Neil Postman was only 4 or 5 years ahead of Surkov.
"Russia only towards the end of the 1990s, at exactly the time Surkov joined the government. The author of Almost Zero loves to invoke such Lyotardian concepts as the breakdown of grand cultural narratives and the fragmentation of truth: ideas that still sound quite fresh in Russia." - October 20, 2011 - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putin-s-rasputin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnypvUQl6TI
September 1996 publication, Neil Postman's "End of Education" book
The full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErPcf_AAkFU
Interesting comment: "It sad to see that this conference was made in 1996, uploaded a year ago, and watched 2.1K times...
I am sure that few or none among those who need to hear these words have had a notice that they have been ever uttered.
Soon it will be 30 years since then. Not only the conference stands true, but the painful realities that describes are as true as they were then and perhaps even worse from the moment that no one seems to care."
For school to make sense, the young, their parents, and their teachers must have a god to serve or, even better, several gods. If they have none, school is pointless. Nietzsche's famous remark is relevant here. He said once: 'he who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how' and this applies, I think, as much to learning as to living.
To put it as I said it before, there is no surer way to bring an end to schooling than for it to have no end. Now by a god to serve, I do not necessarily mean the God, who is supposed to have created the world, and whose moral instructions, as described in sacred books, have given countless people a reason for living, and, more to the point, a reason for learning.
In the Western world, beginning in the 13th century and for 500 years afterwards, that God was sufficient justification for the founding of institutions of learning, from grammar schools, where children were taught to read the Bible, to great universities, where men were trained to be ministers of God.
Even today, there are some schools in the West, and most in the Islamic world, whose central purpose is to serve and celebrate the glory of God. Now, wherever this is the case, there is no school problem. Certainly, there is no school crisis. There may be some disputes over what subjects best promote piety, obedience, and faith. There may be students who are skeptical, even teachers who are nonbelievers.
2:21 But at the core of such schools, there is a transcendent spiritual idea that gives purpose and clarity to learning. To such schools the word God is spelt with a capital G. But there are schools that have been animated by a transcendent spiritual idea which may be called a god with a small g. Now I know it's risky for me to use this word, even with a small g, because the word, having an aura of sacredness, is not to be used lightly and also because it calls to mind a fixed figure or image. But it is the purpose of such figures or images to direct one's mind to an idea, and, more to the point, to a story.
3:20 Not any kind of story, but one that tells of origins and envisions of future, a story that constructs ideals, prescribes rules of conduct, provides a source of authority, and gives a sense of continuity and purpose.
A god, in the sense I'm using the word, is the name of a great narrative, one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power, so that it's possible to organize one's life and one's learning around it.
Without such a transcendent narrative, life has no meaning.
Without meaning, learning has no purpose.
Without purpose, schools become houses of detention, not attention.
Rick Roderick, 1993:
https://rickroderick.org/302-heidegger-and-the-rejection-of-humanism-1993/
But in any case, let me give you what I think is the powerful account, and then its criticism; the final, sort of, punch line of it. With Heidegger we choose a project in full awareness that being is always being towards death. For Heidegger this doesn’t cripple our action, but it makes us see that just like if we wanted to write a beautiful poem, we would plan an incredibly grand last stanza, or whatever. When we choose a project, we want to choose one that will make of our life a complete thing, a thing with meaning; a connected story, a story worth telling. So that’s the ideas that… the recognition of one’s own nothingness and one’s own death as the ultimate possibility… this recognition and acceptance frees us for our projects.
It allows us, for one thing, to engage in a bit of what I consider… if you wanted to sum up the wisdom of the east, you know, Oriental wisdom in just one sentence, it might be something like “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. I mean, there was a real well known Buddhist who told me “I can sum up the dao and the gita; all of that for you quickly… It’s this: Don’t sweat the small stuff. You westerners, you spend all your time sweating the small stuff…” Heidegger here says “Look, if you really internalise as a part of your self story that you too will be dead, gone, nothing, that that will be a freeing and liberating experience, but you have to be able to like… “work through it”, as it were, to use a psychoanalytic phrase “To work through it”.
Well what does it allow us to escape from? Well I actually have to say that this moment in existentialism has certainly been good for me, I think. It’s been a healthy thing for me. It cut short therapy, I went to a therapist once, I went three times, and on the third visit I went “Oh by the way I have a question. Why are we born to suffer and die?” and she went [unintelligible mumble], and that was the end of therapy for me. I figured that if she couldn’t help me with my fundamental problem, she wasn’t going to do much good on the trivial problems. I mean, I had a big problem: why are we born to suffer and die? She just went [utter nonsense]… she just went “Well I can write you a prescription for some Valium”, and I said “No thanks, I drink, I don’t need it” [crowd laughter] I belong to a large club; I am a drunkard… no, anyway…
What it does it this… for me it has made it easier to talk to groups… to teach classes, and talk to groups of students and not to be afraid of cameras and stuff because in the end we are all dead. In the end Johnny Carson, his body will, you know, turn into dust and in the end the earth will shrivel up into a cinder and fall into the sun, and in the end – it’s not the big bang anymore, they call it I think the big balloon, kind of like a bad condom. The big balloon of the universe will stretch out and pop back together and poof… nothing more.
Now for me that’s kind of a kick, because that means if I screw up today, tomorrow, or right now I am not going to worry about it too much. I am going to feel free to engage in my project without worrying about what “they” told me about how I should do philosophy. So I think there is a moment of truth, or a moment of interest in Heidegger’s account. Also it’s made me rather short and sharp with smalltalk, it really does. I mean, it makes me… where people go “Oh gee, you know, the weather today is just, you know” [agitated noises] I am sorry, but I prefer conversations about sex, religion, politics, and of course being a man: sports. But if it’s not something that, you know, grabs me, I feel perfectly free to go “That’s chatter, I haven’t have time for it… be dead soon, can’t do it”
"parenting in Palestine in year 2024". Being age 23, educated, marriage to a spouse also your same age and educated. And the circumstances of life on Eart in Palestine. How to get a job, earn money, get pregnant, have a child, parenting. The denial we have of the circumstances we create with science fiction Torah vs. science fiction Quran hate. The denial and avoidance of thinking about life on Earth and our choice to avoid and not repeat to The 1954 Equation.