Lessons too late for the learning?

The summer is over. With the evenings shortening dramatically, it is time to get back to the hard grind. For no one is this more painfully true than for students. This issue of HOTPress is dedicated to them in this, their hour of distress.
Not that it would be right to make too much of it. The prospect of eight months academic work may not be the most appealing – in fact it can seem like downright torture, dragging yourself out of the scratcher to get to that first miserably boring 9 o’clock lecture – but it is still a privilege to be involved in third level education and we’re as well to acknowledge it. There is a lot wrong with the Irish education system, and with the system in Northern Ireland too. But we still rank among the most advanced countries in the world in terms of educational opportunity.
Besides, the past week has brought into sharp focus the real meaning of the word distress. One day the focus of the watching world turned in horror to the stampede in Iraq as a result of which 1,000 people, maybe more, lost their lives. That it was just the latest in an ongoing litany of appalling events in a country already mired in chaos, brutality and despair made it all the more monumentally depressing.
The next day, an even greater catastrophe exploded onto the front pages, as Hurricane Katrina swept through the southern states, destroying the great city of New Orleans, and killing thousands in the region, in the process.
The scale of the destruction in Louisiana and across the south of the US is massive. Cities have been destroyed. Businesses have been ruined. Houses and buildings have been raised. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. In many cases families have lost everything.
At the time of writing just how bad things will get is uncertain but what’s clear is that there is immense potential for further catastrophe. A shoot to kill policy has been declared, as looters roam the streets, raiding deserted shops for anything they can lay their hands on. Having been without food for days, people are starving. There is a sense of desperation, of panic. This is uncharted territory and it is hard to predict just how bitter and hostile the recriminations might become. But the situation is bad, very bad.
It would be easy to define this as a natural disaster and to claim that there is no legislating for it. No doubt that is what the Bush administration and the authorities in general in the US will attempt to do. But that is to miss the point. Certainly, it would not have been possible to stop Hurricane Katrina in its tracks. But the staggering scale of the devastation wrought by it is a direct consequence of the twisted priorities of the dominant American political class and of US society in general.
To understand this is especially important for people who are just about to embark on their academic careers. What is the purpose of education? Of course there is an extent to which it is about personal and career development. But one of the problems about the direction in which education has taken, and about the way in which the role of students in society has evolved over the past decade in particular, is that college learning has taken on far too crude a utilitarian aspect.
Increasingly, the emphasis is on the market, and on training students so that they can fulfil the needs of industry. This is all very well up to a point. Certainly, to ignore the changes that are taking place in the world of work and to insist on perpetuating the traditional ivory tower perspective of academia would be thoroughly wrong.
But there has to be more to education than mere utilitarianism. It has to be about something other than gaining the degree, in order to get the highest paying job, the better to earn a bigger salary and to own a sexier set of wheels. It has to be about more than self aggrandisement.
In a sense, what has been happening in New Orleans and Biloxi and Baton Rouge and elsewhere along the banks of the Mississippi and around the legendary Lake of Ponchartrain puts all of that into sharp focus. You can get the best set of wheels on planet earth but when the flood-waters rise and the destruction begins they’ll be about as useful as a pair of pair of binoculars in a two person lift. In fifty feet of water, what you need is a fucking ark.
More to the point, the effects of the Hurricane need not have been nearly as devastating. The US President, George Bush, has been accused of fiddling while New Orleans drowns, and it a charge that is impossible to counter. It isn’t just that the little shit was nowhere to be seen and did nothing for two days. Nor that he has depleted resources in the US as a result of his grossly misguided commitment to the war in Iraq – though on both counts he is clearly guilty.
More specifically, dire warnings about the vulnerability of New Orleans to floods of the kind that have effectively destroyed the city were ignored. Worse, policies that had been in place to protect the city were actively undermined by the Bush administration.
A decision had been reached in 1990 to restore wetlands around the city, which have the effect of reducing the level of the waters in the event of flooding. This policy was subsequently abandoned, with Bush turning over the land to property developers. It would be impossible to manufacture a more telling example of the way in which political and ideological issues cut right to the heart of human affairs.
Similarly, budgets to support the strengthening of the levees that protect New Orleans were cut by over 40% since 2001. Meanwhile, the money that might have been spent building the defences of the Crescent City were instead used to initiate the disastrous war that at least indirectly led to the stampede disaster in Iraq…
The failure of the Bush administration to respond to the disaster with sufficient urgency, should be enough to permanently destroy the President’s credibility with American voters. It should also be enough to convince people that US involvement in Iraq is at least an act of grandiose folly – never mind the moral and ideological arguments against it.
There is a lesson in all of this that is at least as important as anything that students will learn, in any college, anywhere in the world, in the 2005/2006 academic year. It is this. Even where a natural disaster is concerned, how a country is run dramatically affects the impact that it has on the lives of ordinary people. Even a hurricane is a political issue.
And what follows is this. One of the goals of education must be to facilitate the engagement of people in things other than what is most likely to mean more money for themselves, as long as all boats keep rising – because, as the events of the past fortnight illustrate with graphic brutality, that is not a given.
What we need from our citizens is a culture of engagement, and students are better placed than most people to embrace this need. They are better placed to ask the questions that need to be asked. They are better placed to oppose the kind of political culture that results in the criminal neglect which ensured that New Orleans would be sunk beneath flood waters – and which in Ireland put the Rossport 5 behind bars, where they remain.
Pleasure is a wonderful thing. Fuck as much as you want to. Music, literature, theatre, art, football, food and fine wine – by all means, enjoy the things that make it easier for us all to make it through the night and to get up the following day armed with some sense that life is worthwhile.
But we must never forget that these are privileges that are denied to huge numbers of people as a result of the way in which we organise the world and the priorities that are decided for us by the politicians we elect. We must never lose sight of the fact that we ourselves have a role in framing those priorities. Nor that we have it within ourselves to make a contribution to re-arranging them, so that the system is designed to serve people, rather than the other way around.
During the past fortnight a report was published that amounted to a thoroughly damning indictment of the Irish prison system. It confirmed the fact, which we have highlighted in Hot Press over the years, that the biggest single issue in relation to so called law and order in Ireland has to do with drugs and the fact that most people convicted of criminal activity here are drug addicts.
The report, like those in New Orleans that warned of the threat to the city from flood waters, screams for an imaginative and committed response.
It will not happen that way unless there is a groundswell of public opinion and concern that forces the hands of politicians. It will not happen unless people are engaged enough to insist on it.
One of the purposes of education is to fuel that sense of engagement. It should also be about fun, enjoyment, pleasure and the many and often wonderful vagaries of growing up. Go for it. And hopefully along the way, Hot Press can be of some assistance. That’s what we’re here for…