Critical Education in the New Information Age

In his celebrated book Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What All Americans Need to Know, E. D. Hirsch and colleagues provide a pointed attack on American education that, for too long, has reduced learning to skills acquisition devoid of cultural content (Hirsch, Kett, and Tuefil, 1988). As an alternative, Hirsch argues that schools should deemphasize “process” and reemphasize “content,” which is, in his view, rooted in our “common cultural” background knowledge. What Hirsch fails to recognize is that his treatment of culture is “descriptive rather than anthropological and political. . . . Its meaning is fixed in the past, and its essence is that it provides the public with a common referent for communication and exchange” (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1988, p. 185).

However, Hirsch’s common cultural shared information is nothing less and nothing more than a veiled cultural information-banking model based on a selective selection of Western cultural features that “dismisses the notion that culture has any determinate relation to the practices of power and politics or is largely defined as a part of an ongoing struggle to move history, experience, knowledge, and the meaning of everyday life in one’s terms” (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1988, p. 186).

What is more pernicious than Hirsch’s fossilized encyclopedia of “our common cultural” background knowledge is his selective omission of cultural facts that all Americans also need to know but are prevented from knowing. This is part of the ongoing “poisonous pedagogy” designed “to impart . . . from the beginning false information and beliefs that have been passed on from generation to generation and dutifully accepted by the young even though they are not only unproved but are demonstrably false” (Miller, 1990, p. 54). According to Alice Miller, to ensure that the received belief and value system is continually reproduced, the recipients “shall never be aware for their own good” of the mechanisms inherent in “poisonous pedagogy,” which involve “laying traps, lying, duplicity, subterfuge, manipulation, ‘scare’ tactics, withdrawal of love, isolation, distrust, humiliation . . . scorn, ridicule, and coercion even to the point of torture” (ibid.).

Although Alice Miller’s work focuses mostly on child-rearing practices, the mechanisms of poisonous pedagogy also inform our education and even our government. We do not have to look further than our newspaper headlines to identify explicit mechanisms of poisonous pedagogy in the behavior of our politicians. For instance, in an investigation of corrupt politicians in the Massachusetts legislature, the Boston Globe (May 27, 1993) concluded that “the Beacon Hill system often seems designed to obfuscate the truth, hinder public scrutiny and conceal the identity of special interests and their agents.” The prevalent lying and concealment of truth are part and parcel of our political culture and are best measured by the public’s resignation to such lies.

Anyone who followed the Iran-contra investigation can attest that Presidents Reagan and Bush were less than truthful to the public, and they were no less deceitful about U.S. complicity in concealing the truth about the carnage and crimes against humanity committed by the El Salvadoran army in the massacre of El Mozote in 1981, the vicious murders of six Jesuit priests, and the rape and murder of four American churchwomen. Yet, public resignation to such lies is so complete that there was little uproar when the Boston Globe (March 18, 1993) headlined, “The Truth Comes on a Dirty US War.” The same public resignation to lies and deceit by our public officials was evident when President Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger, who was accused of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra affair. The same public resignation allows the former secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., to not be accountable for his irresponsible assertion that the four churchwomen raped and murdered by the El Salvadoran army in 1980 may have been killed as they tried to run a roadblock.

The mechanisms of poisonous pedagogy are also part and parcel of our educational system, which is designed to instill obedience so as to require students to “1) willingly do as they are told, 2) willingly refrain from doing what is forbidden, and 3) accept the rules for their sake” (Miller, 1990, p. 13). Thus, obedience becomes a pivotal tool for the reproduction of the dominant culture to the extent that independent thoughts and actions are regulated by the system or repressed by the individual, who has submitted his or her will to the entrapment of poisonous pedagogy. The rule of obedience in eradicating critical thought and independent action was well understood throughout history:

Obedience, however is not easily instilled in individuals. It requires a sophisticated implementation of the ingredients of poisonous pedagogy, which include the use of scare tactics, lies, manipulation, and other means designed to get individuals to submit to the rule of law and to accept what has been presented as sacred. All this must take place in a carefully crafted manner so that the individual “won’t notice and will therefore not be able” to expose the lies. Hitler was fully aware of this fact: “It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them” (quoted in Miller, 1990, p. 63). I would argue that many of our own educators and politicians enjoy a “very special special, secret pleasure” in viewing how anesthetized we have become and how unaware we are of what is really happening to us.

