Selling Education, Manufacturing Technocrats, Torturing Souls: Three myths of higher education

[Karmadillo]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175076/william_astore_educating_ourselves_to_oblivion

Selling Education, Manufacturing Technocrats, Torturing Souls
The Tyranny of Being Practical
By William Astore

Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Our students don't perform well in math and science. The high-school dropout rate is too high. Minority students are falling behind. Teachers are depicted as either overpaid drones protected by tenure or underpaid saints at the mercy of deskbound administrators and pushy parents.

Unfortunately, all such headlines collectively fail to address a fundamental question: What is education for? At so many of today's so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer: For a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in today's collapsing job market.

Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life -- 20 years' service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level -- I'm convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It's simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.)

And here's one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job -- if it's merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods -- you've effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it.

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Over the last two decades, higher education, like the housing market, enjoyed its own growth bubble, characterized by rising enrollments, fancier high-tech facilities, and ballooning endowments. Americans invested heavily in these derivative products as part of an educational surge that may prove at least as expensive and one-dimensional as our military surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As usual, the humanities were allowed to wither. Don't know much about history? Go ahead and authorize waterboarding, even though the U.S. prosecuted it as a war crime after World War II. Don't know much about geography? Go ahead and send our troops into mountainous Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires," and allow them to be swallowed up by the terrain as they fight a seemingly endless war.

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[babylonsister]

1. Education, another reason I like this new prez, because he values it! nt

[anonymous171]

2. Good article. The Humanities may not seem "practical" to the scientist or the businessman.

However, they are vital to our society. Our focus on science and business has turned our society into a nihilist consumerist shell of what it once was.

[BlooInBloo]

3. Good points, but gives short shrift to poor folks who *of course* want to better their lot in life..

by going to college.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

4. doesn't address the fact that a good education does NOT equal a good job.

Not nowadays. The baby boomers are the most educated generation in history but nobody will hire us because we're OLD.

We never got promoted. We were shunned because we were intimidating and smarter than our bosses.

[Karmadillo]

5. Kick because it makes some pretty good points

nt

[jazzjunkysue]

6. Yea and no. Being able to recall exact names and dates and events does not

guarantee a voter can make an informed decision.

If you can restate the Roe v Wade case, it still doesn't help you understand that abortion is a class issue: Safe legal abortion will always be available to the rich. It still doesn't help you recognize that the issue was never religious, nor about a tiny lump of indeterminate cells. It still doesn't help you recognize that it's used as a wedge issue to drive certain voters to the polls.

I'd sooner support educating students to comprehend how a national headline in a news article would eventually effect their personal lives.

Interpretation, and the misuse of statistics for political persuasion is more important than the recall of distant facts and figures.