Said continued
I recall when I was a graduate student one of my professors remarking about Dr. Edward Said, the Palestine-American literary theorist and critic, having his picture taken in Lebanon while throwing a rock at an Israeli guard house. I have included that picture here not to encourage any rock throwing in the literal sense, but rather to encourage activism on the part of my fellow academics.
The strike at Hartnell is an extremely important event on the local level. But it is also an important event on a much larger level as well. California and the nation in general are cutting back on education. In part this is due to an aging population that doesn't want to pay the taxes necessary for it. In part it is a redirection of taxes already paid towards other elements of our social structure. This educational cutback is seen with schools cutting back their classes and their faculty. In fact, it is faculty that is clearly the biggest factor for cost cutting, else why would our schools be getting big beautiful libraries full of computers and occasionally even books while cutting its full-time faculty back to less than fifty percent? The trend towards having a strictly part-time temporary faculty matches the race to the bottom in all areas of our social structure and the economy. It is de-facto union busting and ultimately the de-humanization of not just our education system but our social structure as a whole.
In fact, our classrooms are over crowded and we are implicitly encouraged to keep them so. So our teaching methods must be tailored to meet the prevailing conditions, resulting in more multiple-choice testing and less emphasis upon critical thinking. And now, especially, is the need for critical thinking.
As usual, the solution to this dilemma will be technology: "distant learning." While benign in itself and very useful on many levels, it also harbors the threat of further reductionism. There lies the possible dystopia of alienated home-schooling by private industry interested only in its bottom line and employing the cheapest sources of "labor" it can find. Already you can home-school your children on your personal computer with instructors located as far away as India. The quality of instruction is not in dispute here. The quality of life is. Ultimately we will have a world of machines teaching machines. People, their last useful enterprise being that of the consumer, will be no longer necessary. We are treated as though we are no longer necessary already! We are little more than a conduit for money-consuming commodities at one end while defecating global warming and all manner of pollution from the other.
Which brings me back to the concept of academic responsibility. Knowing when to draw the line and to express outrage at social injustice is certainly as important a lesson as any to be learned in this or any other school. We are so eager to create engineers capable of making a hydrogen bomb, but so reticent at encouraging a critical debate as to why we would want one in the first place. How is it that we teach history without teaching our place in it? How is it that we teach language without content? Teaching science without purpose is like handing out handguns to teenagers-I remind you of the Sarin gas attack in Japan in 1995: all the perpetrators of the attack were highly educated university graduates, yet lacked something in their lives that they found in a dangerous anti-social cult. A school, a college, needs to offer a rounded education. There is a reason for the humanities and social sciences in a rounded curriculum. I think we are experiencing that reason now.
It is time for academics to speak loudly. It is time for professors to "profess." It is time for the real lessons learned to be shared. The struggle against social injustice is not an academic exercise, but it needs the input and support of academicians everywhere. Hartnell may not be a research institution, but that does not mean that we as instructors have quit researching. A chance to teach is a chance to learn. Share with your students and listen to their needs and wants and suggestions. Let them challenge your authority and let them see you challenge those with authority over you. We can utilize the educational system to maintain the status quo or to exercise our rights for democratic principals.
