who do not. Hence the smoke screen we have set up around socialist projects such as universal health care and free college education. “If education is free,” goes this achingly insincere approach, “how will we prevent rich people from taking advantage of it?” This is transparent nonsense. Rich people will fund the programs in the first place, and if there are better private options available, they will continue to take advantage of them; and even if they don’t, what does it matter? The minor socioeconomic losses posed by the rich taking advantage of social programs are more than offset by the gains of providing the entire citizenship with no-cost services. The question that needs to be asked is, “If we don’t have free education, what will be the result?” And the answer to that is all around us: only the wealthy receive decent educations, while the middle classes drown in debt and the poor have no hope at all of mobility. Even if a few toffs decide they want to free-ride it at a state school, this won’t eliminate the social gains of tens of millions of people, including a huge number of women and minorities, getting an education without plunging themselves into eternal servitude to a loan provider.
There is a target in all that we do, and asking questions can help us zero in on that target. But we have to take care, because all around us there is flak going off in the form of dishonest, deceptive, and misguided questions that purport to seek honest answers but are really just weapons being deployed in defense of the status quo. In all that we do, we have to drop our own questions like a bomb, leveling everything underneath it and leaving a level field in its wake.