Howard Zinn on Democratic Education
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Howard Zinn on Democratic Education

Howard Zinn, Donaldo Macedo

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Howard Zinn on Democratic Education

Howard Zinn, Donaldo Macedo

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About This Book

Perhaps no other historian has had a more profound and revolutionary impact on American education than Howard Zinn. This is the first book devoted to his views on education and its role in a democratic society. Howard Zinn on Democratic Education describes what is missing from school textbooks and in classrooms-and how we move beyond these deficiencies to improve student education. Critical skills of citizenship are insufficiently developed in schools, according to Zinn. Textbooks and curricula must be changed to transcend the recitation of received wisdom too common today in schools. In these respects, recent Bush Administration and educational policies of most previous US presidents have been on the wrong track in meeting educational needs. This book seeks to redefine national goals at a time when public debates over education have never been more polarised--nor higher in public visibility and contentious debate. Zinn's essays on education-many never before published--are framed in this book by a dialogue between Zinn and Donaldo Macedo, a distinguished critic of literacy and schooling, whose books with Paulo Freire, Noam Chomsky and other authors have received international acclaim.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317264446
Edition
1
1
APPARATUS OF LIES USA: INTRODUCTION
Donaldo Macedo
image
Why is President Bush going to war to bring freedom to Iraq and he is passing laws to take away freedom at home?
—Alejandro, nine years old
Howard Zinn on Democratic Education is an attempt to analyze a paradox that schools generally face. That is, while schools are charged with promoting a discourse of democracy, they often put structures in place that undermine the substantive democratic principles they claim to teach. As a result, schools are necessarily engaged in a pedagogy of lies that are shaped and supported by the interplay of the media, business interests, and the academic enterprise and, believe it or not, by organized labor as well. How else could one explain the overwhelming support that the Bush administration received in the United States to launch a fraudulent war on Iraq based on lies and deceptions?
It is shocking that a nine-year-old boy can see clearly through the obvious contradiction contained in the current discourse attempting to legitimize an illegal war on Iraq while the media and most Americans—who, by and large, have received higher levels of education—cannot see, for instance, how the Patriot Act that was overwhelmingly enacted by Congress aggressively undermines the Constitution, limiting guaranteed freedom of association and speech. In the name of “security,” most Americans have willingly accepted President Bush’s directive for neighbors to spy on neighbors, for citizens to lose protection from racial and ethnic profiling, and for citizens and noncitizens alike to be jailed without being charged with a crime and without the right to legal counsel. In fact, a piece published by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post cites “FBI and Justice Department investigators as saying that ‘traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans.’”1
The American propaganda apparatus systematically pointed to the denial of such constitutional guarantees in condemning the lack of freedom that citizens of totalitarian governments in the eastern bloc had to endure during the cold war years. Interestingly enough, during the height of the cold war, when these same rights were violated by government leaders who were considered our friends—such as Pinochet in Chile, Zamosa in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah in Iran, only to mention a few startling examples of human rights violators and brutal and despotic dictators—the doctrinal system effectively imposed the necessary ideological blinders that make it possible to selectively see or not see the obvious contradictions and lies. In Chile, for example, Henry Kissinger’s observation that “he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to ‘go Marxist’ merely because ‘its people are irresponsible’”2 was successfully turned into a policy designed to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende under the auspices of Edward Korry, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, via “a strategy of destabilization, kidnap and assassination, designed to provoke a military coup”3 that suspended all civil liberties and killed more than three thousand Chileans. Since Pinochet was our thug, platitudes about human rights and democracy that are being used against Iraq today did not apply to him.
On closer analysis, the obvious contradictions and lies in U.S. policy that appear to be incomprehensible at first glance make a lot of sense when you consider the role that schools traditionally have played as indoctrination sites where the higher the level of education received, the greater the inability, according to Noam Chomsky, to understand elementary thoughts that any ten-year-old can understand.4 For example, over 60 percent of college students believed that there was a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that provided a justification for the invasion of Iraq even though all kinds of evidence clearly shows that there was never a link between the two. In fact, the commission appointed to investigate the intelligence failure during the 9/11 attack concluded that there was no such linkage and that other countries, such as Pakistan, our current ally, provided more substantial and direct material to support al Qaeda. Even President Bush has had to disavow his earlier pronouncements concerning Saddam Hussein’s link with al Qaeda, although he continues to use language manipulation that, on the one hand, moves away from his initial categorical proposition that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and, on the other, reconstructs an association by proposing, instead of a link, a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda: “[T]he reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.”5 Following Adolph Hitler’s belief that “the great masses of people 
 will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one,”6 Vice President Cheney continues to disregard all the official evidence that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda by contending that the “evidence is overwhelming” of a “relationship.”7
Against an orchestrated bombardment of lies facilitated by a pliant media, one can understand, after critical reflection, why these same students and a very high percentage of Americans continue to blindly accept the administration’s initial lie, which is kept alive, periodically, by Vice President Cheney in his absolute, albeit false, contention that such linkage exists without providing a shred of evidence to support his claim. If not for a high level of indoctrination, these same students, along with the media and political pundits, would have to maintain some level of coherence and apply the same rationale they have used to justify the bombing, invasion, and occupation of Iraq by proposing to do the same to Pakistan since, according to the commission investigating the 9/11 attack, Pakistan supported al Qaeda for years.
