Education in today's society (2)

PL commented on my contribution to yesterday's blog discussion:
I respect Brecht and deeply admire Shelley; but for wisdom in these matters give me good old Dr Johnson:
"How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part that laws or kings can cause or cure."


To which I responded:


@PL: Johnson was a pompous windbag.
He knew next to nothing about the human heart.
Just ask any slave (white, black, plantation, galley, salt mine); any starving, HIV-infected kid, any addict or convict from the ghettos of the richest country on earth; any crippled victim of landmines, bombs (working, unexploded, napalm, cluster, vacuum, sophisticated or improvized), snipers, flame-throwers, or gas attacks (military or civil); any indentured child labourer; any mega-city slum-dweller drinking sewage; any farmers thrown off their land by debt, violence, or ecological terrorism (dam projects, monoculture, man-made environmental disasters); any victim of  flogging, keel-hauling, blinding, legal amputation; or any girl or woman violated, brutalized and broken by the sex industry.
Shall I go go on? There's more. And these are only the "lucky" ones still alive.
And take no account of lives stunted and emptied by the anxiety, frustration, stress, and illness of "privileged" societies. Or lack of educational opportunities like those Mary is fighting to preserve and generalize.
Johnson was a pompous windbag.

Education in today's society

Mary B's blog
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/06/escaping-exams.html
drew the following comment from me:


In a decent society, learning and education will be taken seriously. Social wealth (which will be greater than we can imagine today) will be distributed sensibly. As a result, the sharing and caring Mary and a few other lucky people dedicate themselves to will be the norm.
Till then Sweetness and Light will be beacons in the night, in stormy seas, near a jagged rocky coast. Most of us (humanity, that is) will be wrecked without seeing any beacons, a lot of us will be killed by wreckers using false beacons, some of us will reach the shore and find that the beacons are real but inaccessible, and a few will actually make it to the flame, enjoy its light and heat, and keep it alive.
And share snippets of hope with each other:
Die Nacht hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommt schon der Tag...
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

*

The place of Latin

A short piece in today's Guardian:
Latin: why we're better off with the ancient language
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jun/14/latin-language-in-schools)


My comment:
As anyone can tell you who has seen any of my comments on any blog relating to this subject I'm a huge fan of Latin. 
Partly for cultural reasons and partly out of an unusual passion for languages - one that has overcome a lack of autistic proficiency to give me useful access to a number of different but related Indo-European languages (some alive and kicking, and some half-dead and flapping), and to a fundamentally different non-Indo-European language. The iconic Finnish mentioned here a couple of times.
Some languages I got at school as compulsory subjects, some I studied voluntarily at college level, and some I just picked up on a teach yourself, learning by doing, voluntary basis. 
Compulsory French at school worked, compulsory German just about despite hopeless conditions. All the rest has been voluntary - whether formal or normal. 
Formal helps, but opportunity and incentive helps more. 
That's why Grabyrdy's comment bangs the button: 
"I would add that it's not only Latin that helps brains develop. Teach every child in the country to play a musical instrument and participate in orchestras and choirs, and the IQ level of the whole country will rise within a generation." 
Education has to provide opportunity and incentive, and needs to be polytechnical - intellectual, physical (sports, drama, music), practical (craft trades), interactive (politics, psychology). 
So that's Britain oot the windae as far as Latin or any other language is concerned. 
I regret none of my languages, except maybe Swedish for the way it's invaded and occupied my life far too obtrusively and disproportionately. I'd rather have had my life invaded and occupied by Russian, Chinese (yes please!) or Bengali (or Sanskrit. - I'm half-dead and flapping myself...) 
So... anyone who gets a foot in the door, or even better makes it all the way into the rip-roaring party that's another language and its culture, feels more fully human for it and helps others feel better too. And the special thing about Latin here is that it offers a widely recognized currency standard for language, culture and civil fundamentals. (Special Drawing Rights if not Gold...) 
My own favourite (with me everywhere, and more worn by the day) is Lucretius On the Nature of Things. Oh, and Tacitus. Mohammed Alis of culture -- deeply human, aware of their own value, no one's tool and no one's fool, unrepentantly nonconformist, dazzling masters of technique and harder hitting than anyone else alive. 
And nothing prissy, bigoted, arse-licking, or demeaning about them.


