Excerpt
May 09, 2011
There are many good things to do, and many useful kinds of education--the ``great books'' are hardly the only road to heaven. But could minority students possibly be harmed by understanding the ideologies that initially formed American society? How could such students be undermined by learning what the ruling intellectual powers had constituted as a civil society, as rights, as a self, as suffering, as knowledge, as pleasure? If that was truly the ``hegemonic discourse,'' why not learn it, use it, and transform it? After all, the courses did not stand alone; they were mixed with many other books and approaches and a complex play of influences and pressures. Whatever the students did with their minds and souls, what courses they took, how they construed their identify as African-Americans, or Asian-Americans, would emerge from the conflict of desire and influence, personality and pressure. The courses did not impose an identity. And if the students did rebel against the Western tradition, they would not be the first students educated in that tradition who learned to criticize it. The leading black intellectuals in America had absorbed the Western classics as well as African-American literature and African culture. Malcolm X had read everything in prison, Nietzsche and Moll as well as the Koran and Confucius, and virtually the entire academic left had been trained on the Western classics, an indoctrination in the ``hegemonic discourse'' that obviously did little to prevent them from arriving at their adversary position--if, indeed, it were not the reason they arrived there at all. This fact alone should tell us perhaps the most important thing about the Western tradition: It opens almost any door that people choose to push on.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