Obedience imposed through lies is accomplished not only through received but false cultural information but also through the omission of cultural facts, such as the horrendous crimes that the Western heritage committed against humanity in order to prevent the possibility of keeping dangerous memories alive. It is, then, not accidental that Hirsch’s “shopping mall” (Gannaway, 1994) cultural literacy gives rise to a type of education based on the accumulation of selected cultural facts that are disconnected from the sociocultural world that generated these facts in the first place. Educators who adhere to Hirsch’s perspective often contribute to the fragmentation of knowledge due to their reductionist view of the act of knowing. The acquisition of what all Americans need to know in a fossilized encyclopedic manner prevents the learner from relating the flux of information so as to gain a critical reading of the world. This implies, obviously, the ability of learners to critically understand how Hirsch’s view of “widely accepted cultural values” often equates Western culture with civilization, while leaving unnoted Western culture’s role in “civilizing” the “primitive others.”

To execute its civilizing tasks, Western culture resorted to barbarism so as to save the “other” cultural subjects from their primitive selves. Ironically, Hirsch neglects to include in his dictionary information that would show how Western culture, in the name of civilization and religion, subjugated, enslaved, and plundered Africa, Asia, and the Americas. If this perspective of cultural literacy allowed readers to become critical, encouraging them to apply rigorous standards of science, intellectual honesty, and academic truth in their inquiry, they would arrive at a much more complex response than is allowed for in the prevailing version of our cultural literacy.

Critical readers would also question why the dictionary fails to inform American readers that “Indian towns and villages were attacked and burned, their inhabitants murdered or sold into foreign slavery” (Zinn, 1990, p. 25). These often-omitted historical facts were described by William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony: “It was a fearful sight to see [the Indians] thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and [the settlers] gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them” (Stannard, 1992, p. 430). Critical readers would also question why Hirsch’s cultural literacy conveniently fails to discuss how history shows us convincingly and factually that the United States systematically violated the Pledge of Allegiance from the legalization of slavery, the denial of women’s rights, the near-genocide of Indians, to the contemporary discriminatory practices against people who, by virtue of their race, ethnicity, class, or gender, are not treated with the dignity and respect called for in the pledge. If Hirsch, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others did not suffer from historical amnesia, they would include in our common cultural literacy the following observation:

One can now begin to see why Hirsch’s information-banking model of cultural literacy is based on a selective form of history. His omission of important historical facts in his common cultural list that every American needs to know points to the ideological nature of his pedagogy and constitutes the foundation for what I call the pedagogy of big lies. If we were to compare and juxtapose Hirsch’s texts with the historical information he leaves out of his cultural inventory list, we would begin to understand the importance of keeping readers from knowing the truth for their own good. The left column below is taken from the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Hirsch, Kett, and Tuefil, 1988). The column on the right elaborates historical facts to fill the gap of what is omitted from the dictionary.

