Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
― Aeschylus, Agamemnon
One of the most disturbing trends I have witnessed over the course of my forty-nine years is the hijacking of American education by unholy anti-democratic forces, and its transformation into a battering ram used to assault solidarity, literacy, and reason without which democracy cannot survive. In any reasonably humane society, school is a sanctuary where students read great books and learn to distinguish right from wrong, and yet in 21st century America it has become a place where the ruling establishment foments a war of all against all while forging the class of “deplorables,” along with an army of ruthlessly ambitious careerists.
American public schools in impoverished communities consistently dumb down to the lowest possible level, and the vast majority of these students typically graduate high school with a terribly primitive knowledge of American letters and classics of Western civilization. On the other side of the coin are the more competitive schools which often inculcate their students with skills that have significant pre-professional value yet churn out vast numbers of unscrupulous, overspecialized, and profoundly amoral creatures.
When I taught English and English as a Second language at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY, I was able to get away with saying certain blasphemous things which would have landed me in hot water had I been teaching at a more competitive institution, but this is because the majority of my students didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. At the competitive universities it is far less likely that students will be exposed to ideas that in any way challenge the status quo, as the professors at these schools tend to be constrained by a shorter ideological leash. Suffice it to say, this is very intellectually unhealthy, and serves to perpetuate the many lies and myths promulgated by the ruling establishment while ensuring that the next generation of leaders share their values.
As the humanities are increasingly debased due to their infiltration by identity politics dogma, college students increasingly read jargon rather than great literature, biographies, memoirs, or works of history and intellectual history. The dangers of jargon were understood all to well by George Orwell who realized that its purpose was not to liberate the mind and cultivate critical thinking but to cognitively straitjacket the citizenry, and through the inculcation of a mind-numbing conformity, facilitate their transformation into subjects. In fact, jargon is neither meant to communicate nor to even be intelligible and explicitly seeks to confuse, obfuscate, and induce apathy. Academically, students are taught to regurgitate ready-made phrases which they seldom understand and are encouraged to look to their golden-tongued professors to read and interpret these arcane texts for them. As Orwell so presciently observed in 1984, jargon can play a role in subconsciously and perniciously molding people’s thoughts: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Academic jargon, and its journalistic equivalent, euphemistic language, anesthetize the brain rendering contradictory concepts, such as the idea that the Russian military is performing poorly while simultaneously threatening to take over all of Europe, somehow compatible with one another. Another example of this paradoxical thinking is the nonsensical notion that the Putin and Assad governments were slaughtering Syrian civilians who were yearning to be free, while the Pentagon was nobly liberating Syrians from ISIS and Al Qaeda – the very jihadists that the Russians and Syrians were actually fighting.
In fact, the very word “education” has become a euphemism for highly specialized job training and indoctrination into the cults of Zionism, unfettered capitalism, biofascism, humanitarian interventionism and identity politics. There are also instances where job training and indoctrination overlap to such a degree that they become synonymous with one another, such as the indoctrination that routinely occurs in military academies and in the academic departments of business, finance, economics, medicine, political science, identity studies, psychology, or any field in the humanities or social sciences which has been contaminated by identity politics dogma.
During the early Covid lockdown days I had a disturbing conversation with a formerly bright friend of mine who is enrolled in a biomedical PhD research program, and was startled to see that she had become a fanatical Branch Covidian, as all the professors in her department were reinforcing precisely the same nefarious talking points as the legacy media and “the public health agencies.” When I think back on this exasperating quarrel, what stands out the most to me is not even the brazen immorality of what she was espousing, but her unmitigated arrogance, as she was talking to me as if she were a senior lecturer in astrophysics at MIT while I was reading about UFOs in the National Enquirer. I also couldn’t fail to notice how much smarter she used to be as a junior and senior in high school – both morally, and with regards to critical thinking skills. This is a perfect example of the sinister merger that regularly takes place between job training and indoctrination.
(This fallen spirit is currently jockeying for a position in the pharmaceutical industry while dating a guy that works in the military industrial complex, indeed proving that “the more you learn, the more you earn.”)
