Humankind’s Need for Liberal Education

[Time for change]

In his book, “The Sane Society”, the humanist psychologist Erich Fromm discusses among other things the five human psychological needs that differentiate us from animals. For each of these five human needs he discusses healthy and unhealthy ways that individuals and societies deal with them. Dealing with them in unhealthy ways leads to mental illness and what Fromm calls “alienation”. Alienation” is described by Erich Fromm as:

A mode of experience in which a person experiences himself as an alien… He does not experience himself as… the creator of his own acts – but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys… The alienated person is out of touch with himself, as he is out of touch with any other person.

The main theme of Fromm’s book is that our society currently (The book was copyrighted in 1955, but the same principles still apply today) fosters way too much alienation and mental illness because it focuses too much on material success at the expense of the needs of humankind. Another way of saying that is that our society puts profits ahead of people.

In a previous post I discussed three of the five human needs that Fromm discusses in his book, as they relate to the Birther movement: rootedness, sense of identity, and relatedness. Unhealthy ways of dealing with these needs include excessive nationalism, racism, attempts to dominate others, excessive submission to others, and “following the herd”.

In this post I will deal with another of the human needs that Fromm speaks of – the need for a frame of orientation. The healthy way of dealing with that need is to develop a good sense of reason – or rationality. The unhealthy way of dealing with it is to remain irrational – to see things the way we want to see them rather than the way that things are.

Near the end of his book Fromm discusses the educational transformation that our society needs, noting that it should be directed much more towards human needs and less towards the materialistic goals that our society’s leaders foist on us, and also that our educational needs are a life-long process:

We aim primarily at the usefulness of our citizens for the purposes of the social machine, and not at their human development… Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? … Undoubtedly the understanding of history, philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, etcetera, is limited at this early age… In many instances to really understand the problems in these fields, a person must have had a great deal more experience in living than he has had at college age. For many people the age of 30 or 40 is much more appropriate for learning – in the sense of understanding rather than of memorizing – than school or college age, and in many instances the general interest is also greater at the later age than at the stormy period of youth.

Some personal reflections on the need for a liberal education

My own personal experience tells me that Fromm is right on target with the above quoted remarks. Though history was one of my favorite subjects when I attended school, and I spent a lot of time on the subject, today, at the age of 59, I feel much more capable of developing a deeper understanding of it than I had then. In recent years I have become much more aware of how our educational system skews the history that it teaches its young people, and I have developed a healthier sense of skepticism than what I had when I was young.

Therefore I have developed a greater ability to look at history (and other things) from the viewpoint of other people – people of other nations and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, I have developed a better understanding of the importance to our country and our world of developing a more universal outlook towards our history, and to life in general – a widely focused outlook that sees things in terms of their human effects, rather than the narrow focus that many of our “leaders” would like us to adopt. Consequently I have come to believe that this widely focused outlook is the only hope that humanity has for its salvation, well being, and the avoidance of war. It is the only hope we have of creating a “sane society”, as Eric Fromm would say.


The four stages of spiritual growth

The humanist psychiatrist and best-selling author M. Scott Peck had a lot of things to say on this issue. His ‘four stages of spiritual growth’, which he discusses in his book, “Further Along the Road Less Travelled”, bears much similarity to Fromm’s ‘human needs’, and especially shines light on the development of human reasoning ability. Peck explains that, like all aspects of human psychology, these stages are not set in stone, individual people may exhibit some traits of different stages at the same time, and they may or may not travel from one stage to another throughout their life. The ideal of course is to progress to higher stages:

Stage 1 – Antisocial
This is the stage of absent spirituality. Psychologists often refer to such people as sociopathic or psychopathic or lacking in conscience. Peck describes them like this:

People at this stage are utterly unprincipled… While they are capable of pretending to be loving, actually all of their relationships with their fellow human beings are self-serving and covertly, if not overtly manipulative…. (They) will frequently be found in jails. Some of them, however, may actually be quite self-disciplined… in the service of their ambition and may rise to positions of considerable prestige and power. They may even become presidents or famous preachers.