What every American needs to know	What every American needs to know but is prevented from knowing
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people: Words from the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln, often quoted as a definition of democracy.	These words were not meant for African Americans, since Abraham Lincoln also once declared: “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of ringing about in any way the social and political equality of white and black races. . . . I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race” (Zinn, 1990, p. 184).
Indentured servant: A person under contract to work for another person for a definite period of time, usually without pay but in exchange for free passage to a new country. During the seventeenth century most of the white laborers in Maryland and Virginia came from England as indentured servants.	Slavery: Although omitted from Hirsch’s cultural list, slavery involved kidnapping Africans, breaking up families, and shipping Africans to the Americas to be sold to white masters to perform forced labor under duress and inhuman conditions, often involving undignified and denigrating jobs. Slavery was legal and protected by U.S. laws until the Emancipation Proclamation, even though slavery continued unabated long after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Give me liberty or give me death: Words from a speech by Patrick	Patrick Henry’s words were not meant for African slaves or American
Henry urging the American colonies to revolt against England. Henry spoke only a few weeks before the Revolutionary War began: “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun. The next gale that sweeps from the north will ring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethren are already in the field. . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but for me, give me liberty or give me death!”	Indians. African Americans and American Indians continued throughout the history of the United States to experience subjugation, leading Malcolm X to pronounce in 1964 the following: “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. . . . One of the . . . victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flagsaluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I! I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare!” (Zinn, 1990, p. 65).
Navahos: A tribe of Native Americans, the most numerous in the United States. The Navahos have reservations in the Southwest. The Navahos were forced to move by United States troops under Kit Carson in 1864. They call the march, on which many died, the Long Walk. Today, they are known for their houses, called hogans, made of logs and earth; for their work as ranchers and shepherds; and for their skill in producing blankets and turquoise and silver jewelry.	“The United States is founded on the destruction of the native population. Before Columbus the population north of the Rio Grande was maybe 12-15 million. At the turn of the century it was 200,000. The whole history of the conquest of the continent from the time that the saintly Pilgrims landed is the destruction of the native population by various means, sometimes just plain mass slaughter, like the Pequot Massacre by the Puritans or George Washington’s destruction of the Iroquois civilization right in the middle of the War of Independence, and many later events running through the conquest of the national territory. Sometimes it was criminal expulsion like Jackson’s expulsion of the Cherokees, really hard-line things. Anyway, that’s the history” (Chomsky, 1988, pp. 683-84).
Plymouth Rock: The rock, in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, near which the Mayflower, carrying the Pilgrims, landed in 1620.	Plymouth rock seen through the eyes of American Indians represents the beginning of a quasi-genocide legalized by the Massachusetts legislature, which promulgated a law that provided monetary rewards for dead Indians. “For every scalp or male Indian brought in . . . forty pounds. For every scalp of such female Indian or male Indian under the age of twelve years that shall be killed . . . twenty pounds” (Zinn, 1990, pp. 234-35).
Big Stick Diplomacy: International negotiations backed by the threat of force. The phrase comes from a proverb quoted by Theodore Roosevelt, who said that the United States should “speak softly and carry a big stick.”	Big-stick diplomacy characterizes U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Latin America. Recent examples of such diplomacy are the U.S. invasion of Grenada under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. bombing of Libya under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua via a proxy, the contras, under Ronald Reagan, and the U.S. invasion of Panama under George Bush.
Japanese-Americans, internment: An action taken by the federal government in 1942, after the air force of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into World War II. Government officials feared that Americans of Japanese descent living on the west coast might cooperate in an invasion of the United States by Japan. Accordingly, over 100,000 of these residents were sent into relocation camps inland, many losing their homes and jobs in the process. About two-thirds of those moved were U.S. citizens. (See Nisei.) Many Japanese-Americans, including an entire army battalion, distinguished themselves in combat in World War II.	“To the Japanese who lived on the West Coast of the United States, it quickly became clear that the war against Hitler was not accompanied by a spirit of racial equality. . . . One congressman said, ‘I am for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps. . . . Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now!’ Roosevelt, persuaded by racists in the military that the Japanese on the West Coast constituted a threat to the security of the country, signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. This empowered the army, without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast—11,000 men, women, and children—to take them from their homes, to transport them to camps far in the interior, and to keep them there under prison conditions. . . . Data uncovered in the 1980s by legal historian Peter Irons showed that the army falsified material in its brief to the Supreme Court. . . . The American press often helped to feed racism. Time magazine said, ‘The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing indicates it.’
	“Ota was born in the United States. He remembered what happened in the war: ‘On the evening of December 7, 1941, my father was at a wedding. He was dressed in a tuxedo. When the reception was over, the FBI agents were waiting. They rounded up at least a dozen wedding guests and took ’em to county jail. For a few days we didn’t know what happened. We heard nothing. When we found out, my mother, my sister went to jail. . . . When my father walked through the door my mother was so humiliated . . . she cried. He was in prisoner’s clothing, with a denim jacket and a number on the back. The shame and humiliation just broke her down. . . . Right after that day she got very ill and contracted tuberculosis. She had to be sent to a sanitarium. . . . She was there till she died. My father was transferred to Missoula, Montana. We got letters from him—censored, of course. . . . It was just my sister and myself. I was fifteen, she was twelve. School in camp was a joke. . . . One of our basis subjects was American history. They talked all the time’ ” (Zinn, 1990, 89-90, emphasis mine).
Remember the Alamo: A battle cry in the Texans’ struggle for independence from Mexico, later used by Americans in the Mexican wars. It recalled the desperate flight of the Texas defenders of the Alamo, a besieged fort, where they died to the last man.	What is important to note is that the United States, in its history of expansionism and conquest, instigated a war with Mexico so as to later claim half of Mexico’s land.
