Sherry Chandler

An argument against gutting our system of public education

From J. M. Coetzee’s Portrait of a Monster as a Young Artist in the New York Review of Books:

Of the aspects of Hitler’s Vienna period on which the historically minded novelist might build, I mention three. First, despite at times being hungry and even desperate, Hitler disdained manual labor. Second, he hated Vienna. Third, in this phase of his life he can legitimately be called an artist and intellectual, albeit an undistinguished one.

…

Hitler may not have been much of an artist (he always had trouble with the human figure—a telling weakness), but there is no denying that, at least in his early years, he was an intellectual of sorts. He read incessantly (though only what he liked), he was interested in ideas (though only in ideas that fitted his preconceptions) and believed in their power, he involved himself in the arts (though his tastes were unshakably provincial and prematurely conservative).

From the wealth of new ideas to which he was exposed, he made a selection which he cobbled together to compose the philosophy of National Socialism. The pseudo-anthropology of Guido von List made a deep impression on him. List divided mankind into an Aryan master race, originating in the northernmost fastnesses of Europe, and a race of slaves with whom the Aryans had regrettably miscegenated over the centuries. He urged the recovery of the pure Aryan blood-line by strict sexual segregation from the slave race, via the creation of a state comprising Aryan masters and non-Aryan slaves ruled over by a Führer who would be above the law.

Another of the charlatans under whose influence Hitler fell was Lanz von Liebenfels, founder of the Order of the New Templars and publisher of the magazine Ostara, of which he was an avid reader. Liebenfels was an extreme misogynist who saw women as lower beings attracted by their nature to “primitive-sensual dark men of inferior races.” What Hitler knew of racial science and eugenics, and later imported into National Socialist policy, came not from scientific reading but filtered through popularizers and vulgarizers like Liebenfels.

All in all, the adventures of Adolf Hitler in the realm of ideas provide a cautionary tale against letting an impressionable young person loose to pursue his or her education in a state of total freedom. For seven years Hitler lived in a great European city in a time of ferment from which emerged some of the most exciting, most revolutionary thought of the new century. With an unerring eye he picked out not the best but the worst of the ideas around him. Because he was never a student, with lectures to attend and reading lists to follow and fellow students to argue with and assignments to complete and examinations to sit, the half-baked ideas he made his own were never properly challenged. The people he associated with were as ill-educated, volatile, and undisciplined as himself. No one in his circle had the intellectual command to put his chosen authorities in their place as what they were: disreputable and even comical mountebanks.

Normally a society can tolerate, even look benignly upon, a layer of autodidacts and cranks on the fringes of its intellectual institutions. What is singular about the career of Hitler is that through a confluence of events in which luck played some part, he was able not only to spread his nonsensical philosophy among his German countrymen but to put it into practice across Europe, with consequences known to all.

What happens, I wonder, when the fringe manages to get into power and systematically gut a nation’s education system so that there is no one left to challenge them?

On a similar vein — well, Hitler is named — Rising Hegemon has found the proper totalitarian to whom we can compare George W. Bush:

I’m no professional historian, but I’ve stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, and if I was to think of past historical figures that Bush and Cheney ultimately remind me of, it isn’t the easy, intellectually shallow, and easy to discredit Hitler. Bush is pretty damn bad, especially by American historical standards, but Hitler was in a class all his own, with Stalin, Mao some distance behind, and a whole host of murderous thugs like Tamerlane somewhere in the rear view mirror.

No, Bush and Cheney remind me of the last of the Romanovs.

Bush has the shallow, unintellectual stubbornness of Nicholas II. He distrusts and even mocks people who are intellectually on a higher plane or actually make an effort to be intellectually curious. Like Nicolas II, he believes he has been ordained by God to be “the Decider” and therefore any decision is God’s decision.

Cheney, on the other hand, has the narrow-minded haughtiness of the Empress Alexandra, along with the refusal to tolerate those who don’t bow down to his small-focused ideals of good and evil — and inability to consider any decision or statement he makes is not correct by that fact alone.

Related posts:

Should we privatize education?

The way of education…

Reconsidering education

Public faith (with Romney)

Public Rights of Way

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