Chris Hedges, who wrote 'Empire of Illusion,' examines America's identity crisis in an age of consumerism and spectacle.
(via Carolyn Baker)
'Vocational America'
"Education in the United States has become vocational. ... Many of the state universities, community colleges and online for-profit universities — that are growing faster than any other university sentiment — have no use for the Humanities, literature, history, philosophy, classics, art. Why? Because the Humanities ask the kind of broad questions of meaning that those systems that prize above all else vocational workers do not want to ask.
"The problem with our vocational system is that it measures and rewards a very narrow kind of intelligence, a kind of analytical intelligence to create legions of systems managers — people who have a drone-like ability to work for very long hours, and (have) a kind of penchant or capacity for manipulation, but don't know how to question assumptions or structures."
This is the criticism made by Gatto and others of American public education at the primary and secondary levels.
Related links:
Transcript: Chris Hedges, “Empire of Illusion”, 21 July 2009
Truthdig - Chris Hedges, Columnist
Addicted to Nonsense
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