Malcolm X: A political leader of the twentieth century. Malcolm X, a prominent Black Muslim, who explained the group’s viewpoint in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was assassinated in 1965.	“The Trap of ‘Racism’: There are traps that he creates. If you speak in an angry way about what has happened to our people and what is happening to our people, what does he call it? Emotionalism. Pick up on that. Here the man has got a rope around his neck and because he screams, you know, the cracker that’s putting the rope around his neck accuses him of being emotional. You’re supposed to have the rope around your neck and holler politely, you know. You’re supposed to watch your diction, not shout and make other people—this is how you’re supposed to holler. You’re supposed to be respectable and responsible when you holler against what they are doing to you” (Malcolm X, speech given on January 24, 1965).
Parks, Rosa: A black seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama, who, in 1965, refused to give up her seat to a white person, as she was legally required to do. Her mistreatment after refusing to give up her seat led to a boycott of the Montgomery buses by supporters of equal rights for black people. This incident was the first major confrontation in the Civil Rights Movement.	Rosa Parks was not just mistreated. She was arrested and placed in jail. According to her, “Well, in the first place, I had been working all day on the job. I was quite tired after spending a full day working. I handled and worked on clothing that white people wear. That didn’t come in my mind, but this is what I wanted to know: When and how would one even determine our rights as human beings? . . . It just happened that the driver made a demand and I just didn’t feel like obeying his demand. He called a policeman and I was arrested and placed in jail.”
Manhattan Project: The code name for the effort to develop atomic bombs for the United States during World War II. The first controlled nuclear reaction took place in Chicago in 1942, and by 1945, bombs had been manufactured that used this chain reaction to produce greater explosive force. The project was carried out in enormous secrecy. After a test explosion in July 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.	Although American intelligence had broken the Japanese code indicating the Japanese readiness to surrender, it did not prevent President Truman from going ahead and, perhaps unnecessarily, bombing two highly populated Japanese cities. Truman said that “‘the world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.’ It was a preposterous statement. Those 100,000 killed in Hiroshima were almost all civilians. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said in its official report: ‘Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population.’ The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment?” (Zinn, 1990, p. 415).
Vietnam War: A war in Southeast Asia, in which the United States fought in the 1960s and 1970s. The war was waged from 1954 to 1975 between communist North Vietnam and noncommunist South Vietnam, two parts of what was once the French colony of Indochina. Vietnamese communists attempted to take over the South, both by invasion from the North and by guerrilla warfare conducted within the South by Viet Cong. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy sent increasing numbers of American military advisors to South Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, increased American military support greatly, until half a million United States soldiers were in Vietnam.	“The need to ‘stop communism’ was used to justify the invasion of Vietnam and to carry on there a fullscale war in which over a million people died. It was used to justify the bombing of peasant villages, the chemical poisoning of crops, the ‘search and destroy missions,’ the laying waste of an entire country. GI Charles Hutto, who participated in the massacre of Vietnamese peasants at My Lai, told army investigators: ‘I remember the unit’s combat assault on My Lai. The night before the mission we had a briefing by Captain Medina. He said everything in the village was communist. So we shot men, women, and children’ ” (Zinn, 1990, p. 267).
	President John F. Kennedy, who considered Vietnam “an important piece of real estate,” committed ”U.S. planes and U.S. pilots to undertake direct participation, not just control, in the bombing and defoliation operations in South Vietnam directed against the rural population, which was the large majority, about 80% of the population. . . . Adlai Stevenson, our UN ambassador at the time, referred to an ‘internal aggression,’ namely the aggression of the Vietnamese, and particularly the Vietnamese peasants, against the United States in South Vietnam. A society that can use phrases such as ‘internal aggression’ and can perceive the bombing of peasant villages as a defense of either us or our clients, that society has gone a long towards a kind of operative totalitarianism” (Chomsky, 1988, p. 701).
American goals in Vietnam proved difficult to achieve, and the communists’ Tet Offensive was a severe setback. Report of atrocities committed by both sides in the war disturbed many Americans (see My Lai Massacre). Eventually, President Richard Nixon decreased American troop strength, and sent his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to negotiate a cease-fire with North Vietnam. American troops were withdrawn in 1973, and South Vietnam was completely taken over by communist forces in 1975.
The involvement of the United States in the war was extremely controversial. Some supported wholeheartedly; others opposed it in mass demonstrations and by refusing to serve in the American armed forces (see Draft). Still others seemed to rely on the government to decide the best course of action (see Silent Majority). A large memorial (see Vietnam Memorial) bearing the names of all members of the United States armed services who died in the Vietnam War is in Washington, D.C.	A large black marble memorial contains the names of over 50,000 Americans who perished in the Vietnam War.
Banana republics: A term describing any of several small nations in Latin America that have economies based on a few agricultural crops. The term “banana republic” is often used in a disparaging sense; it suggests an unstable government.	As a term, banana republic also refers to the puppet governments installed by the CIA to protect U.S. interests while the vast majority of the population live in dire poverty. The United States often installs and supports dictatorships, giving rise to political instability and periodic civil wars. What follows is a partial list of U.S. invasions of these so-called banana republics to protect the interests of U.S. companies:
	● 1854, Nicaragua: U.S. invasion to avenge an insult to the American minister to Nicaragua.
	● 1855, Uruguay: Landing of U.S. and European naval forces to protect American interests during an attempted revolution in Montevideo.
	● 1954, Guatemala: A legally elected government overthrown by invasion forces of mercenaries trained by the CIA. The government that the United States overthrew was the most democratic Guatemala had ever had. “What was most unsettling to American business interests was that Arbenz [the deposed president] had expropriated 234,000 acres of land owned by United Fruit, offering compensation that United Fruit called ‘unacceptable’” (Zinn, 1990, pp. 430-31).
Colonialism: The control of one nation by transplanted people of another nation—often a geographically distant nation that has a different culture and dominant racial or ethnic group (see Ethnicity). A classic example of colonialism is the control of India by Britain from the eighteenth century to 1947. Control that is economic and cultural, rather than political, is often called Neocolonialism.	Although the United States fought for its independence against Britain, it ended up assuming the colonial role in the world, seizing Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898, the Canal Zone in Panama in 1903, and Hawaii in 1903, and fighting a brutal war to subjugate the Philippines. The United States functions as a de facto neocolonialist power due to its economic and cultural control of Puerto Rico and many Latin American nations. The United States almost always sided with the colonizers in Africa when African countries began their independence wars.
