24.12.10

Education Will Not Save Us/After Globalization/Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman

Thesis 1: Education will not save us
Learning and knowledge are imagined to necessarily solve problems. The troubles of the world are explained as the result of ignorance or inadequate understanding. How to resolve these problems? Through education. Education is thought to be the process by which a void of knowledge is filled, only to be followed by new voids that will be filled, and so on, ad infinitum. But education’s blind spot is not ignorance; rather it is what goes missing precisely when ignorance is overcome.
Even when education reflects upon its own limits, it fails to reflect upon how it participates in reproducing the very logic that structures these limits. Thus, education invariably understands itself to be dis- interested and neutral. In this role as disinterested interpreter, educa- tion is not addressed to a demand for knowledge, but rather to a demand to rationalize the nastiest excesses – from colonialism to environmental destruction to all of the “just wars” underwritten by academic expertise. With the best of intentions, education finds ever- ingenious ways to justify these excesses, to justify injustice (always in the name of knowledge, in the name of neutrality). For every time education questions crime and corruption, it just as surely provides their most perfect rationales. Genocide, war, and the disregard for our fellow human beings are as much a product of education as ignorance. Producing justifications for violence in the name of education con- stitutes citizens who are internally split and perilously self-alienated. The dissimulated truth of education is power; and power dissimulated is more neurotic and dangerous than power acknowledged.

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