To think is already to doubt
The ayatollahs know what threatens them, bless their little hearts.
Ayatollah Khamenei said this week that the study of social sciences “promotes doubts and uncertainty.” He urged “ardent defenders of Islam” to review the human sciences that are taught in Iran’s universities and that he said “promote secularism,” according to Iranian news services. “Many of the humanities and liberal arts are based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings,” Ayatollah Khamenei said at a gathering of university students and professors on Sunday, according to IRNA, the state news agency. Teaching those “sciences leads to the loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge.”
Quite right. The more you learn, both about how to think and about what well-conducted thinking can find out about the world, the less you believe in the baseless tissue of inventions that make up any kind of godly teachings. Therefore, real education (as opposed to the training one gets in madrassas and Sunday schools) is in tension with religion; therefore, dogmatic religion hates and fears real education. We know. Helpful of Khamenei to spell it out so clearly.
It’s interesting (though not surprising) to see that lunatics in Texas and elsewhere are right there with the good ayatollah. Education is scary bad evil socialist propaganda! Get out of here with that scary education stuff! Don’t come in here attacking godly folks with all this demonic learning and thinking and education!
President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening. The uproar over the speech, in which Mr. Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out.
Well why not just have an alternate speech, in which Sarah Palin urges students to be like her and try to get by without knowing anything at all?
Well now looky here, have some sense, the good people of Texas don’t want some guy whose Daddy came from Kenya telling a bunch of decent white kids what a fine thing education is. Can’t you see that? We can’t have a black man standing up in front of a lot of white kids being all intelligent and learned and well-spoken and president of the US and all that there! It ain’t fittin’!
It’s crap, isn’t it? You know that Obama will turn up dressed to the nines and in articulate speech say something about the importance of education or something revolutionary like that. Do they think he’s going to be wearing a Che T-shirt and giving clenched left fist salutes?
KB,
You just know that someone, somewhere, is photoshop-ing almost exactly that *right now*
But to discover my 19-year old degree annoys Islamic theocrats – it’s actually good for something after all…
:-)
From the NYT link in OB’s threadstarter:
“For years, the study of subjects like philosophy and sociology has been viewed suspiciously by Iranian conservatives. During the earliest days of the Islamic Revolution, the nation’s leaders closed universities and tried to sanitize curriculums to fit their Islamic revolutionary ideology. The efforts ultimately failed under the weight of more pragmatic forces eager to engage with Western economies, and a student population hungry for contemporary ideas and contact with the West.”
We have seen prequels; the ideologues’ basic moves were played out in Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China. From this point of view, the best university is a technical college. Clear out the social sciences and just have the natural ones, plus engineering and other disciplnes based on them. Except these days, the teaching and practice of both the natural sciences and technology involve access to the Net and time spent on it. So Internet censorship is a vital accessory, just as is regular purging of libraries and censorship of periodicals.
In the USSR in the 1960s, scholars of all disciplines had to wait until the censors had finished with the incoming numbers of periodicals before they could have access to them; all too often with pages cut out and mutilated to remove offending articles and ads. (I had this firsthand from a scholar then working at Moscow University.)
The whole bureaucratic mess proved to be workable only at the expense of technical progress, and became a game of locksmiths and burglars. But smuggling literature and cutting stencils for samizdat has now been replaced by blogging.
How the control freaks can teach and encourage creative thought of any kind without at the same time fostering critique is a problem yet to be solved, and no doubt a resuscitated Stalin Prize is there for whoever makes the breakthrough, be they Muslim, Marxist or Mormon.
Work hard. Stay in school. Learn to ask ‘how do you know that? How do I know that?’
Jeezis, Ben, I knew you were young but not that young. I could barely tie my shoes when I was your age. Bastard!
Maybe — but even now I can’t tie my shoes very well, evidently, since I’m in the habit of trying to slip into them as if they were loafers. I’m desperately in want of a shoe-horn. You should see the heels of them, they look post-apocalyptic.
So I plan on pre-ordering my jar of vitamin water, complete with jewel-studded metal casing and robot arms. No shoes equals no worries!
“Texas is the largest single purchaser of textbooks in the nation, thus what Texas wants in its textbooks strongly influences what other states get. In past years, evolution was systematically deleted or downplayed in textbooks because Texas required textbooks to print a disclaimer that any textbook dealing with evolution… “
Read on further at http://www.ncseprojects.org/ncser/16/4/texas-textbook-adoptions-whither-wither-evolution
I’d reckon a posse of Texas Rangers could be sent over to Iran to keep their hands in practice: hunting down any of them no-good coyotes that would drag decent God-fearing folks kicking and screaming into the 20th Century. And that just for starters.
Yes well it’s no accident that Brian Leiter and others talk of the Texas Taliban.
Ed Brayton over at “Dispatches from the Culture Wars” has uncovered the televised speech that Bush 41 used to indoctrinate public school children.
You can see video here:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/09/president_creates_bush_41_yout.php#more
Question remains,does Ed know his ass from a hole in the ground.