> doubtless the answers to these questions were to be had in seattle this
> past week. Sorry to have missed it.
> mike
>
There were answers to some things in Seattle last week, mike.
At the session dedicated to the book, "Schooling in Capitalist America",
that he co-authored 25 years ago, Samuel Bowles, tall, grey-haired,
bespectacled, and bearing the unmistakeable air of successful
self-assuredness, put his first transparency on the overhead projector:
Photographs of two young men, one with sandy brown hair, bright eyes, and an
open smile --perhaps you saw this guy at a Love-In recently--, the other
with dark hair, tightly pursed lips framed with a cynical countenance and
dark eyes, almost Dylanesque in his dourness -- perhaps you saw him among a
group of demonstrators blocking the doors of the induction center not so
long ago. "As you can see," professor Bowles said referring to these
pictures of himself and his co-author Herbert Gintis taken from the
dust-jacket their book, "not much has changed in 25 years." Well maybe.
It's easy to mock oneself when one is affluent, successful. But yes, as
Bowles and Gintis pointed out back then: you can't reform the society
through reforming the schools -- let alone after school programs -- since
the schools reproduce the conditions of production of the economy onn which
the society is based. And for this there was plenty of evidence given in a
variety of venues.
Next Bowles put up the second transparency, two pages, side by side, pages
from the book. The last page of the text, the first page of the Appendix.
On the last page he pointed to the following statement: "The people of the
United States do not need a doctor for the moribund capitalist order; we
need an undertaker." On the first page of the Appendix he pointed to an
algebraic micro-economic formula for correcting correlation coefficients.
He raised the question as to why one would find these two together.
Perhaps he should have pointed out that he had held his position all these
years not because of what he wrote about burying capitalism but because he
could manipulate the formulas of its functioning.
Just blocks away from the Sheraton Seattle and the Convention Center, closer
down to Pike Street fish Market, the streets get meaner. AERA is
relatively casual, but chic casual and definitely CLEAN, not so 4 blocks
from there after 6:00 pm. Nobody calls dirty clothes casual.
Maybe, if there were answers in Seattle as to why nothing has changed, they
weren't given last week but several months ago when the Nike store across
the street from the Sheraton got trashed -- at least that would seem to be
consistent with Bowles conclusion 25 years ago. Now I know one reason why
Starbucks Coffee got hit so hard: they have one every block at least; if
anything got thrown, it would be hard to miss one, even without correcting
correlation coefficients. But certainly Nike and Starbucks have profited
from the existence marketing staff who know how to use corrrected
correlation coefficients.
How long ago was it that John Lennon sang "Everybody's dropping out,
everybody's dropping out, everybody's going back, everybody's going back" --
oh yeah, 1968 -- and we all became walruses and eggmen while middle class
women and some fraction of ethnic minorities climbed a little higher on
Mammon mountain (thereby making the desire to climb on that mountain all the
stronger for everyone else, all the while fostering the illusion that there
was going to be some way to bury the mountain while standing on top ot it!
Concerning burying mountains see the parable of the man who wanted to move
the mountain at the end of Mao's little red book.) What ever happened to
the word "co-optation"? What could anyone be co-opted from anymore?
And the badges, the eyes reading the badges, reading not the names but the
institutions of affiliations. How high are you on the mountain? Some
mountain! with all its valleys and nooks and dells, so big that people on
it don't even have a good idea of how many, or what nationality, or belief
systems characterize most of the other people living on it! Lot's of
answers but just one mountain.
So yes, mike, people were providing answers in Seattle. but probably not
directly to the bigger questions that nate and helena and others have
raised, although, in spite of all the words that were exchanged there one
could see one of the reasons that "nothing has changed".
Paul H. Dillon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 01 2001 - 01:01:50 PDT