Disenfranchisement: Removal of the franchise, or right to vote.	The disenfranchised often refers to the oppressed “minority” groups in the United States. The dominant group in the United States prefers the term disenfranchised groups over oppressed groups. With the verb disenfranchise, one can never identify the subject, whereas oppressed acknowledges an oppressor.
Oligarchy: A system of government in which power is held by a small group.	A classic example of oligarchy is El Salvador, supported by the United States in a civil war that has cost that country 70,000 lives. The United States has spent billions of dollars maintaining a de facto oligarchy in El Salvador while ignoring outrageous human rights violations by the ultra right and military death squads that were responsible for thousands of killings, including the massacre of six Jesuit priests.
Refugees: People who flee a nation, often to escape punishment for their political affiliations or for political dissent.	The United States adopts a double standard toward refugees. It welcomed anti-Sandinista refugees while deporting El Salvadorans who tried to escape political persecution. It welcomes Cuban refugees while it deports Haitian boat people.
Third World: The nonaligned nations—which are often developing nations—of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They are in a “third” group of nations since they are allied with neither the United States nor the Soviet Union.	Third World also refers to underdeveloped nations. The term is misleading to the extent that we have Third World contexts in First World nations, such as ghettoes, and First World realities in Third World countries.
World Court: A division of the United Nations that settles legal disputes submitted to it by member nations. The International Court of Justice, also called the World Court, meets in The Hague, Netherlands.	Although the World Court mediates legal disputes among nations, it has no power of execution. A classic example of its lack of execution power involves the mining of the Nicaraguan harbor by the United States. The World Court ruled in favor of Nicaragua, but the United States arrogantly dismissed the ruling.
Class: A group of people sharing the same social, economic, or occupational status. The term class usually implies a social and economic hierarchy, in which those of higher class standing have greater status, privilege, prestige, and authority. Western societies have traditionally been divided into classes: the upper class or leisure class, the middle class (bourgeoisie), and the lower or working class. For Marxists, the significant classes are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.	The ruling elite aided by the intelligentsia goes to great lengths to create mechanisms designed to perpetuate the myth that the United States is a classless society. That is why George Bush, during the 1988 presidential campaign, berated his democratic opponent by saying: “I am not going to let that liberal Governor divide this nation. . . . I think that’s for European democracies or something else. It isn’t for the United States of America. We’re not going to be divided by class. . . . We are the land of big dreams, of big opportunities, of fair play, and this attempt to divide America by class is going to fail because the American people realize that we are a very special country, for anybody given the opportunity can make it and fulfill the American dream” (New York Times, October 30, 1988). This is the same George Bush who fought for a capital gains tax cut for the rich while threatening to veto a tax cut for the middle class and who put into place severe cuts designed to dismantle social services, including education, for the poor. It is the same George Bush who used the benefit of the capital gains tax to buy his Maine two-million-dollar estate, arguing that his purchase “put money in the pockets of real estate agents and contractors,” thus creating jobs. George Bush would be hard put to convince residents of East L.A., Harlem, and East St. Louis that the purchase of his two-million-dollar estate through tax cuts for the rich made their povertyclass conditions any better. In fact, George Bush, while discouraging class struggle debate, was a principle actor in the creation of the biggest gulf between the upper class and the lower class.
	According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “in 1988, the richest fifth of American families received 44 percent of the nation’s total family income. That’s the highest percentage ever recorded for that segment of the population. On the other hand, the poorest fifth received only 4.6 percent. That’s the lowest since 1954. The second-poorest fifth and the middle fifth each received the lowest ever recorded share of the nation’s income.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that “while the average income for the bottom 20 percent of households fell in the 1980s, income for the top 1 percent, after taxes, rose 122 percent, from $203,000 to $451,000. The average salary of a person worth over $1 million rose from $515,499 to $770,587. The average wage of a person who earns under $20,000 rose a mere $123, from $8,528 to $8,651.”
	In the face of glaring evidence of class stratification, politicians and educators in the United States continue to promote the myth that the United States is a classless society. However, it would be hard to convince students in East St. Louis Senior High School that they enjoy class equity in this great land of ours: “East St. Louis Senior High School was awash in sewage for the second time this year. The school had to be shut became of fumes and backed-up toilets. Sewage flowed into the basement, through the floor, then up into the kitchen and the students’ bathrooms. The backup, we read, ‘occurred in the food preparation areas’ ” (Kozol, 1991, p. 23).
Declaration of Independence: The fundamental document establishing the United States as a nation, adopted on July 4, 1776. The declaration was ordered and approved by the Continental Congress, and written largely by Thomas Jefferson. It declared the Thirteen Colonies represented in the Continental Congress independent from Great Britain, offered reasons for separation, and laid out the principles for which the Revolutionary War was fought. The signers included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Jefferson. The declaration begins (capitalization and punctuation are modernized):	The Declaration of Independence was not meant for the slaves that Thomas Jefferson owned. This is why Frederick Douglass, a well-known abolitionist who, evidently is not included in Hirsch’s cultural list, gave the following speech on the Fourth of July, 1852:
	“Fellow Citizens. Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? Why have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and material justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and to express devout gratitude for the blessings resuiting from your independence to us?
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
	“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brassfronted impotence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him more bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—with a thin veil to cover up which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is no nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival” (Zinn, 1990, p. 178).
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute one government, laying its foundations on such principles, and analyzing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
The day of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence is now commemorated as the Fourth of July, or Independence Day.

