One Nation, Divided by Education & the 2016 Presidential Quagmire
By HECTOR VILA, Community Works Journal Contributing Editor, Writer & Teacher, Novelist, Essayist, & Cultural Criticism
Education — with a capital E — has effectively divided the nation. Education has been eating away at the fiber of this country for quite some time. This is obvious when examining the 2016 Presidential Election. Yet, Education is not being held accountable for the mess we’re in; it’s getting a pass.
We can get a sense of this by looking, first, at popular media. Second, we can see how obstructionist our Education system really is, and the consequences.
Bill Maher calls Trump supporters idiots. “What we learned,” Maher tells CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, “is that there’s a lot of vulgar, tacky, racist people in this country, more than I thought…A basket of deplorables.”
John Oliver, in the “Third Parties” episode of Last Week Tonight, describes this election as “Lice on rats on a horse corps on fire 2016.” A person interviewed by Park Street Strategies and played on the show asks, “Three hundred and fifteen, three hundred and twenty million people, this is the best two (Clinton/Trump) we can come up with?” A sign, if there ever was one, that intelligence is lacking.
On MSNBC’s Chris Mathews, Rudy Giuliani, shrugging off questions about Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, an accepted tactic when someone does not like a question, ended the show by screaming, literally, that, “There was semen on her dress, which proved he lied to America!,” referring to Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress and the Bill Clinton affair. A sign that a powerful, iconic individual can simply change a viewer’s perceptions by altering one’s attention. We can’t seem to hold our attention on the real issues, we’re being told.
And Stephen Colbert, on The Late Show, brings out a chalkboard to illustrate the multiple connected conspiracies swirling around Donald Trump’s campaign — only this Venn diagram is rated X, suggesting how best to understand the rather dangerous, affronting rhetoric Trump is using to attack his detractors, particularly Clinton, “big banks,” and the media, all locked in a massive global conspiracy to make sure he doesn’t win November’s election, says Trump.
The election banter has been all below the waist; intelligence has been supplanted by pornography.
I cite these comedy shows — let’s not forget Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show — because we gravitate to their sound bites, their dark humor, their irony.
These programs are poignant but watered down, relevant yet defying a critical exchange of ideas across differences, which would require time, knowledge and understanding, two parties doing their homework and deliberating clearly and creatively. It’s too much to ask, we’re told.
The media highlights critical differences in jokes, or by letting someone such as Rudy Giuliani go unhinged. It’s not that Giuliani is worth listening to; we listen because his unhinging is privileged over substance. Giuliani as a court jester.
This gets us to Education and how dimly we are educating ourselves and our children. Education is the counterweight to this media spectacle; unfortunately, education, unlike watching cable TV, takes work, lots of work. To be educated, one has to be diligent; it’s not easy — and it’s very costly in this country. Access to a solid education is expensive — we know that, though it’s a marginalized issue.
People are divided according to how much a one knows, especially about history, government, and the media. Education breeds awareness; in turn, consciousness engenders hope.
This is how it works, how power — media, government, and big business — exploit divisions perpetuated by Education: Depending on your level of comprehension, you’re either mocked or brought into the fold, one of “us”; you are either marginalized and labeled, or accepted into degrees of comfortability, each degree dependent on which node in the socio-economic system you land in; and each node relative to the type — or I should say, the brand of Education you’ve attained. Princeton is different from the local community college and the local state school, for instance.
Elite institutions, private K-12 schools and private colleges and universities, provide entry into reward-granting spaces in a vertical management system.
What are we managing, you ask?
We lean towards candidates that publicize that change is coming — if you vote for me. But, in fact, we actually vote for the candidate best able to manage the system we have. This is Hillary Clinton’s position — she is best schooled to do this; this is also Donald Trump’s position — he is best schooled to move this system into more affordable directions. Both candidates are about management, not change.
It’s hard to pierce the language, the imagery, the compression of messages delivered by various pipes in our multimodal social media world. This too takes time. It takes time and effort to step away from the noise; it takes time to reach into what one knows to see what is connecting with what; it takes time to research the accuracy and depth of suggestions made in sound-bites.
In our American system, time is a luxury. Our heads down and we’re working hard. Round and round we go. It’s purposely so. See Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Illusion (2009). See John Ralston Saul’s Unconscious Civilization (1995). It’s all right there. See Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008). We have to work to learn and to know.
