Marx and the Student Mind: Let the Jester Do Somersaults
Education is a subversive activity--or at least it should be. Accuracy in Academia (AIA), however, adamantly disagrees with such a view. This new watchdog group is dedicated to monitoring the classroom performance of “leftist,” “radical” and “Marxist” professors.
AIA contends that the classroom should be a place where information that is “accurate, unbiased, balanced” and ultimately uncritical of “the American way” is transmitted. The group seriously misunderstands the role of education, the issue of balance and the character of students.
Philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has suggested that there are two basic competing intellectual attitudes characteristic of every epoch. The “philosophy of the priest” requires intellectuals to guard the sanctity of the absolute and the orthodox, and to sustain the “cult of the . . . obvious as acknowledged by and contained in tradition.” The “philosophy of the jester,” on the other hand, urges us to doubt everything that appears self-evident, “to unveil the non-obvious behind the obvious,” and, in short, to deride common sense at the “risk of appearing ridiculous.”
The jester’s philosophy embodies the true spirit of education, which means that authentic education is radical, critical and subversive of the conventional wisdom. Power, however, is always more comfortable with the loyal priest at its side, since a jester by nature can never be loyal to anything but the pursuit of truth. Socrates was executed for being a jester.
AIA is confused about the roles of priest and jester. It would prefer that we turn our classrooms into cathedrals of “the American way.” Professors would become priests, serving students “accurate” information--as decreed by AIA, of course. All bias and “unfair” criticism of America would disappear from the classroom, and all would be well in the kingdom.
What the “accuracy” experts overlook is that the priest also has a bias, and may not possess a monopoly on truth. No one perspective in education has captured that monopoly. Anyone who teaches, especially in the humanities and social sciences, knows the dangers of silencing or intimidating the jester. Certainly jesters have inescapable biases, but they know that the biases exist. That awareness is the essence of true learning. The tragedy of AIA is that it plays on the ignorance and fear of those who are convinced (or who would like to believe) that there is an absolutely true perspective that just so happens to coincide with the status quo. Not only does that view culminate in educational suicide, but our own status quo would be quite different if that view had prevailed 200 years ago.
AIA is blinded by its own narrow bias, which it views as “balance” in the classroom. But who defines balance? When I teach a course on Marxism, I have approximately 45 hours of classroom contact with students in a semester. A 20-year-old student has been alive more than 175,000 hours, and will probably live 438,000 more. During almost half a million waking hours of family, school, work and recreation, the student will encounter a host of perspectives, biases and opinions, most of them supporting the status quo. When our whole culture is weighted against radical views in the first place, what rationale is there for devoting half my 45 hours to “balance” the course with anti-Marxist perspectives? One course alone should not be expected to provide ideological “balance.” (That is the purpose of a liberal-arts education as a whole, not to mention one’s education in life.)
Finally, AIA’s view of students is condescending. Rare is the student who arrives at college with a blank stare, gaping mouth and tabula rasa for a brain, ready to be programmed like a robot by leftist professors eager to turn him against his country. In reality, most students enter college with a strong set of values and goals formed over 18 years of living and learning in a particular culture. They have heard the priest many times. In my 10 years of teaching radical political theory I have never seen students willing to accept any insights of Marx’s views on capitalism without much debate. It is usually difficult to encourage openness to ideas that run counter to ideological orthodoxy.
The ultimate irony of AIA is how un-American and anti-democratic it really is. Its activities would seem more compatible with societies such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, or even America in the depths of its disgrace during McCarthyism. Those societies did not and do not value openness, compassion, criticism, free thought and speech or the quest for truth. They would silence the jester once and for all.
Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the wisest of U.S. Presidents, once urged us to “pursue truth wherever it may lead.” That clarion cry, and not the closed-minded utterings of AIA, should be our intellectual beacon. But then again, if he were alive today, poor Jefferson might be monitored by AIA for instilling a leftist bias in the unsuspecting minds of his compatriots.
