Cursing dissent
You know you are doing something correct when you get postings like this.
The progressive educators blog is, according to its first post a network of education workers in South Australia with the goals being to further the interests of public education and of education worker unionism.
What is missing from the post on the nefarious activities of Mark Lopez is any sense whatsoever that there is such a thing as legitimate public debate on education. Instead, it is dissent-as-malignancy and dissent-as-manifestation-of-evil-forces.
Let's just ponder for a moment the implications of that for their pedagogical philosophy. This is not public education as better-delivery-of-education, it is public education-as-mechanism-for-social-control by ensuring it promotes the correct ideas. Since, clearly, there are incorrect ideas out there which are deeply malignant carried by such wicked institutions as Australia's largest selling newspapers.
Clearly, they believe that progressive ideas in the public education system is a necessary and wonderful thing, making public education a necessary and wonderful thing and private education, well, not.
Alternatively, one may reasonably argue that progressive ideas in education have been a sustained disaster. Not the level of disaster they have been in indigenous policy since schools are mainstream institutions with rather more resilience and social attention. But a disaster in a similar direction and for similar reasons.
Because to believe--as they clearly do--that dissent is malignant is to be epistemically broken. It is to cut off information from those most likely to spot problems--people who do not share the dominant premises. For, clearly, they believe that good people have good ideas and bad ideas only come from bad people. Who have to be clearly labelled as bad people so everyone knows what bad people they are.
It is a deeply childish outlook. It is also a self-serving and destructive outlook. It is an outlook that dominates our major cultural institutions--humanities and most social science academe; public education; documentary and other film-making; arts and "serious" literature; cultural grants to the same; mainstream publishing; the national broadcasters; the Fairfax metros. In the words of gay writer and former ABC presenter Robert Dessaix: The political correctness of the ABC is extraordinary. There's no leeway in anything to do with race or gender or politics. There is only one attitude you can have to Aborigines, to multiculturalism and to feminism.
Some columnists, a few "shock jocks", four journals (Quadrant, Policy, News Weekly, IPA Review) and a small number of advocacy groups constitute the only serious sources of dissent. Yet their existence is treated as an outrage and as manifestations of malignancy.
Which is an indication of how totalitarian the outlook is. (Robert Dessaix again: The ABC, he went on, is a highly authoritarian organisation and that since he is anti-authoritarian, it means `I have to tailor what I say to the reigning ideology of the ABC'.) But that follows from the premises: if bad ideas come from bad people then clearly it is proper that bad people with their bad ideas not be given any platform to pollute impressionable minds. The sustaining mechanism--conveying a sense of which attitudes grant status as "clever" and "caring"--is hardly secret-police-and-torture stuff. But its apparent "mildness" actually makes it much easier to propagate and much harder to critique.
It also undermines quality, since sufficient flattering of the prevailing prejudices allows one to get away with propagating endless amounts of bunk. Conversely, no error is permitted to dissenters as that feeds into the "proof" of how malignant they are. As Mark says, ideology molds judgments of quality. Particularly an ideology which equates ideas with character, which uses ideas as status-markers.
The progressive educators blog is, according to its first post a network of education workers in South Australia with the goals being to further the interests of public education and of education worker unionism.
What is missing from the post on the nefarious activities of Mark Lopez is any sense whatsoever that there is such a thing as legitimate public debate on education. Instead, it is dissent-as-malignancy and dissent-as-manifestation-of-evil-forces.
Let's just ponder for a moment the implications of that for their pedagogical philosophy. This is not public education as better-delivery-of-education, it is public education-as-mechanism-for-social-control by ensuring it promotes the correct ideas. Since, clearly, there are incorrect ideas out there which are deeply malignant carried by such wicked institutions as Australia's largest selling newspapers.
Clearly, they believe that progressive ideas in the public education system is a necessary and wonderful thing, making public education a necessary and wonderful thing and private education, well, not.
Alternatively, one may reasonably argue that progressive ideas in education have been a sustained disaster. Not the level of disaster they have been in indigenous policy since schools are mainstream institutions with rather more resilience and social attention. But a disaster in a similar direction and for similar reasons.
Because to believe--as they clearly do--that dissent is malignant is to be epistemically broken. It is to cut off information from those most likely to spot problems--people who do not share the dominant premises. For, clearly, they believe that good people have good ideas and bad ideas only come from bad people. Who have to be clearly labelled as bad people so everyone knows what bad people they are.
It is a deeply childish outlook. It is also a self-serving and destructive outlook. It is an outlook that dominates our major cultural institutions--humanities and most social science academe; public education; documentary and other film-making; arts and "serious" literature; cultural grants to the same; mainstream publishing; the national broadcasters; the Fairfax metros. In the words of gay writer and former ABC presenter Robert Dessaix: The political correctness of the ABC is extraordinary. There's no leeway in anything to do with race or gender or politics. There is only one attitude you can have to Aborigines, to multiculturalism and to feminism.
Some columnists, a few "shock jocks", four journals (Quadrant, Policy, News Weekly, IPA Review) and a small number of advocacy groups constitute the only serious sources of dissent. Yet their existence is treated as an outrage and as manifestations of malignancy.
Which is an indication of how totalitarian the outlook is. (Robert Dessaix again: The ABC, he went on, is a highly authoritarian organisation and that since he is anti-authoritarian, it means `I have to tailor what I say to the reigning ideology of the ABC'.) But that follows from the premises: if bad ideas come from bad people then clearly it is proper that bad people with their bad ideas not be given any platform to pollute impressionable minds. The sustaining mechanism--conveying a sense of which attitudes grant status as "clever" and "caring"--is hardly secret-police-and-torture stuff. But its apparent "mildness" actually makes it much easier to propagate and much harder to critique.
It also undermines quality, since sufficient flattering of the prevailing prejudices allows one to get away with propagating endless amounts of bunk. Conversely, no error is permitted to dissenters as that feeds into the "proof" of how malignant they are. As Mark says, ideology molds judgments of quality. Particularly an ideology which equates ideas with character, which uses ideas as status-markers.