Stage 2 – Formal/institutional
At this stage people submit to various institutions for guidance in their lives. Peck describes the different institutions that people may submit to, and then says:

But for most people, it is the church. Indeed, the majority of churchgoers fall into Stage Two… They are dependent on the institution of the church for their governance… Stage Two people become very, very upset if someone starts changing forms or rituals…

Their vision of God is almost entirely that of an external being… They generally envision God along the masculine model, and while they believe Him to be a loving being, they also ascribe to Him a certain kind of punitive power which He is not afraid to use… It is a vision of God as a giant benevolent cop in the sky…

Stage 3 – Skeptic/individual/truth seeking
Peck describes a child being raised by Stage 2 parents who eventually get to a stage where they say to themselves:

“Who needs these silly myths and superstitions and this fuddy-duddy old institution?” They will then begin – often to their parents’ utterly unnecessary horror and chagrin – to fall away from the church, having become doubters or agnostics or atheists… Often they are deeply involved in society. They are the kinds of people who tend to make up the backbone of organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility or the ecology movement. They make committed and loving parents. Frequently they are scientists, and certainly scientific-minded. Invariably they are truth seekers. And if they seek truth deeply enough, and widely enough… they do begin to find what they are looking for, and get to fit enough pieces of truth to catch glimpses of the big picture…

Stage 4 – Mystical/communal
Ordinarily I wouldn’t talk about this stage because, quite frankly, I don’t understand it very well. I guess that’s because I’ve never attained this stage. I normally don’t talk about things that I don’t understand because I like to confine my talk to things that I believe in. But I do have a lot of respect for Dr. Peck, so I’ll include this last stage for the sake of completeness:

I use the word “mystical” to describe this stage even though it is a word that is hard to define and one that has been given a pejorative connotation in our culture… Mystics are people who have seen a kind of cohesion beneath the surface of things. Throughout the ages, mystics have seen connections between men and women, between humans and other creatures, between people walking the earth and those who aren’t even here. Seeing that kind of interconnectedness beneath the surface, mystics of all cultures and religions have spoken of things in terms of unity and community. They also have always spoken in terms of paradox… Mystics are people who love mystery. They love to solve mysteries, and yet at the same time, they know the more they solve, the more mystery they are going to encounter…

The utter rejection of the “National Standards for US History” by the US Senate

I’ve discussed this issue in previous posts. But I feel the need to discuss it here because as far as I can see, nothing better exemplifies the contempt that so many of our national leaders have for truth seeking than the US Senate’s utter rejection of the National Standards for United States History in 1995.

Creation of the Standards
The standards were produced by a policy-setting body called the National Council for History Standards (NCHS), consisting of the presidents of nine major organizations and twenty-two other nationally recognized administrators, historians, and teachers, and two taskforces of teachers in World and United States history, with substantial input from thirty-one national organizations. The document was created through an unprecedented process of open debate, multiple reviews, and the active participation of the largest organizations of history educators in the nation. In November 1994, NCHS released its document, which was meant to provide purely voluntary guidelines for national curricula in history for grades 5-12.

Content of the Standards
As explained by Gary Nash, Professor of History at UCLA and Director of the National Center for History in the Schools, these standards were meant to have one thing in common: “to provide students with a more comprehensive, challenging, and thought-provoking education in the nation's public schools.” Their signature features were said to include “a new framework for critical thinking and active learning” and “repeated references to primary documents that would allow students to read and hear authentic voices from the past”.

Criticism of the standards
In my opinion the criticisms of the Standards do a better job of explaining what they are than Gary Nash himself does. And they also explain more than anything why the Standards, or something like them, are needed so badly. I would characterize the criticisms of the standards in a nutshell like this:

“Our country is great. Acknowledging that it makes mistakes or ever acts on the basis of anything but the purest of motives is heresy and unpatriotic and will gravely damage our children if we allow it to happen.” Here are some examples of the criticisms:

William Bennetta writes that the Standards:

were colored by faddish delusions and sociopolitical pretensions that multi-culti types favor…. and it was animated by a stark animosity toward Europeans (or "whites") and toward the United States itself. The writers evidently had done their best to emphasize American follies and failures, to minimize American successes, and to bury anything that did not conform to multi-culti doctrines and tastes.

Nash quotes Lynn Cheney:

Her line was that the standards suffered from "multicultural excess," a "grim and gloomy" portrayal of American history, "a politicized history," and, in the World History Standards, disparaged the West and gave it short shrift… Cheney indicted the history standards as an almost anti-American campaign waged by the nation's historians.

And Bob Dole:

For Bob Dole, "an embarrassed to be American" crowd of "intellectual elites" created the noxious history standards, bent on a campaign "to disparage America and disown the ideas and traditions of the West." His bottom line on the history standards was that they were "worse than external enemies."

