There was a big discussion about this on Guerilla News, and here's my contribution:
(You can listen to the 'rant' here)
"Uhh… why was he talking about Capitalism, Bush et al when he was supposed to be presenting a GEOGRAPHY class?"
Have you ever studied geography, even at high school level? I was taught three aspects of geography – Pyshical (how mountains are made, why volcanoes erupt, why plates shift etc), Political (the interaction between states, environmental effects of things such as war, pollution etc) and Economic (things such as the EU CAP program, ‘Develpoment’ Aid, why the IMF is the best thing since sliced bread etc).
I’d think a discourse on Bush, capitalism and war would fit right into such a class. But then, I live in Ireland, and that’s how our syllabus was (at least as of 1998 when I finished school).
I should point out though that what we were taught in economic geography was ‘capitalism good’, ‘imf good’, ‘eu good’ – never once did I hear a contrary opinion expressed. And I learned more, albeit in a skewed way, about contemporary politics from my geography class than I ever did in history class (history apparently ended in 1968 with the Prague Spring and Civil Rights Movements [USA & Northern Ireland] – funnily enough, no mention of the Paris uprising – though it did skip the 70’s & 80’s and come back with the fall of the Eastern Bloc).
And this horsehit about ‘both sides’ being presented – well we never had a Communist in class explaining why, say, they saw the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising as good thing, or any of the benefits they may have seen in the communist system. It was simply ‘communism was evil, carried out X, Y and Z, and be glad its gone’. We were never taught historiography – ie that there are different interpretations of history, not just of individually disputed events, but of historical development as a whole – needless to say, the first I ever heard about say Marxist or Whig Historiography was in University. As far as we were concerned, there was only one history and that’s what was in our textbooks.
In religion calss we were never given the atheist argument (this being Catholic Ireland) and I’m kinda proud to say that however apolitical I was in school, I was the ‘class atheist’ – and reprimanded several times for ‘distrubiting propaganda’.
Our art class was totally stripped of political context – we managed to study Warhol without once (as I recall) hearing the words commercialism or consumerism. Warhol made his images ‘just because’. We learned about Picassco without once learning that he was a PCF member and that his involvement with revolutionary politics probably played a role in his radical (in an artistic sense) works. And so on.
From my experince, it’s bunkum that ‘both sides’ [or even more than one side, that side being pro-status quo] are presented in schools, either in Ireland or the US or anywhere else. And no, having a democrat and a republican come in to explain their interpretation of say the State of the Union does not count as ‘diversity’, no more than does a Fianna Failer and Fine Gaeler coming in to give their opinions on the EU.
[Later...]
Having listened to the entire thing, I can’t really see any problem with the content of what he has said (maybe there are some small historical inaccuracies, one I noticed was he implied that the US set up Israel, it was the British – though maybe he meant ‘Western Imperialism’ – but certainly his comments about Israel’s place in US policymakers hearts rings true after ‘67) – his tone could rightly be criticised as ‘in you face’, but he engages the student who asks questions about 9-11, says “you gotta figure this stuff out for yourself, I want you think about these things”. He never tells the student to shut up, makes the point that ‘it depends on perspectives’, and repeatedly encourages them to think for themselves.
In regard to Cuba – You’ll get no argument from me that the Castro regime has carried out human rights abuses over the years – but suggesting that the CIA terrorist war against Cuba was motivated by concern for human rights is absurd. What the guy says is correct, it was an attempt to bring down the Cuban economic system, nothing else. This cannot seriously be disputed except by ideologues – these CIAers and if there are indeed ‘independent’ anti-communist crusaders, could care less about human rights – a fact proven by the terrorist war against the people they carried out over the years.
But its funny that Anthony says, as a criticism: ”[The student] reads about Castro’s human rights abuses and that maybe the situation wasn’t as black and white as his teacher made it seem, he’ll question the rest of rant.”
Isn’t that what we want? A critical perspective. So a student questions the rest of the ‘rant’, comes back the next day with questions and poses them. Dialogue is created, people are free to agree, disagree, or have independent thoughts of both sides. But I find it highly unlikely that even 10th Graders in the USA are not fed anti-Castroite propaganda (remember propaganda can be truthful, the best propaganda is always truthful) in history class when studying the Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs (and if they are not taught about these things then that’s a serious flaw in the cirriculum). Like I said above, what we were taught about Communism, in the Eastern Bloc, China and Cuba was entirely negative – I find it hard to believe that the US cirriculum is radically different in that respect.
And his definition of capitalism, which he says came from the dictionary, is pretty much spot on:
From dictionary.com – Capitalism: An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
His opinion that capitalism and caring are at odds with each other is of course open to debate – one would presume the percieved benefits of capitalism are extolled in Economics class. (I’ll bet there is no counterpoint to the ‘capitalism=freedom’ argument in that class).