This nicely written piece is pertinent to a number of the issues touched on in the last couple of days; an excerpt:
What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.
In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it.
That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe....
The questions are straightforward enough: What do we teach, and why? One might assume that in an aspiring democracy like ours the answers would be equally straightforward: We teach whatever contributes to the development of autonomous human beings; we teach, that is, in order to expand the census of knowledgeable, reasoning, independent-minded individuals both sufficiently familiar with the world outside themselves to lend their judgments compassion and breadth (and thereby contribute to the political life of the nation), and sufficiently skilled to find productive employment. In that order. Our primary function, in other words, is to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily—one might say incidentally—about producing workers.
I’m joking, of course. Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital, and please note what’s modifying what. It’s about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy. And what of our political perch, you ask, whether legitimate or no? Thank you for your question. Management has decided that the new business plan has no room for frivolity. Those who can justify their presence in accordance with its terms may remain; the rest will be downsized or discontinued. Alternatively, since studies have suggested that humanizing the workspace may increase efficiency, a few may be kept on, the curricular equivalent of potted plants.
If facetiousness is an expression of frustration, it does not necessarily follow that the picture it paints is false. The force of the new dispensation is stunning. Its language is the language of banking—literal, technocratic, wincingly bourgeois; its effects are visible, quite literally, everywhere you look.
Start with the newspaper of record. In an article by New York Times editorialist Brent Staples, we learn that the American education system is failing “to produce the fluent writers required by the new economy.” No doubt it is, but the sin of omission here is both telling and representative. Might there be another reason for seeking to develop fluent writers? Could clear writing have some relation to clear thinking and thereby have, perhaps, some political efficacy? If so, neither Staples nor his readers, writing in to the Times, think to mention it. Writing is “a critical strategy that we can offer students to prepare them to succeed in the workplace.” Writing skills are vital because they promote “clear, concise communications, which all business people want to read.” “The return on a modest investment in writing is manifold,” because “it strengthens competitiveness, increases efficiency and empowers employees.” And so on, without exception. The chairman of the country’s largest association of college writing professors agrees. The real problem, he explains, is the SAT writing exam, which “hardly resembles the kinds of writing people encounter in business or academic settings.” An accountant, he argues, needs to write “about content related to the company and the work in which she’s steeped.” It’s unlikely that she’ll “need to drop everything and give the boss 25 minutes on the Peloponnesian War or her most meaningful quotation.”
What’s depressing here is that this is precisely the argument heard at parent-teacher meetings across the land. When is the boss ever going to ask my Johnny about the Peloponnesian War? As if Johnny had agreed to have no existence outside his cubicle of choice. As if he wasn’t going to inherit the holy right of gun ownership and the power of the vote.
At times, the failure of decent, intelligent, reliably humane voices like Staples’s to see the political forest for the economic trees is breathtaking.
(Thanks to Michael Kremer for the pointer.)
Recent Comments