And Newt Gingrich:

For Newt Gingrich, Americans always had an agreed-upon history until the mid-1960s when "cultural elites" launched "a calculated effort . . . to discredit this civilization and replace it with a culture of irresponsibility that is incompatible with American freedoms as we have known them."

Nash sums up the criticisms of the Standards

Reduced to its core, the controversy thus turned on how history can be used to train up the nation's youth. Almost all of the critics of the history standards argued that young Americans would be better served if they study the history presented before the 1960s, when allegedly liberal and radical historians "politicized" the discipline and abandoned an "objective" history in favor of pursuing their personal political agendas.

Gary Nash’s defense of the Standards
With regard to the criticisms of “grimness and gloominess”, Nash had this to say:

To be sure, it is not possible to recover the history of women, African Americans, religious minorities, Native Americans, laboring Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans without addressing issues of conflict, exploitation, and the compromising of the national ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation… To this extent, the standards counseled a less self-congratulatory history of the United States and a less triumphalist Western Civilization orientation toward world history…

Nash discusses the historians’ point of view:

On the other side of the cultural divide stands a large majority of historians. For many generations, even when the profession was a guild of white Protestant males of the upper class, historians have never regarded themselves as anti-patriots because they revise history or examine sordid chapters of it. Indeed, they expose and critique the past in order to improve American society and to protect dearly won gains… This is not a new argument. Historians have periodically been at sword's point with vociferous segments of the public, especially those of deeply conservative bent.

Congressional rejection of the standards
In January 1995, the U.S. Congress voted 99-1 to reject the Standards. The one vote against the rejection was explained by the Senator who cast that vote by saying that the rejection wasn’t worded strongly enough.

It should be noted that, although the Republicans had control of Congress that year, certainly there were enough liberals in the U.S. Senate that they should have been able to muster up a single vote for it. Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, Carol Mosley-Braun, Russ Feingold, and even Paul Wellstone cast votes rejecting the Standards. I don’t believe for a moment that all those Senators cast those votes because they were afraid that our children might learn the truth about some unflattering aspects of our history. Rather, I believe that the 99-1 vote simply reflected the degree of hysteria that surrounded the debate on the Standards. Nobody wanted to stick their necks out for a cause that didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell, at the risk of being labeled “unpatriotic” and losing their Senate seat.


The consequences of our mad quest to avoid the truth

It’s quite understandable why many people find it so unpleasant to learn and acknowledge bad things about their country. But by avoiding the truth – by sticking our collective heads in the sand – we lose our chance to learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating them.

Most of our leaders no longer try very hard to hide the truths about our slaughter and near extermination of Native Americans in the 18th and 19th Century or the many atrocities committed under our slavery system. After all, those things happened more than a century ago. Certainly the United States of America would never do such things again, right?

Yet, the guerilla wars we fought in the Philippines (1899-1902) and Vietnam (early 1960s – 1973) and are now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan all have much in common with our earlier moral lapses. After the Bush/Cheney claim that Iraq threatened us with weapons of mass destruction was proven to have no basis in truth, the next most common rationalization for our invasion and continued occupation of Iraq was that we were bringing democracy to the Iraqis. This is much the same excuse that we used in the Philippines and Vietnam, and it has about the same basis in truth.

Anyone who would take their head out of the sand long enough to see what’s happening and think about it could not possibly believe that we are bringing democracy to Iraq, or that that was ever the intention of those who led us into war. We’ve killed approximately a million Iraqis, made refugees out of over four million, and ruined their infrastructure. Most Iraqis hate us (polls consistently show that over 60% of ordinary Iraqis approve of violence against U.S. troops, and more than 90% want us to leave). One can think of all these facts as “just statistics”. Or one can look a little deeper and think about the many human tragedies behind the statistics. Jurgen Todenhofer, in his book, “Why Do you Kill? – The Untold Story about the Iraqi Resistance”, interviewed numerous Iraqi resistance fighters and wrote about the many horror stories of American atrocities that so many of them witnessed. This is what one of them said to him:

Can you not make your American friends understand that they have to stop presenting our children with this horrible alternative – either to stand by and watch their families being slaughtered or to kill someone themselves? Tell them to end this war… We cannot take it anymore. There is hardly a mother in Iraq who is not weeping for her sons, her children…

Lest anyone think that this man and many hundreds of other Iraqis are making this up, many of our own soldiers are saying the same thing. Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd describe the testimony of numerous U.S. veterans in their book, “Rules of Disengagement”:

Veterans spoke about shootings and beatings of children and other innocent civilians as well as the torture of prisoners…. Ian J. Lavalle reported, “We dehumanized people. The way we spoke about them, the way we destroyed their livelihoods, their families, doing raids, manhandling them, throwing the men on the ground while their family was crying…”

In conclusion

Most people are basically decent – or at least they want to be. When they hear stories about atrocities committed long ago in the past they are horrified. If they would open up their eyes and learn what their country has done much more recently in their names they would also be horrified. Yet our “leaders” cringe at the thought that by teaching children the truth we will incite them to “disparage America”, as Bob Dole says.

