By Jonathan Michael Feldman
In the last year, or even months, I have begun to notice that many students are unable to use the semi colon properly in my university classes. It’s a small step that demonstrates that the Swedish education system is failing. Here is how this failure works and teaches us valuable lessons.
Students confuse a semi-colon with either a comma or a colon. Yet, by the time they get to my classes, they must have had other teachers who failed to point this out to them. Thus, we have a symmetrical system of failure. Failure on the supply side and failure on the demand side. Failure on the student side and failure on the teacher side and above all a failure on the administrative side because hardly anyone really cares that language is abused and misused. A teacher like myself who sees this first asks himself what teachers proceeded me and engaged in “benign neglect.” This neglect extends not just to the proper use of semicolon, but also the proper use of possessives, the link between singular nouns and singular verbs, and even the ability to properly format a document.
It’s all normalized at the administrative level because what is of course more important is managing identity politics relations (as opposed to getting rid of patriarchal structures, promoting economic inequality and addressing the unfair concentration of political power). Administrations can’t conduct language tests and force students to get remedial help. That is too “authoritarian” and costly. The proper use of language is not a major concern for pedagogic theory as advanced among the university faculty. Instead, pedagogic theory often emphasizes that lectures are useless and students have limited concentration levels. The politics of scarcity is married to politically correct sounding formulations that endorse the alienation of individuals from their potential abilities to act in the world. Even the left is often indifferent to academic decline, often blaming “for profit schools” rather than also blaming the entire mediocrity of the system.
Again and again and again the endless mantra among pedagogic theorists or academics is about how individuals’ capacities are limited, but that we must support diverse identities and allow people to flourish in their differences. This respect for difference is combined with a passive aggressive tolerance of language incompetence, a language incompetence which obviously reproduces the class differences which are tolerated. In sum the other side of “the respect for difference” is “the respect for inequality, a lack of solidarity and a lack of liberation.” If student concentration levels are normally low, one might have pedagogic departments emphasize how to increase student concentration levels. Sadly, this possibility is considered revolutionary, not pragmatic and “pie in the sky,” a utopian possibility in which the word “utopia” is a code word for being naive and not “realistic.” Of course, this version of realism might be called “crackpot realism,” the kind of realism that is leading to the disintegration of learning and the promotion of ignorance and sloppiness. Playing devil’s advocate, we could say some level of hierarchy is needed because of the division of labor and uneven distribution of competence. That’s true up to a point, but it will always be better if the general level of education is increased in an organization because of informational scarcity, accountability requirements and even for pure productivity concerns, much less egalitarian impulses.
I have been told by some that my creation of guidelines for my students about how to write properly is a waste of time. Yet, the basis for learning and education must involve a solid language foundation. What I have been told really is that an improvement of educational foundations is a waste of time. This is one step removed from saying that education itself is a waste of time. Why do academics believe that their own profession is a waste of time? The answer to this question requires that we investigate the labor process of academic life.
As most people know, academics divide their time in several large blocks. The first priority is often their own research. The second is teaching. The third is administration. The official “third task” in Swedish universities was at one point, “social involvement” or some such thing. This third task might involve consulting for large companies or perhaps even helping a peace organization. In practice, however, I find almost zero academics involved in the Swedish peace movement. At most, very few such persons are formally involved. Almost all academics are primarily concerned with advancing something called a “career.” The central question then is how does career advancement and the growth of far-right parties, systematic and existentially threatening climate change, and rampant militarism (which can take the form of arms exports to dictatorships) combine to create a larger totality?
What the decline of proper usage of the semicolon tells us is that not only are political commitments to necessary causes suffering. In addition, commitments to the educational process itself are now suffering. Academics rationalize their ill-attention to such matters because their time and their research is the most important thing in the world. This claim may or may not be the truth, but any truth is certainly part of a larger commitment to narcissism and self-indulgent pursuits embodied in fears of mortality or claims on immortality. The here and now of students and their lives are devalued because career advancement is key. This advancement is tied to power structures in which declining expectations managers are utilized to diminish expectations. It’s a mild form of what a public relations officer working for the Pentagon must do while explaining U.S. military progress in Afghanistan or the utility of other past military missions that left a lot of dead people, underdevelopment and chaos.
The embrace of this politics of scarcity and mediocrity is not limited to any specific ideology. One reason is that persons on the left or the right basically want to advance their careers. We have a politics of style in which a substitution of a few words here and there reflects the same drive, with the same deleterious results. This politics is also tied to the extension of cynicism systems. As teaching quality declines, academics are faced with the choice in reproducing an orgy of mediocrity and saving their own time, or trying to save a sinking educational ship when it comes to language usage, or perhaps rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking educational Titanic.
What is rather surprising in all this is the emergence of a new kind of militant defense of mediocrity that is slowing creeping up into the academic system. These are champions of a kind of laissez-faire approach to learning, i.e. let students drown in their own limited capacities, what they don’t know about what they don’t know can’t hurt the students. Of course, such free market thinking, even advanced by nominal leftists, is really about conserving time for the academic’s own commodity production. The “craft” or batch production of academic products is conserved by treating the educational system as a Fordist production nightmare which is somebody’s else’s problem. That distancing is just the other side of how the right and left equally are indifferent to social responsibility but do believe in the cult of structures and the replacement of really existing individuals with socially constructed identities.
This strange hybrid, “militant mediocrity,” appears as part of a process which began as part of the post-New Left counter-revolution. The basic approach was to appropriate the forms and symbols of dissenting culture and reincorporate them into commodities, cliches, and administrative practices. The idea of enhancing an individual’s value substituted for actually assisting that individual’s capacities. Of course, the elites always have to have competent to managers, at least in more progressive varieties of capitalism. Less elite students or universities can be allowed to indulge their ignorance, under the tutelage of academics who are rewarded for repressive tolerance of their ignorance. It’s a win-win for the academic and the student because they both end up getting what they want. This kind of hollow victory, much like the meeting of a sadist and masochist, is of course rather pathetic. The pathetic development is tied to the assassination of truth, a process aided in turn by mediocre reproduction of “post-modern” ideas and the harvesting of student bodies to extract private or public tuition funding, i.e. truth is a barrier to exchanging the student body (C) into capital (M). The middle class has often had as its central cultural code the killing of truth or its dilution. None of this really is surprising. In fact, much middle class culture is based on the cultivation of ersatz products in work, leisure, and other spheres. The phony substitute is good for profits, good for professional preservation, and keeps everyone happy with masks and mirrors reflecting into each other into a total abyss–a metaphor that nicely matches the constant memory suppression of the ecocide or nuclear holocaust that might be right around the corner.
In summary, the sad decline in the proper usage of the semicolon turns out to represent a kind of psychological and economic development managed by the politics of stupidity. The stupidity is managed by elites who don’t seem to care very much about whether the population can fully master proper language usage. Students’ bodies, time, minds, lives must be harvested to extract capital to keep the educational machinery going. The psychic ego of the academic must be tied to cranking out research products to burnish the sense of importance, most of which will turn into what often amounts to useless dust in a period of 20 years more or less.
The monies which could have been spent on mandatory courses to improve language capabilities are not allocated so that academics can negotiate their mortality, administrators can harvest tuition, and students can be left to enjoy their limited capacities which are the first casualties. In the Swedish context, the top social priorities are health care, the military budget to defend against a phony Russian threat, and perhaps keeping the highway system going so that cars can go where they want. There’s some attention to mass transit modernization, which is honorable, and even ecological investments which are significant but limited, yet none of this is as dramatic as a society which seems indifferent to the productivity losses engendered by letting the proper use of language decline.
