The Rouge Forum News
Working Papers, Critical Analysis, and Grassroots News
Issue #15
fall/winter 2009/2010
www.rougeforum.
From Travis J. Barrett – Thesis: Dissidence and Institutionalized Oppression: A Counter-hegemonic Response
John Taylor Gatto similarly asserts, “Intellectual
training is not the purpose of state schooling - obedience and subordination are” (1995, p.?).
Jimi Hendrix once said, “when the power of love overcomes
the love of power, the world will know peace.” The world is not in a state of peace. But if the
love of power, and its subsequent possession are the reasons we don’t know peace, then we can
question; who is so in love with this form of power, who has power, and to what ends is power
used?
In the Introduction to Paulo
Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaull also puts forth, “There is no such thing as a
neutral educational process. Education . . . functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate
the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about
conformity to it . . .” (Freire, 1970, p.34).
Perhaps to those who have “confuse[d] freedom with the maintenance of the status quo; so that if
conscientização threatens to place that status quo in question, it thereby seems to constitute a
threat to freedom itself” (Freire, 1970, p.36).
As soon as you do history you are confronted with the fact that you are selecting out
of an infinite amount of data a certain amount of data, certain pieces of data, to
include. And you make that selection according to your point of view, so that every
historian and every work of history has a point of view. So doing history is all a
matter of selection and deciding what is important; and you decide what is
important, really, on the basis of your present concerns (Zinn, Macedo, 2005, p. 71).
In A People’s History of the United States, 1492-present, Howard Zinn problematizes the onesided
education most of us have received about Columbus. He does this by looking at the work of
distinguished Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. In Morison’s popular book Christopher
Columbus: Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and killings of Native
Americans. Morison writes, “the cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his
successors resulted in complete genocide,” to which Zinn replies, “That is on one page, buried
halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book’s last paragraph, Morison sums up his
view of Columbus”:
32 Rouge Forum News, Issue 15, fall/winter 2009/2010
He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities
that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and his mission
as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite
neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the
most outstanding and essential of all his qualities—his seamanship (Zinn, 2005,
p.7-8).
Are we to surmise his superior seamanship trumps the fact that the policy he initiated resulted
in complete genocide?
What every American needs to know:
“Give me liberty or give me death”—words from a speech by Patrick Henry urging
the American colonies to revolt against England. Henry spoke only a few weeks
before the Revolutionary War began, he said: “Gentleman may cry peace, peace, but
there is no peace. The war is actually begun. The next gale that sweeps from the
North will ring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethren are already
in the field . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may
take, but for me, give me liberty or give me death”
What Americans are not allowed to know:
Patrick Henry’s words were never meant for African Slaves or American Indians.
African Americans and American Indians continued throughout the history of the
United States to experience subjugation, leading Malcolm X to pronounce in 1964
33 Rouge Forum News, Issue 15, fall/winter 2009/2010
the following: “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of 22 million black people who are
the victims of Americanism . . . One of the . . . Victims of Democracy, nothing but
disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a
patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I! I’m speaking as a victim of this
American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any
American Dream; I see an American nightmare” (pp. 70-71).
It hasn’t been Congress or the President or the Supreme Court who has initiated
acts to remedy racial inequality or economic injustice, or to do something about the
government going to war. It’s always taken the actions of citizens and actions of
civil disobedience to bring these issues to national attention and finally force the
President, Congress, and the Supreme Court to begin to move” (Zinn, Macedo, 2005,
p. 132).
Educational Policy as a System of Control
Along with History and language, the standardization of curriculum and state and national
assessments across all content areas have further served to rob our students of their ability to
think critically. High stakes testing and teacher accountability have ensured that teachers will
not focus on individual student needs, rather they will focus on teaching to the test. Effectively,
No Child Left Behind has crippled teachers and reduced them to mere technicists in the
classroom. Indeed, as Paulo Freire states in the forward to Donaldo Macedo’s Literacies of
Power, “The educational pragmatism embraces a technical training without political analysis,
because such analyses upset the smoothness of educational technicism. Simply put, we are
witnessing the assertion of an educational technicism that urges us not to burden students with
political thoughts and to leave them alone so that they can best focus on their technical training”
(Macedo, 2006, p. x).
Zinn warns, however, that intellectual dissidence is not sufficient:
Well, the chief problem is that if intellectuals who do have a radical vision of this
society, and who even present that vision in the educational system in their
teaching through the books they assign or what they say in their lectures, are not at
the same time involved in the world outside, in the real social struggles that go on—
if the classroom remains a sealed, intellectual entity—then they are teaching their
students that this classroom radicalism is sufficient. They’re teaching their
students to be content with being intellectually dissident and then, maybe, to
become teachers who will perpetuate the role of the intellectual dissident but
without venturing into the world outside (2005, p.64).
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