Well, better that our children disparage America and thereby learn to make us a better nation than that they hide their heads in the sand. As long as Americans refuse to confront the truth they will condone one war after another, until our nation destroys itself, and the rest of the world with us.

[BlooInBloo]

1. I don't know about all of this mumbo-jumbo, but a deep study of history, math...

literature, and 1 or 2 foreign languages would make this country a brazillion times better than it is.

Of course there are other nice-to-haves - but that's what I consider core.

It should go without saying that these topics need to be taught by people who possess an in-depth understanding of the topics.

[puebloknot]

2. K&R A good look at what we have become, what we always were ...

... behind the curtain.

Teaching the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and history, are a needed foundation for understanding the more elevated subjects which you touch on in this wonderful article.

I started reading Erich Fromm in my mid-30s, and wish for the kind of sanity he espoused.

If we survive as a nation, a future generation of young people will have to wrestle with the same kind of stigma that Germans have dealt with since the end of WWII.

Thank you, as always, for the effort you have put into writing this piece.

[Time for change]

3. Thank you puebloknot -- I was thinking much the same thing --

that we will have a stigma similar to what the Germans had since the end of WW II. To a large extent we already do.

Some will argue that the comparison is unfair. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews, plus a few million others he had sent to concentration camps, plus about 20 million who died in WW II. Our country on the other hand has only been responsible for the deaths of a million plus Iraqis, plus unknown thousands of Afghans, plus a few hundred coalition soldiers.

It is also true that, unlike Hitler, the Bush/Cheney administration didn't touch most of the Muslims living in our own country. That's an important difference. However, the Muslims living in Iraq have just as much right to live as the Muslims in our own country.

And we also know that Cheney wanted to nuke Iran. God knows where that would have led. Perhaps it was Seymour Hersh's exposure of that plan, followed by a very negative reaction to it from large segments of our nation, that prevented that.

Anyhow, this isn't over yet. Obama intends to escalate the war in Afghanistan, torture continues despite his executive order to the contrary, and I am not at all certain that we will get out of Iraq any time soon. What does it mean that Obama intends to keep 50,000 "non-combat" troops there? Will the Iraqi people consider that as an end to our occupation?

I first read Fromm as a teenager, I think (my father was a psychologist) -- but not "The Sane Society". That was recommended to me by H2O Man, and I just finished reading it last night.

[Demeter]

4. I've BEEN an Alien All My Life

as has any woman in a male-defined society. And then, having above average intelligence AND education, an alien from my sex. Then, add in born-in-the-blood Progressive tendencies, and I might as well be from Mars. Still, until recently (say, Reagan) I felt that there was room for me in this country.

No longer. I haven't the youth and naivety that made me so exploitable any more. I'm a hardened veteran of the Race, Sex, Politics, and Class wars. I don't give liars a second or even a first chance, don't take shit from anybody, and don't really care what anyone thinks about me.

Welcome to my world.

[kleec]

7. Here's

another Alien from that same world. It has been quite discouraging right up to today to actually know things, try to present facts and receive sneers or total blank looks!

As you, I will not have my voice stilled or quieted and if someone does not like that, too damned bad, they can either get over it or not, I really do not care. I was told by a very wise gentlemen that life is not a popularity contest, and, there are many who do not want to hear truth in any form but their own convoluted thinking. That is more prevalent today then at any other time in my life.

Thanks for sharing your world.

[zeemike]

5. As for myself I have been through 3 of the 4 stages of spiritual growth

That you mentioned and am working on the forth.

But it is my observation that our educational system is geared to stop education for most people when they leave hi school.
And I see this in a none logical way I know....but I think that you can tell when a person has stooped growing by his or hers hair style....In many cases they will have the same hair style as when they were in hi school
Perhaps that does not make sense but it is my observation never the less....it is like these people were told that "these are the best years of your life" and they believed it and so stopped growing or learning anything else.
What saved me from this fate is that I never made it in school and was self taught on most everything i know...which is not a lot, but better than many people who never read a book or even think about anything out of the ordinary.