Given the high level of indoctrination students receive in schools supported by media propaganda reminiscent of totalitarian socialist states, Howard Zinn states that he is “not surprised that 60 percent of college students would think something like the linkage between al Qaeda and Iraq is absolutely true, because they didn’t get anything in their education that would prepare them to look critically at what the government says, so they listen to the government say again and again and again that something is true or hint and suggest and make connections, and then when the president denies it in one statement, it’s not enough to penetrate what has already become a mountain of lies” (p. 54, this volume). This mountain of lies is part of the indoctrination process that imposes a willful blindness to evidence and contradictions.
These lies and contradictions are more readily embraced by the educated class to the degree that the more educated and specialized individuals become, the more interest they have invested in the system that provides them with special privileges and rewards. For this reason, we often see people whose consciousness has not been totally atrophied, yet they fail, sometimes willfully, to read reality critically and they often side with hypocrisy. In most cases, these individuals begin to believe the lies, and in their roles as functionaries of the state, they propagate these same lies. That is why, for example, according to Noam Chomsky, the majority of the educated class supported the war in Vietnam while it was being waged, whereas in 1982, according to a Gallup poll, over 70 percent of the general population said the Vietnam War was “fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake.”8 Characterizing the Vietnam War, as well as the atrocities committed by American GIs, as a mistake, as Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the war, has done, removes both responsibility and accountability from those who should be tried by the World Court for their horrendous crimes against humanity.
This represents yet another example that supports the contention that more education does not necessarily entail greater ability to read reality critically and accurately. The indoctrination that students receive in schools is acknowledged by the Trilateral Commission, whose members—among them former President Jimmy Carter—state that schools should be designed “for imposing obedience, for blocking the possibility of independent thought, and they play an institutional role in a system of control and coercion.”9 Given the indoctrinating mission of schools, we should join Howard Zinn’s sense of encouragement, optimism, and hope “that only 60 percent of college-educated people believe [the allegation of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein], since from what they get from the educational system, it should be 95 percent” (p. 54).
The “weapons of mass deception” used by the Bush administration to “manufacture consent” for the Iraq War gives credence to Hitler’s proposition that the effectiveness of any propaganda machine depends largely on big lies rather than small ones. It does not matter that no weapons of mass destruction were found; neither does it matter that Iraq did not possess “30,000 warheads, 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin”10 as the president claimed in his 2003 State of the Union Address. It does not matter that the illegal war on Iraq has already killed “approximately 11,000 to 15,000 Iraqis,” of which “between 3,200 to 4,300 were non-combatant civilians,”11 nor that, if necessary, we might carry out Sen. Trent Lott’s threat that “if we have to 
 we’ll just mow the whole place down, see what happens.”12 It does not matter that the war on Iraq has become an international travesty conducted in defiance of “a spectacular display of public morality [when] 10 million people on five continents marched against the war in Iraq.”13 What matters is that President Bush acts like a macho-man John Wayne–light who makes tough decisions and unilaterally dismisses the opinions of 10 million people worldwide because he’s tough enough not to base his policies on “focus groups.” What matters is that we support our troops while the Bush administration cuts billions of dollars in veteran benefits limiting access to health care and programs designed to aid troops’ reentry into civilian life. What matters is that we heed the jingoistic, chest-pounding patriotism of “bring ’em on” while the media become bona fide cheerleaders whipping the citizenry into a war frenzy to exact revenge for the cruel attacks on the World Trade Center that killed more than three thousand people.
As we rightly mourn and denounce the killing of innocent civilians in the World Trade Center, we must also recognize the pain of the families of more than three thousand Iraqis, innocent civilians, who have been the victims of our capricious and destructive missile attacks. These families’ pain does not diminish in the language manipulation that reduces the act of mass killing of civilians by our guided missiles to the euphemistic phrase collateral damage. Whether it is labeled a terrorist act when carried out by planes turned into missiles or an act of war when carried out by our guided missiles, the terror inflicted on civilians in both instances remains the same. For instance, in May 2003, a U.S. missile struck a wedding party in Iraq, killing forty-five family members. For the relatives who survived this cruel attack, these supposedly guided missiles are part of our fabricated high-tech war in Iraq, which is controlled by ever-increasing technological wizardry, ephemeral sound bites, metaphorical language, and prepackaged ideas void of substance. But rather than being mesmerized with “shock and awe” at the near-precision landing of our “smart bombs” during aseptic “surgical strikes,” these Iraqi civilians experienced the same kind of terror that in the United States is symbolized by the box-cutter-wielding terrorists who turned planes into deadly weapons. The jingoism and our need to exact revenge for the 9/11 attacks should not, however, blind us to the shameful fact that, according to Michael Berg, who lost his son in Iraq, “there are 11,000 plus Iraqi citizens that are dead and each one’s family is as affected as I was, but the American media doesn’t cover these people. It doesn’t cover the people who are suffering the most.”14
The inability to empathize with the sufferings of innocent civilian Iraqis who were also victims of terror gave rise to a jingoistic, post-9/11 national mourning that required politicians, the media, and citizens to use the American flag as blinders, preventing even the most liberal and well informed to give up the democratic right to question and instead to blindly support the newly coined proposition of a “war on terror.” As a result, after 9/11 not wrapping oneself in the flag constituted an unpatriotic act. If one were to argue that patriotism involves a lot more than a jingoistic display of waving the flag—that it is more patriotic to work to make the country more democratic, more just, less racist, and more humane—one would probably be accused of a lack of patriotism or even of being anti-American. If one would point to the vulgar commercialism of the flag after September 11, ranging from American flag thong underwear to condoms designed in red, white, and blue, one would also be charged with a lack of patriotism. If one pushed the envelope further and pointed out that the leaders of our country were hiding behind the flag to promote one of the largest shifts of wealth from the poor to the rich via tax cuts and corporate subsidies ($15 billion to the airline industry alone) while cutting services to the poor and elderly and sl...

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