Culture vultures prey on the cretins of cool

COOL is the cult of cretinism; so it is unsurprising that it is also auto-destructive. This became evident last week, when it was revealed that schoolchildren in Scotland are refusing to wear reflective clothing, as a road safety measure, because 88% of them think that high-visibility clothing "does not look cool in front of friends".

This is the Darwinian theory of natural selection operating at first hand. Until very recently, hedgehogs thought it uncool to scurry across motorways. Now, according to zoologists, their sense of self-preservation has reprogrammed them either to avoid crossing roads or to travel as quickly as possible when they do so, with the result that their numbers are once more on the increase.

Considering that hedgehogs are more intelligent than the average comprehensive pupil, it seems likely that many of the most sullen and self-absorbed elements of our youth culture are about to be culled, victims of their devotion to the cult of ‘cool’.

The parallel cult of youth is one of the most destructive hypocrisies of our age. The Great Charlatan has even proposed a youth council, in which the most brain-dead generation since Palæolithic times would be asked for its infantile views on public policy. If the potential members could read, write or identify Britain on a map of the world, their opinions might be more valuable.

Politicians’ courting of the ‘youth vote’ is an absurdity. Few young people trouble to vote. For that we should be grateful, since the young are profoundly ignorant. In any case, the demographic trend is in favour of senior citizens. Grey power is the new reality: the future lies not with Darius, but with Victor Meldrew.

The ghetto into which the younger generation has now retreated is the cult of cool - a social stockade ring-fencing the chronically insecure. Its roots are American: the children of the welfare state have looked to the most materially successful civilisation in the history of mankind and have selected its losers as role models. ‘Cool’ has its roots in ghetto culture, viewing the world through the indispensable ‘shades’ that mask social inadequacy.

In America, the potential for this negative world view both to diminish domestic culture and poison the rest of the world has become a focus of academic debate. In his book Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, Benjamin R Barber, of the University of Maryland, protests against the tendency of the United States to export the worst of its culture.

‘This is the first generation in Europe without any concept of an after-life’

Shorn of its Whiggish liberal élitism and a degree of First World cultural cringe, Barber’s mea culpa and his plea for a return to good taste has some validity. An assault on his views by Charles Paul Freund, a free-marketeer, reinforces Barber’s thesis by its implausibility: "The opportunity to create and revise one’s identity is by its nature an anti-authoritarian enterprise, and that is nowhere more obviously demonstrated than in the reviled Western cult of ‘cool’. Successful culture industries don’t try to manipulate their customers..."

Qué? Is Mr Freund serious? The social history of the past half century is a chronicle of public taste refashioned - and debased - by culture industries. Popular music, television and the cinema are only the first examples that spring to mind.

Future historians will ask whether a society that anguished over the imposition of ever more absurd politically correct terminology might not have been better employed in curbing some of the excesses of the rock music industry. Just as the musicians’ lyrics are violent, obscene and self-pitying, so is the generation that supports their opulent lifestyle.

The nastiness of ‘cool’ has a significance beyond economics. This is the first generation born in western Europe without any concept of an after-life. The mediæval peasant, however lowly, believed that he had the spiritual potential to enjoy the beatific vision for an eternity that would dwarf the transient woes of earthly existence.

Regardless of whether that belief, in objective terms, was true or false, that was his self-perception and it conferred on him a tremendous dignity. In today’s society, where people have been taught to regard themselves as just the highest order of animal, it is hardly surprising if animal behaviour is the consequence.

Family life has largely been destroyed. Yet, so far from being alarmed by this unprecedented social phenomenon, the liberal élite responds with hysterical hostility to the most modest attempts to reinstate it.

"Wait till your father gets home!" is not a viable sanction for single mums on sink council estates. It would be a very long wait, involving DNA tests on multiple candidates. Many women today, we are assured by feminist commentators, are choosing not to get married. Choosing? For the tower-block singles, there was never the remotest opportunity to marry. What man, in their peer group, would consider it?