As things presently stand, it is virtually impossible to get tenure or a tenure-track position at an American university if one contradicts any of the unhallowed tenets of neoliberalism: the vilification of the latest imaginary Hitler, multiculturalism (inextricably linked with unfettered capitalism and ghettoization), and the wonders of neo-Nazi medicine. Until recently there was a tinge of ideological room to maneuver with regards to the issue of Zionism; and provided the professor is using copious amounts of Marxist jargon, there is a little leeway offered on the issue of unfettered privatization. But with regards to biofascism, Putin bashing, uncontrolled immigration and identity politics no dissent is tolerated by university administrators. Consequently, students are often trapped in an echo chamber where their professors fail to challenge the lies of the legacy media, and more disconcerting, these degenerate ideas have become imbued and intertwined with a sense of prestige.
The myth of the meritocracy is ceaselessly invoked in American academia, inculcating young people with the notion that the best and the brightest always get the best jobs, and that one should always “trust the experts,” a problem glaringly on display with the Branch Covidians who would believe that two plus two equaled five if FDA, CDC, and the WHO said it did. Regarding Washington’s destruction of Libya, most of Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, etc., the “smartest people” (New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, political science and economics departments at Ivy League schools) are saying we’re nobly battling evil dictators, hence we must be battling evil dictators. How could all these geniuses be wrong? John Kerry’s recent remark at the World Economic Forum that the ruling elites should be allowed to determine “what’s a fact and what isn’t a fact” could be the motto of virtually every educational institution in America.
The inimitable Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda asked random Palestinians in Gaza what they thought of the recent American election, and they said it didn’t matter as both candidates supported Zionism, revealing a better understanding of Beltway devilry than all American presstitutes and the majority of American political science professors put together. This unrelenting emphasis on blind obedience and the false meritocratic paradigm fosters a deep-seated infantilization amongst college students. Alas, legacy media acolytes remain as children all their lives.
Imagine a scenario where a political science or Russian studies professor in an American university stands before a class and informs their students that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked, that post-Euromaidan Ukraine is not a democracy, and that Moscow intervened in a regional civil war to protect the Russian speaking Ukrainian population from Banderite fascists and to prevent NATO from establishing a permanent foothold in the country which would pose an existential threat to the Russian Federation. Assuming they were untenured, such a professor would be fired immediately.
And the saddest part is that their own students would likely be the ones who would go to the department demanding such an outcome. Most professors are adjuncts and can be dismissed as easily as turning a key in a lock. Even if a professor should utter such heresies and be tenured, there are ways that the university can retaliate against the heathen by subjecting them to a toxic work environment and by preventing them from teaching classes which could allow for such intellectual discourse to occur in the first place.
In conjunction with this pitiable state of affairs, students that wish to pursue a field in the humanities are routinely mocked and ridiculed by their peers, yet these are the very subjects that constitute the foundational pillars of knowledge, enlightenment, and civilization itself. As popular Nazi writer Hanns Johst wrote in his 1933 play Schlageter, “Whenever I hear the word culture…I release the safety-catch of my Browning.” (Also sometimes translated as, “Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.”)
By enforcing ideological taboos set forth by presstitute puppeteers, academia has violated its sacred duty to uphold academic freedom and betrayed its historical, cultural, and moral purpose. For colleges that pursue an open admissions posture and which warehouse students that typically hail from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the humanities are often completely nonexistent, with these schools sometimes only offering majors in exanimate fields such as human resources, marketing, hospitality management, sports management, and criminal justice – essentially anti-subjects from which zero intellectual growth can emerge.
Urban public school students in particular are growing up in a post-nation state world where their level of dehumanization goes beyond mere illiteracy, as they are increasingly raised in an anti-society, a nihilistic void that has obliterated its past. This fate can befall not only immigrant youth and hyphenated Americans but Americans themselves (vividly on display in the dark film Martha Marcy May Marlene), who have likewise been given a terribly poor knowledge of the humanities, are raised in an economically ravaged post-industrial wasteland with neither communities, nor heroes nor canon, and who have lost any semblance of who they are and what their heritage is.
Academia’s penchant for sculpting international students into particularly compliant and docile workers, which is done by deliberately confining their English language instruction to the specialized jargon of their field making it almost impossible for them to understand anything in the US outside of their area of study, is likewise significant. When undergraduate international students that hail from high schools where English is not the language of instruction take writing-intensive classes in an American university to fulfill a liberal arts requirement they are invariably given easy A’s and B’s, and passed on with inflated marks when their papers are littered with grammatical errors and they are seldom able to understand the assigned readings. In this way, they are deceived into believing that they have learned English when their “education” is confined to learning the specialized English language lexicon of their major. Add to this the fact that many of these students will be on a guest worker visa upon graduation which ties them to a specific employer, and this further exacerbates their extremely vulnerable and exploitable position.
