Howard Zinn - Howard Zinn on Democratic Education

HOWARD ZINN ON
DEMOCRATIC
EDUCATION

Series in Critical Narrative

Edited by Donaldo Macedo

University of Massachusetts Boston

Now in print

The Hegemony of English

by Donaldo Macedo, Bessie Dendrinos, and
Panayota Gounari (2003)

Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda

New Updated Edition
by Noam Chomsky (2004)

Pedogogy of Indignation

by Paulo Freire (2004)

Howard Zinn on Democratic Education

by Howard Zinn with Donaldo Macedo (2005)

Forthcoming in the series

Pedogogy of Dreaming

by Paulo Freire

The Globalization of Racism

edited by Donaldo Macedo and Panayota Gounari

Dear Paulo: Letters from Teachers

by Sonia Nieto

HOWARD ZINN ON
DEMOCRATIC
EDUCATION

HOWARD ZINN

WITH

DONALDO MACEDO

First published 2005 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zinn, Howard, 1922

Howard Zinn on democratic education / Howard Zinn with Donaldo Macedo.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-59451-054-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 1-59451-055-5 (pbk.:

alk. paper)

1. United StatesHistoryStudy and teaching. 2. United States

Politics and governmentStudy and teaching. 3. United StatesSocial conditionsStudy and teaching. 4. DemocracyStudy and teachingUnited States. 5. Politics and educationUnited States. 6. Education and stateUnited States. 7. Zinn, Howard, 1922- I. Macedo, Donaldo P. (Donaldo Pereira), 1950- II. Title.

E175.8.Z56 2004

973.931dc22

2004021697

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-054-0 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-055-7 (pbk)

CONTENTS

Donaldo Macedo

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

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 friendssuch 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 dictatorsthe 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 Kissingers observation that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to go Marxist merely because its people are irresponsible 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.

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 administrations 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 didnt 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, its 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. 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.