Comments

1
Agreed!
2
Charles,
Whew! You and West lost me partner. I'll just say that education is important for any community. And that it is a continuum. One must always learn.
3
Woah, hold up Charles. West is a huge advocate of education, and he's not pointing towards some sentimental "true self". I think the reality that he's pointing us towards is the material/existential reality of human suffering, inequality, etc

The problem is West's arguments dont lend themselves to twitter formats. He's good with a cutesy pull quote but usually those pull quotes are modifying a larger argument.

He answered a similar way when i asked him a question about whether the lack of theological education among the evangelical laity --their tendency to read CS Lewis and not, say, Karl Barth--was responsible for their affinity for economic brutality etc--and he noted that there were plenty of accomplished theological scholars who still lacked any real human compassion etc--and then he went on to say we should be reading Neibuhr, Tillich, James Cone, early Mary Daly, Serene Jones etc.
4
I don't understand the context of "if you're still on the surface". Is West dissing the Eloi?
5
West is in that realm now where he can occasionally sustain his profile by saying shit that makes some people think but mostly just makes people feel like they're thinking.

Without more info I can't figure out what the fuck he's talking about here. It definitely sounds magical but I'm not finding it very helpful.

Do we need to go deeper? Isn't that dangerous? What if we miss the kick and get stuck? I don't want to go crazy.
6
is keck putting you up to this, charles? are page hits down or something?
7
Being educated has nothing to do with being a better person, and is often unrelated to real learning.

Some of the kindest, happiest, cleverest, and most independent individuals in the world would fail a 4th grade geography or science test, while many of the most evil deeds imaginable, resulting in the deaths of tens and hundreds of thousands, have been committed by people with PhD after their name.
8
@3 FTW
9
Dr. Cornel West is the preeminent African American scholar of our times. Charles Mudede, not so much.
10
Yeah, but it won't get you a job.
11
Funny that West is too abstruse, (and wrong), but you use the ultimate PoMo reference with the Derridian "always already." Derrida makes West seem an amateur obfuscater.
12
many of the most evil deeds imaginable, resulting in the deaths of tens and hundreds of thousands, have been committed by people with PhD after their name.


Huh?
13
@12

Dr. Henry Kissinger
Dr. Condoleezza Rice
Dr. Josef Mengele
14
@12

The African political leader who has done the most for eduction in his country -- bringing literacy up to 90%, the highest level on the continent -- earned six degrees, including a Master of Science and and Master Laws, and was later awarded roughly a dozen honorary doctorates.

His name is Robert Mugabe.

I'm sure this is rarely far from the thoughts of our esteemed Mr. Mudede, whose father served at one time as an economic advisor to President Mugabe.
15
Thank you, robotslave.

"The better the education, the better you are," is as childishly and objectively untrue as "You can be anything you want to be!"
16
Thanks, LJM, but I'm getting the sense that you may have missed Charles' point.

At a minimum, I'd suggest interpreting both instances of the word "better" in that statement as implying exactly the same value scales.

The quotes around "All the education in the world" might make one pause and consider different meanings for the phrase; the link Charles provides isn't random, either...

Mudede's complaint with Dr. West is not a naive equation of more education with an elevated morality, but rather an objection to the idea that one can choose to sidestep one's education at any time via reference to an essential or "true" inner self that remains constant and untouched by that education.
17
You can have all the schooling in the world, but if you don't learn critical thinking, you're not really educated.
18
I think it's telling that when I saw this in my Google Reader feeds earlier today, I thought it was a P.Z. Myers post.
19
Just as a side note, if any of you do decide to watch The Boys of Baraka and have never seen it before, make sure you have about a dozen boxes of Kleenex at the ready. Quite possibly one of the most depressing documentaries you will ever see.
20
robotslave, I think my confusion is centered around the word, "education." It seems to mean different things to different people while occurring in a variety of conflicting situations.

But thanks for making me think a little more about it.

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