If a ski instructor gives his/her blessing for a student to do something which is known to be beyond the student’s abilities and a disastrous accident ensues, is the teacher not responsible? This happens countless times every day in American education, except the wounds are more difficult to see, as they are not physical injuries but injuries to the soul.
The biggest problem in the US is not that trillions are spent on unnecessary wars and maintaining a system of hundreds of bases around the world while millions of Americans suffer from poverty and indentured servitude, a lack of education, joblessness, broken families and communities, mass incarceration, and the absence of a single-payer health care system that upholds the informed consent ethic, but rather, that a vast swath of the population fails to see this as a problem. This pervasive moral and intellectual bankruptcy is American education’s grisly legacy.
Unlike with lower income students who are frequently denied any knowledge of the past, the ruling establishment wants the more selective mills to churn out students that are capable of writing grammatically correct sentences and possess at least a basic liberal arts education. However, the knowledge they are inculcated with is carefully scaffolded so as to rob them of logic and ethics, and any book, lecture, or field of study that could potentially cultivate these things will be identified as a threat and treated accordingly.
Setting fire to the humanities and teaching students to identify themselves by their ethnicity, sexual orientation, and occupation greatly advances the ruling establishment’s goals of alienation, tribalism, philistinism and illiteratization. Imaginary identities breed blindness and delusion, and the oligarchy deems peasants who have rejected ties to American history and the Western canon as well-trained pets. A population that has fallen into a morass of such extreme atomization that it is no longer bound together by a shared heritage and common language with which to discuss cataclysmic political and socio-economic problems and which is wallowing in the most abject political ignorance is on a runaway train to slavery.
This rabid anti-intellectualism is a pox on American society and allows the plutocrats to distract the masses from grave domestic problems while engaging in endless orgies of sadism and brutality, of which the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are quintessential examples.
Long discarded amongst the ranks of worthless white guys, Benjamin Franklin understood the vital importance of freedom of speech and its inextricable connection to liberty. Writing in The New-England Courant in July, 1722, he underscored the connection between democracy and what would later become the First Amendment:
“That Men ought to speak well of their Governours is true, while their Governours deserve to be well spoken of; but to do publick Mischief, without hearing of it, is only the Prerogative and Felicity of Tyranny: A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their Freedom of Speech.”
Furthermore, Franklin understood that freedom of speech could not survive without an educated and informed population – a population that could think:
“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech….”
Regrettably, it is not that one periodically encounters Americans with the most advanced degrees who have a kindergartner’s understanding of politics and the world in which we live, but that this has in fact become normalized. In actuality, these creatures are not so much educated as they are credentialed.
In conjunction with this pathological compulsion to destroy human cultures starting with one’s own, our education system presently exists to not only dismantle liberty of thought but to destroy the very capacity to think.
Just as American education is crying out for a restoration of a proper humanities syllabus that will inculcate the younger generation with a reverence for art, literature, a knowledge of the past, and a rejection of segregation, militarism, and materialism there are politicians in the Kremlin who would define victory in Ukraine, not as a destruction of the nationalist army per se, but as a new curriculum; i.e., the establishment of a new Ukrainian education system where the Russian and Ukrainian languages are taught side by side and which is devoid of Russophobia and Banderite indoctrination.
Insensate man – sometimes illiterate, frequently aliterate – is a being devoid of common sense, empathy, and the ability to methodically analyze extremely serious political and socio-economic problems – in a word, man devoid of consciousness. Relentlessly bombarded by a ruthless and omnipresent propaganda apparatus while simultaneously enveloped by an education system whose raison d’être is brainwashing and increasingly specialized vocational training, millions of impressionable minds are being severed from reason and the realm of human morality. Subsumed under a nihilistic oblivion and trained to mindlessly trust their leaders and do what is best for their careers, these hapless souls are molded into unthinking malleable shells in the hands of an oligarchy that has grown weary of democracy.
David Penner’s articles on politics and health care have appeared in Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Global Research, The Saker blog, OffGuardian and KevinMD; while his poetry can be found at Dissident Voice, Mad in America, and redtailedhawk.substack.com. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books of portraiture: Faces of The New Economy, Faces of Manhattan Island, and Manhattan Pairs. He can be reached at 321davidadam@gmail.com. Read other articles by David. 
