We are once again in the late spring graduation season featuring much upbeat newspaper coverage of inspirational speechifying and partying. But this self-congratulatory mood flies in the face of certain realities about the role of education in our society.
Of the truths we hold self-evident, that formal education, the more the merrier, is one of the good guys, essential to a democratic society, (etc., etc.) is one of the most firmly held and least examined.
One of the clouds in this happy picture is the reality that education may not be the key to economic security it has long been considered. It’s a well-rehearsed story: too many over qualified graduates seeking too few jobs, college graduates burdened with huge debt that will take decades to pay off; those twenty-somethings returning home to live in their childhood bedrooms.
Much worse is the fact that, according to recent media stories, of those who do find jobs, a troubling percentage, especially graduates of top tier colleges and universities (the ones our local high school grads would like most to attend) are going into careers the whole point of which is to make money for themselves and others. (An example of several articles along these lines available online: “America’s ‘Brain Drain’: Best And Brightest College Grads Head For Wall Street,” Huffington Post.)
Is it not an indictment of the whole educational enterprise, public and private, from top to bottom, that such a large percentage of its products go into such self-serving and redundant careers instead of employing their creativity to address the many problems of this troubled world?
An important statistics-based critique coming out of the 1960s and ’70s is that whatever educators’ intentions, our educational institutions reproduce and legitimate social class structure from one generation to another. Studies such as Bowles’ and Gintis’ “Schooling in Capitalist America” thus refuted the myth that in America education trumps class. I’m not aware that their conclusions have ever been refuted.
The rhetoric of college catalogs and of many of those graduation day speeches challenges students to think critically, to bring creative thinking to bear on the problems around them . But according to this analysis, it’s not that educational institutions are failing in pitched battle with, say, inequality and corporate hegemony; it’s not even fighting the good fight. Education, far from solving the problem, is, in Eldridge Cleaver’s old slogan, actually is more part of the problem than part of the solution.
In the most discouraging finding of this critique, schooling’s actual role is to prepare students, by training them to put up with boredom, sit in rows, follow orders, for boring jobs in the status quo.
There are many good-hearted and well-intentioned teachers, all of whom have themselves chosen a more creative and useful career path than helping the rich get richer. It’s a troubling contradiction that the net effect of the institution to which they give their lives is to blend all too comfortably with the problematic state of things.
At least it ought to be troubling. Education, which purports to encourage critical, creative , problem-solving thinking, is no better than most institutions at bringing such thinking to bear on itself and its role in and effect on the world.
We go on arguing (endlessly) about standardized testing for students and teachers. But there is little discussion of the aims of education beyond financial measures (the boast, which it seems may be in need of revision, that the better educated we are the more money we make in a lifetime).
It would seem that education itself could use some educating, starting with values clarification.
No Comments