Having
become accustomed to walking through the McGill university campus on my way to
the best coffee in Montreal in Café Castel on Sherbroke street, run by a bunch
of amiable Lebanese and Vietnamese young men who make the most amazingly
skilful drawings in the cream that tops their Lattes, yesterday I took with me a soapbox, mounted
it in one of those delightfully arranged plazas that are scattered throughout
the campus, and delivered the following oration to a largely unimpressed
gathering of young people:
“Students, including frosh (whatever that may
mean), professors and hangers-on, lend me your ears for a moment. I am a man of
advanced years who has been moving unobserved among you as you have gathered in ever-growing numbers hurrying towards your new
lives, an experience that I believe entitles me to make a few observations on what
you seem to be embracing. I have noted your excitement and your urgency and have
in recent days become accustomed to feeling the rush of air as some young woman
(it is the young women who seem the most urgent) whishes past me urgently on
her way to whatever marvellous event confronts her as she plunges into her search
for Knowledge. Whish, she goes, and I have become accustomed to indicate the
movement with a rapid forward movement of my own arm, adding a yelled commentary
each time: “Whoosh! Off to get the Knowledge, are you!? Avid for the Knowledge!
Crazy to become the repositories of the accumulated Knowledge of homo sapiens!
“I have not talked to any of you, but I would
doubt from your demeanour that you would be interested in hearing my theory
that we already have too much Knowledge, that in fact the Knowledge you are so
eager to discover, this self-appointed burden you appear to be so eager to
undertake, could become for you a
poisoned chalice that will begin to twist and distort your lives from the
moment you have to first confront the debt that our grateful capitalist society
will impose on you as the price for fufilling your great dream.
“Be that as it may as the fellow said,
somewhere or other, I hope you will look
at yourselves, so young and energetic, so full of life, so determined to flaunt your impressive, undeveloped minds; and I fear that as you look at your professors, for the most part so grey and burdened with
troubles, so conscience-stricken by their half-acknowledged understanding that
what they are handing on is so totally irrelevant to what is needed for this
world to survive and prosper, as you look at them, I say, the darkness will
begin to wrap itself around your hearts and minds.
“Not immediately, of course, for you are in the
full flush of your self-awareness as developing beautiful human beings. A notable
and surprising change I have noted from the last time --- several years ago ---
that I had occasion to brush up against a student body has been to find that
the approved garb for academia and its studies has become the same as for
international tennis, or beach volleyball --- that is, the very short short, which could
be, but perhaps is not, designed to drive your professors mad. I comfort myself
with the thought that professors, a
stern, unforgiving group of gents and ladies, must be accustomed to being confronted with such
youthful vigour as they earnestly plod through their lessons in calculus or astrophysics,
or, to take a common philosophical dilemma that has beaten to death generations
of similarly eager students, the meaning of meaning. But
who, after all, in these days, does not glory in the tanned thigh, the tattooed
shoulder? I think we can depend on the
professorial cadre to have only the one thing in mind: they will be straining to
ensure you finish your course knowing more than two plus two equals four, and all
the other complicated things you need if you are to become the bridge-builders,
the railway and aircraft engineers, the rocket scientists, the research
chemists, of our growing generations.
“Can all of you, professors and students, thrown
together in the cavernous classrooms scattered around the campus, possibly change
the stark fact that it is from these institutions, these extremely expensive, extremely
pampered, resource-gobbling universities, these learned classrooms, studies and
libraries, from these that have emerged all of the highly-trained people, the scientists,
philosophers, artists, politicians and even statesmen, who have been so
assiduously prepared to go out into the world, armed with the Knowledge they
have been taught, but whose very effect has been to transform our world, so beautiful
in its origins, into the hell-hole it has become, whose biggest business is to
produce killing machines, whose preoccupations are with wars, riots, violence,
repression, terrorism and death.
“Students, frosh, hangers-on, mark my words I
pray you. You are being prepared to go out and fuck up the world with your inadequate
Knowledge. Quit this place as quickly as
you can before your professors have a chance to brainwash you with their
useless poisons, turning you into filing cabinets so overburdened with information
that you will have no idea what to do or where to turn.
“Save yourselves, I beg of you, before it is too late.”
With that I picked up my soap box and retreated
to the Castel for another delicious cup of coffee.
Hello, I have been reading your work for years. Brushed shoulders once in the Octopus Bookstore in Ottawa a few years ago. Agree with your speech. But the straw man argument has to be beefed up with at least an idea of how to change the current educational system. Being within the system there are areas of progressive thought and teaching. Few,granted, but there are some. As Miliband wrote years ago, the perks keep the others in line.
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