Year-End Synthesis

Education is the most important aspect of the discourse on American politics and on the methods through which our political network might improve itself in its deployment abroad as well as in our own country. Of the current political maleficence performed by the Bush administration, there are mistakes that appear so painfully in their brilliance that we now find ourselves with the opportunity to dissect how they came about and what we can do to transform the way we think about political action. I detect an inability within our political leaders to admit wrong-doing, to think critically in such a way so as to escape the pitfalls of obtuse partisanship, and to speak in clear and precise terms about the important issues dotting the political and cultural landscape of this country. These same weaknesses appear in the college students I teach, and while I am not suggesting a smooth continuity between these students and our political leaders, I am arguing that the we must address these weaknesses in order to find new approaches to problems of international diplomacy and to the unequal distribution of power in the United States. At the same time, I will point out that today's college and university students are the men and women who will replace the current political leaders. While that may be an obvious statement, there are still so many flaws in the way our school systems educate our students that one could easily be fooled into thinking that there is a power behind the curtain who seeks to continue along the same path of political action instead of seeking to change that path and head off in new directions. There is no mastermind behind the curtain, but there are multiple nodes within the networks of our political, technological, scientific, and educational systems that have corroded and that have capitulated to the rhetoric of Sameness and homogeneity.

This blog is public and anyone may read its contents. I even forward each of these entries into my facebook account, which is an online networking site used by every college student I know. Despite the transparency of these postings and the troubles that might come of criticizing the order of things, I still feel it is important to say that, from what I have seen in my four years of undergraduate experience and two years in a PhD program, our college students do not have the tools to become effective leaders. The skills to think critically are not reaching the majority of students who receive bachelors degrees. The undergraduate sector of the University is the new High School, by which I mean that it is now possible for students to walk blindly through four years of college and survive by simply showing up. For too many young people, critical thinking has become synonymous with criticism, and criticism has gained a pejorative quality that makes it nearly impossible to criticize a student's work without that student shutting down beneath a shell of defensiveness and apathy. I place critical thinking at the front of my syllabi and insist that the skill to express oneself clearly through writing and through speech on complex topics of politics, race, class, economics, and performance (as in the performances scrutinized in Performance Studies, Theatre Historiography, and other related fields) will ensure that you find placement in the field of your choice. Without those skills, student right out of college will fall into careers for which they will work 500 hours a week and into offices where they will spend more time with their co-workers than with their own families and friends.

There have been numerous events in the headlines over the past several years that speak to the sources of students' inabilities to think critically and to allow for a multiplicity of answers instead of searching for The Right Answer. An obvious example is the removal of evolution from the classroom. This is problematic not because Evolution holds the keys to recovering list origins, but because it presents another theory on how things came to be. Educational censorship points to the vague dogma of Morality that blankets the minds of Americans. There is no such thing as political correctness or incorrectness, there is only politics, and the removal of evolution from the classroom is a political move not a moral one. Moral fiber is woven from the desires of those in power. In place of morality we need to develop an ethical mode of engagement with the world around us, and to do so we each need to know what we believe. We can't know what we believe if there are no choices. Another example of the removal of choice from the classroom is one less visible than the issue of evolution v. creationism. In 2005, you may have read this in the papers: "The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth [...] American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed." This was the wording in Florida's Education Omnibus Bill, signed by Gov. Jeb Bush. With the passing of that opinion into law, a law that can be enforced with the full weight of Florida governmental system, we see an instance of selective forgetting. Jeb bush and his administration chose a definition for the concept of History and henceforth students in the public school system in Florida will not even have as an option the alternative texts on history written by people such as Foucault or DeCerteau. I don't think most elementary or middle schools offer those texts now, in Florida or elsewhere, but for the existence of such texts to be removed completely is a violent act of repression and censorship.

I will conclude by suggesting that theatre studies and performance studies offer the possibility of a way out from the single lane highway of teleological progress narratives enforced by the dominant voices in our political and educational systems today. Each act of censorship and each law passed into motion reveals a performance of numerous bodies who seek to limit what it is possible to think about. What separates theatre from literature is the presence of a body. There are theatres where players perform Hamlet and there are theatres of war where soldiers fight insurgencies. In each case, the bodies are moving through motions set for them by invisible forces. In the case of traditional theatre, the written text guides the actor as well as the choice of the director and producer. In terms of war, the bodies of soldiers follow the orders conveyed to them through a chain of command that leads back to a war room and the general in charge of the assault. We need to critically examine the performance of the bodies in the latter scenario as much as scholars have examined the performances of the bodies in the former. There are theatre departments in universities throughout the country where the skills to study those kinds of performances can be learned, and I'm proud to say that my department is one of them. We need to continue to fight for economic support to keep these departments running, and we need to ensure that the departments are filled with professors who engage in ethical and critical methods of teaching. That will be an impossibility, however, if we don't teach these skills now.