I made a further comment:
MSGlendinning writes: 
"I currently teach EFL. There is absolutely no coincidence that the students and people that I know that are non-native speakers that have the highest level of fluency and understanding of the nuances and other pecularities of English are the ones that have spent time immersed in an English-speaking country." 
So if they're so good why do they need you to teach them? 
How do you "immerse" yourself in a country? Burrow head down into the soil (or concrete)? If you immerse yourself in intercourse with people in that country (heh) how many people do you need to intercourse with? And how much and how? And what language and culture do the people you intercourse with use? 
Maybe it's communication between people that's the important thing... So god help us given the dreadful communication skills of the average teacher, if teaching has got anything to do with it. 
To communicate you need something to communicate about, and communicate with. And if you live somewhere you are forced to communicate with people there. But if you are well prepared to communicate about things that are common to humanity, and are skilled/trained at learning, you'll pick up a language like lightning - as I've seen in my teaching. If you aren't, and you're surrounded by your own culture and language (let's say you're Armenian or Russian in LA), then you're screwed. As I've seen with Kurds and Somalis in my teaching. 
OK, so the thing about Latin is that a lot of it is one way communication - but a lot of it is communication about things common to humanity (sex, money, politics, war), done in ways common to humanity (writing, striking language, striking settings). And it communicates these things using a common cultural legacy, adding familiarity. 
So why shouldn't acquiring Latin be more useful and attractive than acquiring pidgin Double Dutch? Should we force people to learn New Guinea Creole because living people use it and it has a thriving local culture? 
If you read novels or follow the news, then you're into abstract, non-immediate, non-immersive communication. That is, you're in a good position to derive pleasure and stimulation from Latin. 
The conditions for learning it aren't too good - but neither are the conditions for learning other languages in Britain. And Latin has one huge advantage - almost everyone involved with teaching it or using it is full of enthusiasm for the language, for the culture and for sharing this with others. But first let's have a decent society and a decent educational system, so non-local culture and communication mean something more than an old school tie. 

About class leadership

Some thoughts on the tube this morning

Given that imperialism is capitalism pregnant with socialism...

The history of the 20C shows that the objective preconditions for socm are far better than we realized, and conversely the leadership situation is far worse.

An important factor almost never taken into account is the enormous readiness of the working class to follow leadership even to death - provided it perceives the leadership as its own. 

Examples are the Social Democrats in Germany and the KPD during the early 30s when their warring destroyed the class's organizational and political viability and let in the Nazis. Also the fatal leadership of the CPSU and the CCP in China and Spain, Indonesia etc.

On the positive side we have the objective victories of the class(es) in ww2, in China vs Japan and the KMT and the bourgeoisie, in Yugoslavia and Vietnam and Cuba, and in the creation of the DWSs in Eastern Europe and Korea.

This is empirical evidence of the power, courage, discipline, loyalty of the mobilized working class and its allies. 

If there are leadership struggles in the class, these can mobilize the same loyalty and courage in a civil war leading to self-destruction (examples above), plus generally speaking a condition of short-circuited paralysis if the war is "invisible" to the masses - as in the DWSs (including the degenerated SU) or in welfare states or imperialist states with traditionally large-scale concessions to strategic sections of the class (the US, Australia).

So, what are the conditions for winning leadership in the class, for getting the class to perceive us as its leaders?

EMPIRICAL - We must be vigorous and influential and viable and be seen to be so.

STRATEGIC - We must have objectives that are crystal clear, attainable, and attractive.