The juxtaposition of the texts above points to a pedagogy that enables readers to link the flux of information in order to gain a more critical reading of reality. Instead of just consuming Hirsch’s cultural list as facts, readers can rely on other points of reference so as to be able to think more critically, thus recognizing the falsehoods embedded in the various pedagogies created by the dominant class. By and large, dominant education utilizes poisonous pedagogy mechanisms to undermine independent thought, a prerequisite for the “manufacture of consent.” It is only through a pedagogy that manufactures consent that a society tolerates gross distortion of realities and the rewriting of history as exemplified in The History of the United States, by Robert J. Fields, which is used as a social sciences text in some of Boston’s public schools:

What the above text clearly demonstrates is how history is distorted not only by the presentation of false information but also by the omission of important facts that serve as a counterpoint of reference. For example, in the rewriting of the Vietnam War, Fields fails to account for the over one million Vietnamese who died in the war, not to mention the systematic killing of the elderly, women, and children, as evidenced in the My Lai massacre. Similar massacres were routine, as recalled by Sergeant James Daley: “ ‘When you come into an enemy village,’ we were told [by training instructors in the United States], ‘you come in opening fire. You kill everything that’s living—women, children, and animals’ ” (Gibson, 1988, p. 146). Daley’s account proves that the My Lai massacre was not an isolated incident. In fact, Shad Meshad, a psychologist who served in Vietnam, describes what he heard from soldiers: “They’d been on sweeps of villages, with orders to leaving nothing living, not even chickens and [water] buffaloes. Well, what the fuck did that mean, following orders like that? Wasn’t it Lieutenant Calley who created the stir in the first place? They were doing a Calley every day” (Gibson, 1988, p. 158).

