To: John Lacelle who wrote (15577 ) 12/21/1999 12:53:00 PM From: GUSTAVE JAEGER Read Replies (1) | Respond to
[...] The double fetish of growth with technocratic answers tends to have the long-term effect of multiplying dysfunctions or postponing much-needed wide-ranging and innovative solutions. As mentioned earlier, socialism, liberal capitalism, and their political and developmental corollaries were deeply encased in a modernist belief system. Scientific socialism was just another way to reach modernity. Liberal capitalism nowadays has mutated from its earlier Keynesian forms into a broader and more encompassing synthesis: trilateralist neoliberalism. Like its dialectical materialist counterpart, this ideology is imbued with a scientific pretension. But its appeal transcends the discourse of current economic orthodoxy as spread by mainstream university curricula. It is also grounded in the trappings of traditional elitist beliefs about authority, in "common sense," and in the opinion-inducing campaigns of the business-controlled media. The constructed hegemony of neoclassical economics Atlantic Monthly , the "arch enemy of an open society is no longer the Communist threat but the capitalist one" (Soros 1997). The difficulty with present-day monism, as with any form of exclusionary scholasticism, is that, having reached the end of contradictions, it soon runs out of ideas. Thought processes evolve into tautologies and slogans; education becomes simple training; and critical thinking becomes anathema. This dysfunctional cultural software is reproduced through increasingly acritical institutions of higher education and ever more complacent and transnationally integrated systems of diffusion of ideas as a form of Muzak(tm) or mesmerizing chant. The crisis of learning and the crisis of ideas Human Development Report 1992 pointed out that although the North-South gap in human survival (the basic component in human development, including life expectancy, literacy, nutrition, infant-child mortality, and access to safe water) had been somewhat narrowed in the 30-year period between 1960 and 1990, disparities in the cultural gap had in fact increased (UNDP 1992).16 Unequivocally, the crisis of thinking is closely connected with a profound global crisis in education, both formal and informal, at all its levels. This crisis is not limited to the periphery. As Ivan Illich observed many years ago, "schooling" has everywhere become divorced from education, thus encouraging goal displacement in the learning process. Education through prevailing institutions has little to do with enlightenment and with what Freire (1992) calls "the practice of freedom." Far from offering people the tools to transform their world and unleash their creativity for problem-solving, conventional schooling is a bureaucratic mechanism for human disempowerment and for the entrenchment of conformity and quiescence. [snip]idrc.ca