PSYCHOLOGICAL - We must be "charismatic", ie fulfil the empirical conditions with confidence, bravura and heroism.

None of these need be met to an absolute or ultimate degree (as is obvious given the support gained by bureaucratic and fundamentally treacherous leaderships). But they must be met well enough, and in particular to a degree strikingly superior to other contenders for leadership (eg the Maoist leadership of the CCP vs the Moscow-backed leadership, or the Castro leadership vs the Cuban CP, or Chavez vs other left forces in Venezuela).

If you think these points are correct, learn them by heart! Impress them on your comrades and work your arse off to make practical use of them!!

C

US-backed piracy and murder - Israel rapes the Gaza peace convoy

In response to a long and toothless thread on a discussion group I wrote:


Israel's arguments remind me of nothing so much as the justifications given by the Argentine junta and the South African apartheid racists for their brutal and inhuman actions. And however "sincere" individual South African whites might have been in their support for these arguments that doesn't make the slightest difference to their responsibility for these actions. I don't consider Argentine supporters of the junta to have been sincere in the least. And I think that any sincere Israeli supporters of the Israeli military and those giving them their orders in this murderous act of piracy on the high seas are either wilfully ignorant and indifferent ("they're only Arabs, and anyway they bring it on themselves" - I've heard it first hand) or completely numbed to any sense of proportionality in political interaction including acts of war.

Israel exceeds the vileness of both the apartheid regime, the Argentine junta and (for what it's worth, the old East German regime) for several reasons. The first is the total support in words and actions and arms supplies by the most powerful nation on earth, the US. US support for the junta was less open, and the SA racists were only supported openly by a second-rate imperialist power - Britain. Every brazen Big Lie by Israel is swallowed whole (camels against gnats) by the States, and not a cent is withheld, not a carbine or bulldozer or bomb or helicopter or "adviser". Legions of university-trained, highly experienced, smooth-talking lawyers fill the newspapers and airwaves with sophistical gunk - brains targeting humanity like those of the American war industry, instead of working on solving problems of disease and poverty that kill thousands of people daily. The wall being erected (much of it already in place) between privileged Israeli areas and discriminated Palestinian areas is larger and more jealously guarded than the infamous Berlin Wall, and even than the much bigger wall the British occupying forces erected for similar reasons in Belfast. Oh, and Israel has the Bomb, which neither Argentina, nor racist South Africa (not quite), nor the GDR had.

All this makes me sympathize with those who refer to the rulers of Israel and their supporters as Zionazis. This is not the case, politically or historically - Israel is a very different kettle of rotten fish from Nazi Germany, as Aristotle would be able to tell us if he were around today. But the symptoms of callous degeneracy are there for all to see and ignore at their peril. Israel is the child of imperialism and is allowed to act out its bad boy tantrums by its indulgent parents (and by god I've seen Tantrums on the boardwalk at Coney Island). And all because it's an invaluable fortress for imperialism - locking the Eastern Mediterranean, keeping a lid on popular sentiment in its neighbouring Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan), and constituting a gigantic military base for the US that allows it to threaten the whole of the Middle East by proxy - most recently by howling for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a US bogeyman de jour, Iran, which the US can distance itself from (plausible deniability) on the basis that it's "just a tantrum". Not to mention the cataracts of pus pumped out by its propaganda machinery. Or the (unmentionable even by Israeli standards, and that's saying something!) deeds of the Israeli secret service Moshad - KGB, Stasi and Securitate eat your hearts out...

And the rot won't stop with a Two-State solution. We need a single, united Palestine, independent, secular, and democratic. But it won't happen given the current balance of power in the world. Divide and rule coupled with military intimidation and a lack of alternatives - too bad Iraq and Saudi don't do the job as well as Israel - will see to that.

And in the meantime, as Pete wrote: 

Voltaire had a word for it:

Cet animal est très méchant,

Quand on l'attaque il se défend.

(This animal is very evil -

Attacked, it fights back like the devil.)

Chops