Coolness is just a modern term for selfishness. Like a bad apple, it has spread through the whole barrel. Young people of every social class are morally dysfunctional. Our ‘inclusive’ society deplores divisions of race, sex or creed, but has dug a chasm between generations. Cool is the encroaching glacier of a spiritual ice age.

My views changed fairly dramatically when I became a father. It was only then that I realized the central truth of American culture: Greedy, morally bankrupt executives of our media/music/tv/movie industries are burning the midnight oil trying to market garbage to my kids for no other purpose than to make money.

It all started with Elvis' hips. That was when the industry execs realized that they could exploit the immaturity and natural rebelliousness of youths by marketing sleaze. Notoriety, rather than talent, became the path to riches.

Can Brittney Spears read music? Can Tupac? Can Marilyn Manson? Probably not. But they still make a bundle because they aren't selling talent, they are marketing notoriety.

The problem is, in order to keep this thing going, you have to constantly engage in "one-upmanship" Nobody would pay attention today if a musician swung his hips like Elvis of the '50s. Like heroine, each hit has to be bigger than the previous one in order to get the same effect.

The result is a race to the bottom, with compex marketing schemes revolving around what sort of dysfunction can be sold to kids in order to get them to part with their too-high disposable income.

And it shows no signs of abating. Every time I think that they've hit bottom, they manage to go lower (did anyone see this year's MTV Music Video Awards?).

As I see it, the only way to solve this problem is to hold the execs personally responsible.

If this fails, perhaps we should gut the intellectual property laws for music, tv, and movies....thus destroying the industry. My children are more important to me than Sumner Redstone's bottom line.

Check out this article by Diane Ravitch. She explains why we have the "culture" we have today.

Excerpts Taken from Diane Ravitch's -- Education After the Culture Wars"

by Donna Garner

October 20, 2002
Diane Ravitch has served as the Assistant Secretary of Education, is presently a research professor at New York University, and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Ravitch has written one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read called "Education After the Culture Wars" (http://daedalus.amacad.org/issues/summer2002/ravitch.pdf).

(I have taken only a few excerpts from Ms. Ravitch's article. The reader is encouraged to read the entire article as posted at the above website.)

Every citizen of the United States who cares about the future of our country needs to read this article. Every parent, grandparent, policymaker, voter, taxpayer, politician, educator, or young person needs to know what material is being put in students' textbooks, in states' standards, and on standardized tests -- and why.

It is important for parents to remember that even if your child is being educated in a public school in a small town in middle America where you think you don't have to worry about the concerns presented by Ms. Ravitch in her article, your child is still reading the same secular textbooks put out by the major textbook publishers, he is still being taught the same public school-state standards, and he is still taking the same standardized tests as other children throughout America.

Ravitch states, "For how, in a society as varied and rapidly changing as our own, can a common culture survive without a clear commitment to broadly shared standards for the teaching of literature and history? And absent any such shared culture, how can we communicate across lines of race, religion, ethnicity, and social class in order to forge common purposes?"

In describing her experiences reviewing fourth-grade reading passages for inclusion in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Ravitch explains, "After I had read about a dozen such passages...I realized that the readings themselves had a cumulative subtext: the hero was never a white boy. Instead, the leading character -- the one who was most competent, successful, and sympathetic -- was invariably either a girl (of any race) or a nonwhite boy. Almost without exception, white boys were portrayed as weak and dependent."

"A passage from a well-known fable was also edited to remove the moral of the story. The original had ended with the conclusion that 'God helps those who help themselves.' To avoid any reference to a deity, the editors had replaced this phrase with the advice that 'People should try to work things out for themselves whenever possible.' "

"When I asked why so few reading passages were drawn from classic children's literature, the publisher [Riverside Publishing] explained that it was a well-accepted principle in educational publishing that everything written before 1970 was rife with racism and sexism. Only stories written after that date...were likely to have acceptable language and appropriate multicultural sensitivity."

"If the Riverside guidelines [Bias and Sensitivity Guidelines in Testing] seem incredible, bear in mind that these rules typify the guidelines used today by most major American publishers of educational materials."