All things are inverted in and by Education. There are two sides to this problem: 1. We have, in this country, an apartheid system of education, as Jonathan Kozol demonstrates in The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005), which documents his visits over five years to nearly 60 public schools in 11 states and finds that inner-city children are more isolated racially than they have been at any time since the landmark ruling of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Our apartheid system of education mirrors our socio-economic system: Some people can participate fully and completely, others somewhat, and the remaining, the silent voices that are suffering, cannot and experience what Rob Nixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), calls slow violence, an ongoing, powerful attack on people who are always, and conveniently, invisible to those busily building wealth on other’s backs. Wealth comes at a cost .
The result is problem 2: Higher education, the key to success, we’re told, is hierarchical and it, too, mirrors our socio-economic system; it is also the staunch supporter of the managers educated to keep the system afloat.
The managers of our system, from the White House to Congress to the Supreme Court to big business all come from the best American educational institutions. Everyone is interconnected, socially mobile, intimate, and interchange positions and roles. The President of Harvard becomes an economic advisor to the president; a senator or congressman, a lobbyist.
Our elite institutions also graduate the captains of media with an arsenal of “know how” about how to use language and how to manipulate, for the good and the bad, images; add to this Silicon Valley whose sole mission is to guide our eyes, have us download more apps, and confuse our attention, as Tim Wu, who coined the term “net neutrality,” contends in The Attention Merchants (2016), and we have a lot of powerful, intelligent, and creative people, all of whom are connected, and also interchangeable, vying for our attention — and getting it while frustrating us. But we don’t know why we’re frustrated.
It’s because Education does not teach us to think through this; it tends to dissuade us from our feelings, saying they’re off, that there is a prescribed way — we just have to make it better. In order to maintain its place in society, Education thus complies with the standards of power, what we call the status quo.
Let’s quickly look at a few of our of real problems and see how this works.
Take the case of the disenfranchised white worker, what we see as the Trump supporter, someone from a former industrial area in the country, someone whose job has gone abroad, someone, perhaps, in the coal industry no more.
Globalization has been around since Marco Polo; it has increased, not diminished. Global trade is a system by which nations stay afloat, gain influence, trade and tax, and thus bolster an economic system, which is supposed to make life better. This is fact, not fiction; it’s not going away since we’ve been on this road for a long time. Telecommunications has entered the picture along with the digitization of money, which knows no borders. Money is fluid, as it has always been; it moves from New York to London to Hong Kong to Singapore to Germany. It flows to where there’s less resistance. That has to be taken in and understood completely — it’s how we now live.
The loss of jobs, such as in the coal industry, is not a Republican issue and it’s not a Democratic issue; rather it’s an economic system that uses either party to exploit others for gain.
The politicians of either party are merely conduits for transactions; they facilitate the transfer of capital and provide the laws that will ensure money flows without impediments. So both parties are equally accountable for the sense of marginalization the white worker feels.
The solution is local. If, say, a coal mine is being shut down or a business is moving offshore, the local government, with the help of the U.S. congress, should compel companies — or in the case of coal, the Federal Government — to put something in its place: Education that’s future oriented, focused on new technologies; creative ways that would ensure a community’s standard of living remains the same, whether through taxation or new forms of work. In other words, part of the profit a company receives should first be returned to the community that is being exploited; communities need to be supported, on an ongoing basis, by the exploiter.
But we don’t do that. We wait for the bottom to fall out and then engage in name calling, trash talk, and false promises that can never be kept. If we educate ourselves — and if we demand that Education work to inspire citizens to ask questions, argue, demand; if Education teaches how to critically examine a subtle point and how then to argue effectively for a position, which it does not do equally for all citizens — we won’t have to ever get into a situation like the one in South Dakota where now President Obama, after much fighting and suffering, is looking to move the pipeline. Issues of race, class, nationality, land rights, the power of a corporation over invisible citizens, Native Americans — it’s all here.
Yet, Obama is not presenting a solution. He’s just telling a new story, a new chapter to the same old story about moving the pipeline for the benefit of all Americans.
But if Education was focused on, say, health, the environment, and social justice, rather than how best and more efficiently to move into commodity culture, which values materialism above all else as a moral measure, we would all by now have learned that the real solution is no pipeline at all since any benefit comes at a cost to the environment, the land from which it originates, and proposes huge risks to communities along the pipeline’s route.
Education supports and even teaches hyperindividualism — my benefits are above all others’. Education teaches how to enter into management positions of influence where, depending on where you land, you can have the capacity to affect capital. Education divides along race and class lines, while simultaneously providing avenues for programs on race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and community service, but it does not give the students and many professors in these programs the byways to power, the means, the stage to address vital concerns, all of which have been silenced in this election cycle. Education, in the end, determines who can speak and who cannot; it is a silencing mechanism if you don’t tow the line.