I do have ideas on how to make education better but those ideas would only draw ridicule from most people, but I feel safe telling them here because I know you to have an open mind.

First and foremost eliminate sports from our educational experience....The reasons given for this is that it builds character and team spirit...and it is true but the character that it builds is not communal at all and the team spirit is just a primer for nationalism.
Second elevate the status of teachers and make the teacher the school.
Third increase what is expected of kids in the lower grades....their is no reason at all why a kid in the fifth or sixth grade cannot do algebra and learn to write more than a paragraph....by the time a kid is in HS they should be reading the classics and studying science in earnest.
And forth have a 2 years of public service after HS for all kids as a requirement for entrance to collage.

I know this may seem nutty and I have no credentials to say it...but here it is anyway....for what it is worth.

[Time for change]

8. Interesting ideas on how to improve education

I especially agree that the status of teachers should be elevated. They have some of the most important jobs in our country, and yet their status and pay are disproportionately low. It seems to me that their jobs are certainly more important that those of bankers, stockbrokers or anyone else in the financial industry.

I like the idea of public service especially if combined with a plan to make collage much more affordable to everyone. Having them all do public service should save a lot of money and make that idea doable.

I don't feel competent to have an opinion on what academic expectations we should have of kids in the lower grades.

As for sports, I was reading something recently (I can't remember if it was by Fromm) that suggested that an important value of sports is that it provides a means for people to present themselves with a certain amount of tension which they need for psychological reasons, in a relatively safe environment (of course, that depends on what sport we're talking about). That idea hit home with me because it occurs to me that that's what I use sports for (I play a fair amount of tennis). So, I don't know. I believe it's worked for me, and I don't think it encouraged me to be nationalistic. Does sports encourage nationalism? If it does, then perhaps we could find a way to stop that from happening without getting rid of sports in school altogether. I would tend to disagree with you on that one, but as you say, I have an open mind about it. ;)

[zeemike]

10. Well I am not competent ether in education

But I had a long term relationship with a second grade teacher who was very good at it and could teach kids to read that were struggling in other classes...she was able to make kids excell....and as her reward she got every problem student dumped in her class...but that never stopped her....It was from her that I heard about how the 4th and 5th grades were mostly goofing around and little attention paid to academics.
And about sports I was thinking mostly of HS football....and I lived in the south for some years and yes it taught nationalism....HS football in the deep south is near to a religon...and sets up a class group in schools...the in crowd is the football player who can do no wrong and they and the cheerleaders will get all the attention from the teachers and community and those who are not football players or in the band are just crap....I have seen this too many times...but I will not trouble you with examples.
It is not the sport that is at fault but how it is used in the academic world.

[Overseas]

6. K&R.

Wish U.S. students did learn more about our nation's history. We don't teach a lot about the labor movement either, and how hard they fought to win the 8-hour day and other common standards we take for granted these days.

If we taught more about the 20's and the robber barons and students read the speeches of Teddy & Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they'd be better prepared to understand what we just went through and how strongly we need to fight against those moneyed interests.

If we taught more about basic economic theories and the results of those approaches, we might not have been stuck in the ridiculous trickle-down illusion for so long.

Sigh...

[Time for change]

9. I learned nothing at all about the labor movement in school

Very good point. How can we poosibly understand the state of our nation without understanding the labor movement?

[Overseas]

11. I didn't either. Yet the battles for working conditions we now take for granted

were quite intense. Those rights were hard to achieve. People died for us in that cause.

And yet we've been successfully propagandized to distrust the labor movement. Reagan's union busting was propped up with right wing talking points and essays for years afterward. Even while the union movement was being reduced dramatically, paid pundits railed against Big Labor. Workers who had insecure working conditions were encouraged to resent those big unions with their great perks, instead of fighting to create their own unions and get them themselves.

Perhaps if we studied how hard previous generations had to fight to improve their living and working conditions and get The New Deal after the last major depression, we would be less squeamish about demanding real change from our president today.

In the meantime, we have manufactured discontent to fill the void-- fake populism funded by corporations to insinuate the "Hate Government" message more deeply into the national dialogue, if possible.

I am glad that we have alternative media to get some of the messages out.

But the dumbing down of our country has been so much more successful than I thought it could be.