An Evolved 21st Century

Although there is always a lot of lip service given to "critical thinking" as a supreme educational goal, regardless of the course, we are as academics and as a society are no less than disingenuous here. We for instance know that the illusions regarding individualism and personal choice have, with our present students, reached such extraordinary levels that the message of Ð'.....The Secret -- we can simply have to choose what we want and the whole universe will support that choice Ð'- is accepted as grounding Truth. Critical thinking cannot begin as long as students feel that their individual choices, though made in the world, can ignore the world without peril. There is not much need to pay close attention to, say, the upcoming 2008 presidential election if one really feels that who becomes president is irrelevant Ð'... because one's one individual decisions, and not the president's or the Congress's, are what matter. If a student enters your class holding that trump card Ð'- then regardless of what your subject is and what you say Ð'- they can choose to replace all that and all that with Ð'...what they choose. What does a person who pays scant attention to anything but his or her own choices have to offer the world that will assist us in, for example, critiquing the beginning, middle and possible end of our Iraq war? Not much I would think since firstly, what's outside the individual has in the end very little effect on "the self-designed" life so there's no inclination to pay any attention to it. If you survey the present crop of university students you will find very little interest in politics, for a variety of reasons, none of which are critically examined by those who spout them. Secondly, the self-absorbed individual is caught in a kind of navel gazing posture, a curve inward and back into itself. If that happens to a potted plant it eventually dries up and dies.

When I offer this image my students protest that they change, and that they change all the time. Change is a feature of the new 21st century technoculture. They change at the speed of a computer mouse or a TV remote or a cell phone. Whereas I, they offer, who don't even carry a cell phone on my person so that I can be "reached" day or night, am stuck in analogue time, in what's "so five seconds ago." I suggest the change they cite is not to be confused with the change produced by critical thinking. I suggest that a so-called post-industrial information/service hi tech endlessly consuming economy prizes constant and continual change as the absolute sine qua non of its existence. Being vulnerable and indeed molded by such marketing stimulation to change one's look, one's ride, one's kitchen and bathroom and so on is not the kind of change university education endorses. You might say that it critiques rather than endorses. Now I can go on suggesting until the cows come home but in the end the suggestion to be followed is one personally chosen.

If academics aren't challenging the ludicrous assumptions of individualism and personal choice it's because they are now the cornerstones of U.S. society, cornerstones the university in its "feeding" role is loathe to challenge. If the university's mission is seen to be one of feeding a growing economy with the workers it needs rather than, let us conjecture, critiquing various costs other than recorded by the Dow Jones, then there's not much urge to topple cornerstones, regardless of how they confound the intellectual history to which the university is supposedly lip-locked. The highly competitive global market needs "symbolic analysts" and "innovative thinkers" and "agents of change" and "economy growers" and more catalysts for miraculous change than you can find in a chem. lab. Call them "entrepreneurial thinkers," where thought is directed to "how to start a business," "how to grow the economy," "how to