Brilliance tarnished - Letter to the Editor

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Fall, 2002 by Thomas Kempa

I came over Mihai Nadin during my research for a paper about foreign language teaching as influenced by neo-liberal (NL) ideas (i.e., Reaganomics in the United States), and so I'm what you might call biased on this matter. I found references to his book The Civilisation of Illiteracy in a text, which is strongly influenced by those NL ideas. Even if his personal aim is different from the aim of NL, I have the impression that he transports those NL ideas unconsciously as many "second-hand dealers in ideas," as one of the founders of NL, Friedrich August von Hayek, called them contemptuously (though he postulated that NL needed those people).

Of his first experience with American students, Nadin says in your interview with him: "It was an environment of innovation, an environment that facilitated change in a way that stopped long ago in Europe. Dealing with change is one of the major problems in Europe, if not the major one."

One thing is true: if you have much to change, a long history of ideas, even a long history of perhaps your family having lived in one place for instance, maybe you really are a bit slower concerning the notion of change--because you have more to lose! But, more important, this idealization of change, if you put it to the proof on the socio-economic plan, means also, that you do not give up things you have conquered in the past. Conquered with loss of blood and life perhaps. I talk of the trade unions and their function, which were/are essentially for the well-being of millions of working people, whose great-great-grandparents spilled their blood in order to fight for a better tomorrow. Now the NL movement tells us that those trade unions, those social securities, the common welfare only disturb the free market and have to be abolished. A rather cynical and conservative point of view that disguises itself as "progressive" and "modern"--these also are implications of uncontrolled changes. It is almost needless to say that this slogan of flexibility is most popular with the NL.

Nadin also says that "... literacy is not transparent. It keeps people from having access to all that we are entitled to in a democratic society. Literacy is hierarchical and centralized."

I do not think this is true. I think literacy and democracy go very well together. Nadin's ideas are either antidemocratic in an NL sense or not very well reflected. You need a certain amount of input in order to judge political issues. What this has got to do with literacy is not clear to me.

By the way, NL is still alive and dangerous in the Mont Pelerin Society.

THOMAS KEMPA
Journalist for Mobile Content
Bochum, Germany