This post first appeared on aud.life
I submitted the title of the keynote I'll deliver next month at the ICDE conference in South Africa: "Technology Imperialism, the Californian Ideology, and the Future of Higher Education." It's the middle phrase in that series that I've been thinking about this week, in part because I just read Richard Beck's We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s (inspired to do so by this book review by Rebecca Onion).
The book is a cultural analysis of the panic surrounding child sexual abuse (and often Satanism) in the 1980s, and the focus of much of the book is on the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach -- right up the road from where I now live. Among other things, it traces developments in the field of psychology surrounding sexual abuse, repressed memories, and multiple personalities, alongside the explosion of self-help groups particularly in and around California. The book also makes the point that this all put the focus of the (so-called) epidemic of child sexual abuse on the individuals accused, not on structural issues. Moreover, the focus was often on perpetrators outside the family, and as Onion describes in her review, very much a reflection of middle-class anxieties about childcare.
I vaguely remember the McMartin case, which holds the record as the longest criminal trial in US history. I certainly remember the moral panic surrounding Satanism, probably because I was as a teen a huge fan of heavy metal. It was quite strange to read Beck's book while sitting here in Hermosa Beach, as there were several places I know well now that make an appearance, including St. Cross Episcopal Church, just a few blocks from where I live. One of the accused teachers in the McMartin case allegedly held a Satanic black mass there (and a preschool that ran out of the church was closed in the midst of all the panic about sex abuse in the area).
Every Thursday at noon (for the past few weeks at least) I have actually gone to St. Cross Episcopal Church for an Al-Anon meeting. This week, I sat in the meeting unable to really concentrate fully on everyone's "shares." I was thinking instead about Beck's book, about this strange history of the South Bay, about the relationship between the "Californian Ideology" and "the mind." I was struck too in the meeting by this relentless focus on the individual and her/his own story -- although I think that "alcoholism" has a strange agency in the Al-Anon framework -- and not, again, on the systems that lead to addiction, abuse, violence. One of the things I've found really helpful about Al-Anon is that you hear echoes of your own story in others'; but that resonance doesn't point towards structural issues. It just points to lots of individuals sharing the same experiences.
I want to think more about this piece -- it's connected to the self-help movement and it's connected to psychology and cognitive science more generally and it's connected to the media and to computer technology: this focus on the individual. It is a cornerstone of the "Californian ideology." And I think it's shaping the future of education in powerful but unexamined ways.