From John Ohliger.com
To Hell With Philosophy
To Hell With Philosophy
(Editor's Note: The following column was written in 1972 for the "Social Philosophy” page of the magazine Adult Leadership but it was rejected by the editorial committee.)
by John Ohliger
The next person who tells me I'm being "philosophic," I'm going to punch square in the mouth. I know just what the means, but he hasn't got the guts to come right out and say it.
He means that I'm being impractical, that I'm not being realistic, not facing the facts of the situation, not getting down to the nitty-gritty, not providing the nuts and bolts response he needs, not offering a workable technique that he can immediately. He believes (and I suspect most of you reading this believe) that philosophizing is something you do when you're old and retired and have nothing better to do. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time.
Well, maybe he's right. Let's forget about the word "philosophy." We don't need guides to action any more. We don't need a value system of our own. The institutions we work for provide that for us. We can just go on solving our day-to-day problems within that imposed framework. Mr. Rauch, who writes that darling little column fatuously called "Open for Discussion" in the magazine, Adult Leadership, obviously believes that. He was asked in the March issue to comment on the trend toward compulsory adult education. Naturally, he applauded it. It's happening and all our great institutions support it, so it must be "a good thing." Oh, he dressed up his answer with all that camouflage about "rapid change," but his reasoning was transparent. Compulsory adult education provides more work and higher status for adult educators so it must be okay. The institutions of adult education must triumph.
We Might Get Fired
Recently I served as a member of a doctoral committee examining a candidate for a degree in adult education. In response to a question from another member of the committee (NOT a professor of adult education), he explained that adult educators serve the needs of the people coming to them without imposing their own value structures. That committee member then commented, "In other words, you're a prostitute."
The candidate tried to weasel out of it in response to that committee member's follow-up question about what he would do if a group of suburbanites asked him to develop a course on how to keep Blacks from buying homes in their neighborhood. His response was that he would offer the course but would then go into the ghetto and offer a course to Blacks on how to go about buying homes successfully in the suburbs.
No, we certainly don't need moral or ethical guides to social action. They just get in the way. If we stood up for what we believe in, we might get fired, or at the very least frowned on by our bosses or our fellow employees.
I envy all those people who don't need to be continually working on a personally developed approach to action. They must sleep well at night firm in the conviction that someone else higher up in the hierarchy will tell them what to do. After all, being an adult educator is just a job, like any other job. It's a living. Right? It's not our fault if the result of our work further enmeshes people in the web of institutional slavery. We're just doing our job. Like Adolph Eichmann.
And yet? And yet when I was a high school senior and asked to write a theme on "My Creed," I submitted this:
My Creed is no creed at all.
This is my spring,
Wait for the fall
To show the creed
Of the man
Now on the mall.
Was I wrong then and right now? What do you think? Write me at Basic Choices, 1023 Drake, Madison WI53715 and we'll print some of the responses in a later column. John Ohliger is the director of Basic Choices, Inc., in Madison, WI.
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