jude folly

Two weeks into the Iranian voter protest against the questionable outcome of their presidential election, and right wing pundits continue to squeal and bray for President Obama to take urgent action in the name of ‘democracy’; the ‘will of Iranian’ people is at stake. Such goading presumes the president’s cheer leading and turning cartwheels would give Iran’s hardline leadership a moment’s pause.

No doubt, given the several handfuls of Persian protestors that have been slain, the hundreds that have been arrested and thousands that have endured a beat down by the police and the paramilitary thugs known as Basij - the situation conveys great peril now, as well as the likelihood of a catastrophic crackdown by the country’s ruling clerics.

Among other absurd accusations lobbed at President Obama, he’s criticized as lacking ‘moral fortitude’ or ‘moral clarity’ for the measured tone of his response to the abuse meted out to citizens participating in demonstrations; also the object of caricature, described as a ‘man of the hard left‘ - an apologist for the likes of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez - one who would prefer a ‘totalitarian Islamic regime’ over a ‘free Iranian society.’

If the pundits think they’ve scored any political points with their cheap shots at the president and dyslexic assessments of the situation in Iran, they’ve only betrayed an obscene (some might argue willful) ignorance of historical context and the sordid legacy of the United States’ relationship with Iran.

Typical of those who ignore the history of US covert intervention in the affairs of other countries, they would rather forget or dismiss what President Obama acknowledged in his Cairo speech to the Muslim world just weeks ago – that the United States played a role in the 1953 ousting of Iran’s parliamentary-appointed prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq.

I would argue that this act of meddling in the national affairs of Iran set the pace for a troubled and troubling relationship bewteen the two countries; a dialogue that most certainly became a face off after the 1979 Revolution created  a window for Islamic clerics to seize control of the country. Now, at a moment when the Iranian people have a chance to actively decide their nation’s political destiny – not just free from foreign manipulation but also unshackled by their leadership’s paralyzing suspicion of the West – wouldn’t it make sense to offer moral and diplomatic support, but mostly just sit this one out?

Lewis Lapham, former editor at Harper’s, serves as editor of a history-focused literary magazine called Lapham’s Quarterly. It publishes a collection of excerpted writings by the greats of literature, philosophy, art, politics and any other arena of renown. Each issue features texts gathered around a specific theme (e.g., States of War, About Money and Eros). Fall 2008′s theme, Ways of Learning, addresses education.

In a stunning preamble to that issue, Lapham presents an incisive, often devastating, critique of education in the United States. How fitting that he titles the piece ‘Playing with Fire,’ evidently inspired by a maxim tacked at the top of the essay, a quote credited to Plutarch:  ’The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.’

No less incendiary than that sentiment, Lapham delivers a far-reaching but nuanced analysis of the forces at work in the perpetual shortcomings of education. Taking a cue from the 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education, which cautioned that the the nation’s schools were flooded with ‘a rising tide of mediocrity,’ the author illustrates a broader cultural context to account for the said deluge of underachievement.

Two mistaken but often unquestioned assumptions at work in the demise of education are 1) the belief that education is a commodity and 2) that the humanitites are inconsequential. As Lapham discusses each assumption, I cannot help but marvel how each notion enables and provides cover for the other; working together they render a consensus thinking that the writer savages in the following statement: ‘If the kids know how to run the computers, work up the punch lines for Disney or Goldman Sachs, figure the exchange rates between the euro and the yen, what does it matter if they don’t know who won either the Revolutionary or the Civil War?’

If Thomas Jefferson were to have his say about what is taught in schools, he might reiterate his hope for a citizen prepared for the demands of self-government and encouraged ‘to judge for himself what would secure or endanger his freedom.’

Echoing Jefferson’s thinking toward the end of the essay, Lapham writes, ‘What makes men and women free is learning to trust their own thought, possess their own history, speak in their own voices.’ If conveying this kind of knowledge could not be co-opted, packaged and mass marketed for maximized profit, would there be any takers?