White on black Book

Furedi makes a lot of important points against the institutionalized infantilization that takes place in academia and other public organizations like libraries and museums but he caricatures the opposing 'side' of his argument unfairly at times. He for example attacks reflexive modernity thinkers who link knowledge with risk in our everyday lives. The argument actually points out the nefarious nature of intensive specialization of fields because there is a loss of accountability and there is no distinct overlap or sharing of knowledge across fields. Furedi trivializes Bauman's arguments regarding the ordered nature of modernity leading to the holocaust and strips it of the context that is necessary to appreciate the nuances of his point. Furedi almost paints him as a primitivist that simply isn't true or fair. He also misunderstands the pedagogy of incorporating experience into the curriculum, it's not about replacing "objective knowledge" with "subjective knowledge" (life experience), it's about incorporating the personal experiences of the learner which encourages participation but also creates critical and reflexively aware thinkers who don't merely regurgitate facts but rather use them in inventive ways to help change their own lives and to understand it.

He makes a fantastic defense of enlightenment values against philistinism and incorporates this into a chapter discussing the political process and how inclusive policies attempting to encourage public participation has done the opposite, as they are patronizing and reduces the seriousness of the discourse down to soundbites. Furedi argues rather successfully that the problem is that politicans attempt to cater to the lowest common denominator and infantilize the general public, which leads to resentment and disengagement as issues become trivialized and banal with differences being subtle or insignificant. It's an appeal to business, managerialism and use value has also stultified the educational system, as E. P Thompson (1971) famously opined by referring to his old university Warwick as Warwick LTD. These traits that were critically examined by Thompson appear to be praised and lauded in today's academic culture. Use value has in a sense transformed the educational sphere into a production factory and intellectual stimulation is lacking as it's merely a surplus factor that can be attained rather than the key constituent of university life.

He makes a good critique of relativism particularly in politics. Alan Bloom famously remarked that the left was paralyzed by Nietzsche and this is particularly true in the rejection of universals or meta-narratives in sociological thinking. It has led to identity politics, whereby experience and inclusion is the most important factor facing political discourse. Epistemology is centered on particulars as is evident in "A Woman's Way of Knowing" (Carol Gilligan 1982). Furedi argues that this type of bifurcation of epistemology has led to the erosion of the status or role of an intellectual, as knowledge is no longer objective, it's predicated in experience. He rightly states that being part of a culture does not give an individual greater understanding of that culture just because they happen to live in it, than those who study it from the outside. This is a type of fallacious thinking that compromises intellectual engagement that isn't predicated on immediate and intimate experience. However I do think Furedi creates a dichotomy here that he argues against that again is slightly unfair to his opponents. The incorporation of experience can help facilitate a greater understanding of the 'objective' 'outsider' knowledge that is gained. Ethnography is based on this principle and so it's not about replacing one with the other or disregarding knowledge, it's about offering new ways of understanding the knowledge we have. However Furedi is right when he says we should focus on quality rather than inclusion for it's own sake. The transformation of the museum is not populist, it's based on a fallacious understanding that views the public as inferior and dumb and unable to engage seriously with ideas. Hannah Arendt was right in saying that we don't have a mass culture, we have mass entertainment as Furedi cites, but it's erosion is multidimensional and the changing nature of education may be a sign of digitization in which attention spans are remarkably short and there is a direct and intense hedonism available to anyone with a keyboard. This may be a consequence of managerial bureaucracy trying to accommodate with students who have different learning styles to those generations past, due to their very different lives.

He passionately argues for the restoration of proper debate and this is very laudable. Since knowledge has been sutured with experience, critiquing an idea becomes personal rather than a distanced objective examination of an idea on its merits. The idea of inclusion has meant that debate has became a dirty word and viewed with suspicion as it may disengage other students. This type of thinking is destructive in attempting to create critical thinking, as it views debate as belligerent and something to be avoided. This is based on a systematic attempt to abolish the perception of failure (Furedi 124) which actually creates a curriculum that is in effect dumbing down as people won't accommodate or change their ideas based on the best argument/evidence as knowledge is not a singular category, but has many different epistemologies. Your evidence is just an opinion now in effect. All these points are well argued but his attack on incorporating experience is misguided, it's the managerial structure which has created this type of culture at the university which for business and political reasons wants everyone to succeed and nobody ever to fail. Experience in education can be very positive and beneficial to understanding objective ideas, as displayed in Furedi's work "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1968)