"The worst aspect of all of these guidelines is that strict application of them entails the exclusion of classic literature from reading textbooks. Neither the Riverside nor the Macmillan-McGraw Hill nor the Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley guidelines require that a certain proportion of textbooks be set aside for classic literature."

"Only the blandest, least controversial, and ultimately least interesting passages can pass through such a fine filter. The only authors likely to pass muster consistently are those who have been commissioned to write, to order, for the tests and textbooks. This is an awfully weak foundation upon which to build a curriculum. How can we transmit our culture to the younger generation if we teach only what was written in the past dozen or so years? Is the culture created prior to 1970 so corrupt that it should be locked away and forgotten? Should we allow our cultural heritage to be hijacked by a handful of self-righteous pedagogical censors?"

"That helps to explain why so many American children now arrive in college without ever having read anything by writers such as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, W. E. B. DuBois, Jack London, Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, George Orwell, or Charles Dickens. Insofar as such writers flunk the tests laid out by textbook publishers, they risk slipping quietly out of circulation."

"By ensuring that students never read anything that might possibly offend them, current textbook guidelines reinforce a sugarcoated and narcissistic view of culture, as if books and poems and historical narratives were ephemeral commodities -- meant mainly to make us all feel better about ourselves."

"Over the past decade, every state but Iowa has written new academic standards...The standards are particularly important as a guide to assessment: a state cannot ask questions on standardized tests about topics that were not specifically included in the state standards...It is noteworthy that these standards [New Jersey] do not refer to any particular events or issues or time periods. They sound impressively comprehensive. But they are so vague that they cannot be tested and should not be considered a 'standard.' "

"At present, no state identifies any specific work of literature that students should have read at any grade level [including Texas]."

"Writing in a recent issue of 'The American Educator,' a college professor acidly described a class of incoming freshmen. Most of them assume that 'all theories and opinions are of equal value, as are all readings of works of fiction -- regardless of the facts of the case.' Students often told him, "My high-school teacher told me that a poem can mean anything I want it to mean." Unable to imagine the concerns of other people living in other times, these students have been taught instead to express invariably their own concerns when confronted with any given cultural artifact: 'whether the text is the Bible, Shakespeare, or Toni Morrison, students read only themselves over and over, with the predictable results that the greater their ignorance the higher their self-esteem.' "

Ravitch goes on to say, "Can we sustain a healthy civic culture when so few students (or adults) understand the evolution of our political democracy? Can we preserve a common culture when many high-school and even college graduates know little or nothing about our nation's history and its literary heritage? ...If we do not teach our children history, Walt Disney and Oliver Stone will do it for us."

"When the school day is done, they [students] will turn to the videos and music that feed them eroticized violence and surround them with language that knows no constraints...Schools cannot beat the entertainment industry at its own game. What they have to offer students is the chance for intellectual freedom, the power to think for themselves rather than the incentive to gorge themselves on the media's steady diet of junk food."

The article concludes with Ravitch giving some very positive steps which the public can take to counter this unhealthy trend in education.

If all else fails and you cannot seem to change the direction of your child's classroom, may I suggest you do one of the following: Find a private school for your child where the textbooks and curriculum do not have to adhere to state standards, home school your child yourself, or supplement your child's education through some other alternative means.

We as parents often acknowledge how quickly our children grow up, and the reality is that children only come this way once in their lives. If we as parents miss the chance to influence our children's lives at this age, we will probably never have that same chance in the future.

Diane Ravitch's newest book called The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn is to be published in May 2003.

(Please make note of new e-mail address as of 8/9/02.)
Donna Garner
wgarner1@hot.rr.com
FREE ENGLISH / LANGUAGE ARTS / READING STANDARDS DOCUMENT (PRE-K -- GRADE 12)
http://www.EducationNews.org/new_home_for_the_texas_alternati.htm
FREE GRAMMAR PACKETS
http://www.readbygrade3.com/cvrltr.html

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