Guided by school systems that are themselves bound to traditional ideas and conclusions about human life, students continue to be taught what to think, rather than how to think. This reality is in large part due to the fact that the alternative to this endless recycling would require a significant sacrifice by the adults, parents, and powers that be. It would be nothing less than the renunciation of the quest for an illusory feeling of security that comes from "being right".
For many people whose self-concepts are highly reified and built on shaky foundations, such a quantum leap - in terms of mature functioning - would represent a significant emotional and cognitive loss indeed. In most school systems a commitment to move in this direction would mean a radical revision of school curricula and educational methodology. Instead of merely giving knowledge -- in terms of facts, figures and social fictions that are deemed important -- such a curriculum would focus on asking (sometimes radical) questions and discovery, rather than being limited to instruction and memory.
A 2017 Pew Research Survey is titled U.S. students' academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries. When it comes to math, U.S. high school students are falling further behind their international counterparts, according to results released Tuesday of an ongoing study that compares academic achievement in 73 countries. And the news is not much better in reading and science literacy, where U.S. high schoolers have not gained any ground and continue to trail students in a slew of developed countries around the globe.
"One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science."
John Goodlat, author of A Place Called School has shared observations that schools seemed to be moving in the direction of more rigidity and less openness, more militarism and less creativity. School reform, he noted, begins to look like "reform school."
Philip Slater's focus clarifies a related dimension:
"But there is a hidden agenda in the return to basics. What characterizes "basics" is that they are fixed and arbitrary. The student is told how to write, spell, add and subtract. There is very little room of discovery, for putting together old facts in new ways. Authoritarian(s) at the top of social pyramids sense intuitively that an ignorant population is more likely to be an obedient one. Yet children learn by doing. [With guidance,] this is how we learn to walk and talk, to ride a bike, and drive a car. But in a large authoritarian classroom there is very little room for doing, only for remote repetitions and application of unanalyzed principles and formulas. This is good preparation for living in an authoritarian society, but not in a democratic one."
Slater emphasizes the obvious: that democracy depends on informed and questioning minds - on actively engaged people, rather than passively receptive ones. Yet, more often than not, the importance of "obedience" continues to remain unquestioned. Many young people continue to be expected, both at home and at school, to do what others tell them to do, because they are (after all) only children. However, obedience frequently involves accepting and believing lies, not asking obvious questions, not saying what one wants, not showing emotions in the moments when they are felt, not demanding one's rights, smiling when unhappy and generally not making waves. Is it surprising that, after years of obedience training, we continue to elect politicians that clear vision would immediately reveal are deceptive and obviously have little interest in the truth of things?
The alternative to an "authoritarian preparatory school" is a situation where students will be empowered to draw to draw their own conclusions, "to think for themselves," rather than merely coming to the conclusions of their elders. And here finally, lies a pivotal question: Do we, the adults, want our society to grow, evolve and mature, or do we want to continue to hear that we are - and have always been - right?
Slater places his ideas within the context of what perceives sees as a global shift from an authoritarian to a democratic "mega-culture." By mega-culture, he refers to a core of attitudes, practices, and beliefs shared by a wide range of different cultures in many parts of the world. While democracy is emerging as the dominant mega-culture, remnants of the old one still permeate our psyches, Slater suggests that , "the agonies and upheavals of our time result from our efforts to move into a new era while still toting a huge load of emotional and intellectual baggage from the old one."
In A Dream Deferred Slater demonstrates how this shift is being played out in politics, business, education, science, religion, popular culture, and relations between men and women. In each of these areas, Slater shows how traditional systems are proving too rigid and inefficient to cope with the continuous change that characterizes modern life. He also shows how many of our responses to current social and political issues are rooted in an old authoritarian mindset, which perceives radical innovation as a social ill.
However, notwithstanding of his legacy of destruction, there is another key factor in Trump's continued support. It is evident that for a great many Trump supporters the connection with their leader is not rational but emotional.
Sandor Ferenczi was a contemporary and student of Freud, but he broke with his mentor in significant ways. Most importantly, Ferenczi believed that the accounts of childhood sexual abuse that were reported by so many female patients were true, whereas Freud famously pulled back from his original formulation and opted to consider these fantasies. This in turn led Ferenczi to think about how people react when they find themselves in situations where they are confronted by overwhelming forces they cannot control. Although he focused primarily on parent-child relationships, others following him have suggested that the dynamic he identified identification with the aggressorcan apply on a broader scale.
Ferenczi argued that a child who is raised by a threatening, bullying, or abusive parent may attempt to survive in that relationship by "identifying" with the aggressive, dominating parent. That identification, ironically, becomes a source of safety. It is possible to fear an abuser so much that we may end up imitating or justifying the form of intimidation or violence by which we were victimized.
Psychoanalyst Anna Freud described a phenomenon in which the aggression in question is taken in (identified with). All too often the cycle of abuse is repeated as a survivor of abuse becomes an aggressor and repeats the cycle of trauma, enacting it on another.
Donald Trump represents the kind of dominant figure that masses can choose to identify with as a solution to their shared vulnerability, anxiety, rage and helplessness.
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