The barbarism of our Western heritage civilization training proved to be lethal for the Vietnamese. Jeffrey Whitmore, a marine, describes another graphic slaughter:

Although the vicious acts of violence perpetuated against innocent Vietnamese women and children by our GIs are documented, no history books in school expose students to our crimes against humanity. Thus, it is not surprising that cultural legionnaires such as Hirsch choose to selectively monumentalize certain aspects of our Western heritage while neglecting to report on heinous crimes that Western civilization has committed throughout its history. A more honest account of our Western cultural heritage would not only monumentalize the great deeds in museums and great books but also look at Western civilization through a magnifying mirror so we could see the grotesque and barbaric images of the Western cultural heritage. In other words, historical truth and academic and intellectual honesty would demand that for each museum of fine arts we build in a given city, we should also build a museum of slavery, with graphic accounts of the dehumanization of African Americans, when entire families were split and sold to the highest bidder on the block, and with pictures of lynchings. For each museum of science built in a given city, we should also build a museum of the quasi-genocide of American Indians, their enslavement and the raping, and the expropriation of their land. We should also build a Vietnam museum alongside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in which graphic accounts of rape and killing of Vietnamese women by Western heritage trained GI’s would be described:

Although I had read a great deal about American GI atrocities in Vietnam, I was revulsed when reading the above, and I immediately called a friend of mine who served in Vietnam to certify if, in fact, such crimes had occurred. My friend, Herman Garcia, who is now a professor at the University of New Mexico at Las Cruces, recounted his experience in Vietnam in the following note:

The Vietnam museum would also show reenactments of the mass killings of children in the so called pacification operations and put human faces on disfigured children who are still suffering the aftermath of our spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange on Vietnam. It is not only Saddam Hussein who should be put on trial before an international tribunal for his use of chemicals (against the Kurds). Agent Orange and napalm did no less harm to the people of Vietnam, and their use constitutes no less of a crime, as graphically captured by a former soldier. “They’d be out on a mission and call in strikes. Napalm would be sprayed, and the people would be burning. Sometimes they’d put them out of their misery. The guys who did that are still coming into vet centers with it 12 years later” (Gibson, 1988, p. 146).

The presence of museums for slavery, Vietnam, and American Indian genocide alongside our museums of fine arts and science museums would create a pedagogical space that not only would keep dangerous historical memories alive but also would provide a pedagogical structure that juxtaposes historical events, providing a cultural collage to force us to look at the Western cultural heritage. The juxtaposition of historical events would also enable us to develop a more critical understanding of the often mystified received historical facts, allowing us to deconstruct these facts so as to understand the reasons behind them. These museums of crimes against humanity also would “remind us that when we embrace the Other, we not only meet ourselves, we embrace the marginal images that the modern world, optimistic and progressive as it has been, has shunned and has paid a price for forgetting” (Fuentes, 1992, p. 411).

These museums would perhaps prevent the modern world from ignoring the carnage and mass rape of women, including children as young as five years of age, in Bosnia. These museums could also serve to remind us that when we dehumanize the Other, we also dehumanize ourselves, as a Vietnam veteran succinctly points out: “When we came back after the mine sweep he [an old Vietnamese man about eighty years old] was outside his hootch. And all his relatives and friends were sitting around and crying and shit. And we laughed. And human beings don’t do things like that. But we stayed there and we fucking laughed until he died. So it turns you into some sort of fucking animal” (Gibson, 1988, p. 204). The museums, like Goya’s “black paintings” (Fuentes, 1992, p. 411) would serve as a constant reminder that we should always be vigilant in order to avoid complacency and the social construction of not seeing. Perhaps, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and E. D. Hirsch, among other Western cultural legionnaires, can learn a lesson from Carlos Fuentes’ insightful comments. If these critics honestly reflect on Fuentes’ insights, they will come to the realization that the real issue is not Western culture versus multiculturalism. The fundamental issue is the recognition of the humanity in us and in others:

5

Our Common Culture: A Poisonous Pedagogy

What All Americans Need to Know

References