PARAGRAPH: Donald
Trump and the Education of America
The 21st century urges us to reconceptualize the meaning of
education. Laugh if you must at Donald
Trump's foibles and his signature, signifying hair. Sleep in anger as you dream of his
mini-lectures and his offensive utterances.
Applaud, with appropriate trembling and fear, his bold articulations of
the twisted ideas and values you hide in the privacy of your mind. Or, if you
have a different mind, flush his utterances down the toilet of
imagination. From whatever angle you
behold Trump, you have to admit that he is the contemporary and negative
equivalent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a negative humanist. He is having no little success in exploding
and refashioning the American mind and the education of America. He is teaching us that education is not
confined to civil exchanges in spaces of academic pluralism. On the contrary, education is what occurs in
the public sphere of the American body politic or polis. The Internet, Twitter, Facebook, and
ideological blogs are the living textbooks we study. We exercise our vernacular pieties and vulgarities with democratic fervor. Education is the conversation where people
actually bleed as they teach and learn prejudice and counter-prejudice. The conversation is driven more by emotion
than reason; it is most assuredly a war among conservative, centrist, and
liberal passions; the combat zone is an abject space where envy,
hatred, dubious assertions about what God said or did not say, and maximum distrust
flourish like powerful weeds. In the education of America, the message is the
medium and Donald Trump is neither a trope nor a metaphor. He is a tenured
professor. Never forget that, for if you
do you become a candidate for your own enslavement.
