I just came back from San Francisco, where I spent the last five days at the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference. Like every year, I navigated through a sea of presentations, speeches, and discussions designed to improve our understanding and practices of education. Although I encountered people who were doing interesting work, much of what I saw was far from groundbreaking. It reminded of the following quote from Stuart Hall, the greatest Black intellectual this side of W.E.B. Dubois:

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies? What is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they’ll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.

Like Hall, one of the great theorists of his generation, I’m not against theory. In fact, I spend much of my personal and professional life ensconced in it. Still, I sometimes worry that much of our intellectual practices serve only to keep us employed and do little to improve the human condition. Instead of informing social interventions, political struggle, or transformative education, much of the ink that we waste is spent dabbling in minutia.

Maybe I’m just irritable because of my long layover in Las Vegas or the fact that I left my half-finished Barry Bonds/BALCO book, along with unread copies of “Amerian Theocracy” and “Freakonomics, in the airport and returned to find that someone had stolen them (”Americans are anti-intellectual” my ass).
Either way, I want to send a shout out to all the people who do REAL work in the field: the teachers, social workers, activists, and public intellectuals who are struggling for the people by merging theory and practice.