...But Who Wants to Live in an Institution?

Professor, 

 All this talk of higher education reminded me of that old joke about marriage. :)

You had so properly wrapped the last chapter up it seemed to me I could add little to it. Or did you just expect a woman to want the last word? :)

Clarification: The statistics on literacy I quoted aren't from the book but other sources.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, Somewhere along the way, the idea of a real education, the joy of learning,  and maybe even learning things in hopes of becoming a better person and to put the world in some sort of moral context,  got lost. I like this quote from Dr. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College:

"Education, as classically conceived, is not primarily for citizenship, or for making money, or for success in life, or for a veneer of "culture," or for escaping your lower-class origins and joining the middle class, or for professional or vocational training, whether the profession is honorable, like auto repair, or questionable, like law; and whether the profession is telling the truth, like an x-ray technician, or telling lies, like advertising or communications or politics. The first and foundational purpose of education is not external but internal: it is to make the little human a little more human, bigger on the inside."

Once upon a time an education was about something other than getting a job. Now, a degree (not necessarily an "education" by the above definition)  isn't guaranteed to even to that for you.  How education is defined and sold (and this idea must be "sold" to get families to continue to go into debt for a system that often doesn't do what it promised) is based on the concept of turning out good workers. You may not learn anything in school that makes you "bigger on the inside" but you will learn how to follow instructions and arrive someplace on time Monday through Friday. You will learn not to question authority or ask why things are done the way they are. The industrial revolution needed education systems to produce workers who could do these things. Critical thinking? Not so much. Your quest for "truth and reality"? How is an employer going to score that on a performance review?

Here is a short video that explains how we got here (and what's wrong) by Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms. 

I've heard more than a few people bash the Occupy Wall Street protesters for stating that their student loans are difficult to repay and they'd like to be relieved of that burden. The argument goes like this: "Oh you wanted to take out a loan to go to school and now you've graduated and don't want to fulfill your obligation. That isn't the way the real world works." Yes it is. It's called bankruptcy. Dave Ramsey,  constantly reminds listeners and readers that "student loans and IRS bills are the only two things that are not bankrupt-able". I wonder if students are constantly reminded of this on campuses and in meetings with advisers.  If we have credit card companies play by new rules that make it easier for cardholders to understand fees and penalties, shouldn't we be be making sure an 18 year old knows what they are getting in to? You can get protection from creditors if you bought a car and house you couldn't afford, but you can't get relief for trying to get an education? And let's be honest these universities, clearly (as my son will tell you) admit students that they know should not be there.  Students are being promised, from entry into the system in elementary school,  that a degree guarantees a job, which it doesn't. Not any more. Richard Vedder and Andrew Gillen recently addressed this in their article, The Solution to Student Loan Debt: 

"The kids dutifully listen to their parents and mentors. In many cases, earning mediocre grades from less-than-mediocre public high schools makes the kids ill prepared, so 40 percent fail to graduate within six years. Those who persevere and graduate face a bad market (largely because of the poor public-policy decisions of politicians they did not select), but even if they graduated in a period of prosperity, they would be very likely to take a job that is quite different than the one they expected when beginning their higher-education journey. This is economic and academic child abuse."

Once students are admitted and on the road to becoming good employees, they are pushed even farther along that twin road, the one that leads to being (or should I say continue being) good consumers.  Hedges uses Berkeley as an example, but we could apply his complaints to nearly every university.


The corporate hierarchy that has corrupted higher education is on public display at Berkeley. The wealthiest of the elite schools, such as Yale and Stanford, assign dormitories by lottery. They treat their students with a careful egalitarianism, expecting all to enter the elite. Berkeley and many other public universities, however, assign rooms depending on how much a student can pay...Corporations have cut deals with universities to be sole providers of goods and services and to shut out competitors. Coca-Cola, for example, has monopoly rights at Berkeley, including control of what kinds of drinks and food are sold at football games. Corporations such as Cingular and Allstate blanket California Memorial Stadium with their logos and signs. (p. 93)


The credit card companies have been banned from peddling their wares on campus to students who are (thanks to our education system that fails miserably at economics) financially naive. Of course, if they can't hit up the students directly on campus they can do it indirectly at Bank of America Stadium or the Capitol One Bowl. Much about colleges and universities has been branded. How interesting that the older use of that word meant marked by the owner.


And lest anyone think that universities, students, and professors are havens of free thinking and troublesome inquiry, we are set straight by a Berkeley undergrad student, Chris Hebdon:


"Too many students and professors are distracted, specialized, atomized, and timid. They follow trends, prestige, and money, and so rarely act outside the box." (p. 93)

Where is all this leading us? Hedges puts the choice before us: If we do not grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political reforms," we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with the artifice and the seduction of the consumer society, and wields power through naked oppression. (p. 90)