Caveat Emptor : This is not an attack on ALL poetry.
While I was being "
educated" in the 80s and 90s, not just learning, but the mere act of attempting to learn or write any kind of poetry or verse was considered a virtue and an end in itself.
Art for Art's sake. I ahve yet to decide if I should call it a mystical snobbery. Anyway most boys I studied with thought it pussy.
"Ooh let us be men of culture *
snicker snicker* and rise above our animal state *
blah blah* and learn to appreciate fine wine, literature, music, poetry and other such activities, the more exotic the better".
This view was generally held and
evangelised by the "educational" complex/establishment which in every era has a strong prescence of misogynists, feminists, religious fundamentalists and commies [including those who deny that they are 'left of(f) centre']. The schools I studied in were affiliated to various educational syllabi - [Oxbridge for West Africa / ICSE / SSLC / CBSE / various Indian Universities]. The "educators" and central planners of these pedagogical 'schools of thoughtlessness' hoped to suceed in their mandate to brainwash entire populations. They mostly suceeded. Several generations clung on to, defended and even perpetrated the crime of
not having an independent opinion. They held on to views that their masters - both seen and unseen - deemed necessary.
Collectives of people may be categorized variously but I find the spectrum between Mob and Prayer Group convenient to illustrate my point here. Mobs are short-lived, more unstable but achieve fast results. Meditative and Vegetative groups usually take longer but achieve better approximations to desired functionality. Besides they last longer. Thus control over the content of the material of study was vital. Witness the recent debate over a 7th standard textbook in Kerala. All groups - peaceful like a prayer group or violent like a mob - have a controlling factor. If you can determine how to control that controlling factor
then your's is the earth. What's more, you da man my son [
with apologies to
Rudyard Kipling].
George.S.Patton once said "a good plan executed violently today is better than an excellent one executed tomorrow" ... no point having a computation intensive algorithm when you have insuffient memory or processing power or both. It could be analogous to saying that erudition or even elementary literacy is not vital for a mob and may even hamper it's effectiveness in most cases.
Anyway the point is that syllabi exist to neuter 'questionable' tendencies. It helps to train the 'herd' and make them docile or bo-w/v-ine in temperment. Poetry was a vital tool in this process. It made intelligent people stupid as they tried to study verbal gibberish [aka poetry] scientifically ... Bloody Iambic Pentametres ... [I would ask you to see
Ken Robinson's TED presentation]. Failing to find meaning they would accept what their equally inept and inadequate teachers told them. Repeated over several years you learn to become a well trained dog. In India, the Luddite Socialists wanted us all to be Romantics and wash our panties and lungies in
thIS DESH KI DARTI. And we were supposed to think of it as
sona heerey moti ...
Maybe the educational system became so bad because of poor feedback. There can be an excess of anything especially if the feedback mechanism is bad. And it will be so in Socialist countries.
It naturally becomes bad over a period of time as an idea that was once good [for a particular problem in a particular situation] fossilises over a period of time into a dogma. Like a Stalactite-Stalagmite salt column where the cause meets the conclusion in perfect harmony, it is imprisoned in it's own inertia and acquires an inability to think any differently. The feedback mechanism will be broken down - or severely weakened at the least - since the self aware parts of the system are dumbed down either by force [unruly students] or by indoctrination [obedient students].
Those who could not get into the policy making bodies expressed their distrust of the system and bitterly criticised the polit bureaus or curias. They either exiled themselves or got exiled by those who won the power struggles. Very often if they did not suceed, they either resorted to violence or degenerated[?] into a
bohemian lifestyle. Very few ideologues fade peacefully into
oblivion.
It was asking too much. To ask the masses to stop acting like
philistines . I guess it was bit like asking a lesbian girl to rape a gay man under pain of death.
WTF? That's a load of fun.
The allies of the
indoctrinators would be the pretentious effeminate members of our society who would pain us to learn collections of words strung together that made no rhyme nor sense cause they thought it masochistically ennobling or ubermenschical or erudite or just plain 'romantishque'. Yuck.
Non curo. Si metrum non habet, non est poema
I think that making us learn dumb poems was to make the population at large dumb. It helped in making us dumb as we laboured to learn the meandering meaningless verse and rewired our neurons to see beauty in sub-intelligent sentences by Keats or Shelley. I believe that this was done in order to subjugate the population into obliging feminine serfs ... cows to be milked if you like. And worse, people competed for this privilege, what with the IAS being the pinnacle of achievement in India at one time and the
Mandal Commission [still?] being the most controversial issue in politics.
I wish I had discovered
Linkin Park back then :-(
