Owning Education

Madame M:

Little stomach turning in Oil!  In fact, it takes about 100 pages before you get hooked, because the pattern (and the points) don’t begin to become clear until about then.  Or maybe my cerebral fluid was a moving a bit slow when I read it, lol.

Education has become a servant of money.  School districts have banners in their gymnasiums that read “Coca-Cola (or Pepsi-Cola, or any of a number of corporate purveyors of non-nutrition) is THE (my emphasis added) proud sponsor of the X School District.”  (And for those who think this is not a general phenomenon outside education:  How many corporate named things in/on PUBLIC buildings (or even the buildings themselves) are there if you think about it, let alone campus ones?)

Kow-towed college and university teachers are increasingly powerless cogs in the corporatized machine.  Their administrators are like politicians, who spend anywhere between 1/3 and 2/3rds of every typical day having to raise money (and we wonder why they don’t get any of OUR business done, assuming they would even want to do OUR business)—college officials have to keep the money coming in, along with the prestige, attention, “modernization,” and other aspects of the corporatization of education.   The supposed goal of EDUCATION takes a dim, name-only backseat (WAY in the back) of the education bus to moneysville.   Places around the country differ from Penn State only perhaps in specifics, not in underlying causes.

Socialized to obey?  Of course! It’s not JUST that students are processed instead of educated, or that their curiosity is stunted, or that their critical thinking skills are undeveloped.  Teachers complain that “students don’t ask questions,” but when you have a culture and a system that discourages doing so (or at times even makes it irrelevant!), it shouldn’t be so surprising to those teachers.

Yes, Madame, yes!  Your paragraph on the humanities should be pasted on the front cover of every humanities textbook in the country!  Here’s a star of the humanities with words to emphasize your point:  “We begin to die when we are silent about the things we believe in.”  Martin Luther King Jr.

Education has become, like many things in this society, about manipulation.  The test-prep business is instructive (pun intended).  It’s all about the APPEARANCE.  Manipulate the process to make it to the next step.  Hedges found that out when he was having his son prepare for standardized testing.  “The tutor told my son things like ‘stop thinking about whether the passage is true.  You are wasting your time thinking about the ideas.  Just spit back what they tell you.’”  (101) It worked, proving that those who can afford tutors and other manipulators (such as daddy donors who can make big contributions and so can get their kid’s application skid-greased) get the “elite” education.

But as Hedges says, it merely fills these “elite” (yes, I’m increasingly choking on the word) classrooms with large numbers of drones.   And yet these drones will go off to Wall Street or Corporate America/World upon graduation, many with beginning salaries of $120,000 or more.  Did they earn these salaries by truly being exceedingly keen and proficient?  No, Hedges says, they merely showed they could do large amounts of work (regardless of whether it was meaningful or insightful, which it probably wasn’t, and with no real evaluation of results) and faithfully regurgitate information.  They have little recognition of, or regard for, concepts and systemic effects.  Their intelligence and proficiencies are narrow and selective.  They cannot see (indeed, probably have little ability to do so) themselves as they truly are, or their culture as it truly is.  They swim in narrow currents in their minds—currents that deal largely only with their personal situations and those of their immediate families, plus the problems and opportunities of their business “profession.”    “They do not see their own biases” and “are blind to the gaping inadequacies in our economic, social, and political structures and do not grasp that these structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster.” (102-103) Social intelligence, emotional intelligence, moral balance, true creative ability: all stunted.  This culture determines worth—both business and institutional—by wealth.  It’s all about winning (and especially winning monetarily), with no thought of (or concern for) the cost to other individuals, or to the society.

Pointing out the exceptions to the above only serves to prove the rule.

Students who want something different find themselves feeling like freaks, and the isolated feeling is reinforced by the system.  The decay in the culture has left them with fewer places and people where they can hear and discuss big questions.  Largely gone are the days of discussing those questions in church groups.  And literary societies and debating clubs of the kind produced in scenarios like Dead Poets Society are no longer vibrant on most campuses, and many are effectively coma-like.   That the Humanities are so disparaged (“what can you do with that?  Worthless!”) is evidenced by the stat that only 8 percent of graduates now choose to attain such degrees. (108)

"Frank Donoghue, the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, writes that liberal arts education has been systematically dismantled for decades.  Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished.  Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite.  They do not know how to interrogate or examine the economic system that serves the corporate state." (108-109) As Hedges says, this includes many students who are otherwise very bright, and these go on to work for their unexamined corporate masters.

The list is long about why the Humanities are so important.  Hedges has given us one reminder, from Matthew Arnold’s piece of 1869: “’the best that has been thought and said,’ would provide standards to resist the errors and corruptions of contemporary life…But Arnold’s eloquent defense of knowledge for its sake, as a way to ask the broad moral and social questions, has been shredded and destroyed.  Most universities have become high-priced occupational training centers.  Students seek tangible vocational credentials.” (109)  This credentialism has become so intense that it often becomes THE objective of everything connected with “education.” Actual functional ability (and let’s completely forget about knowledge, awareness, or conceptual understanding) becomes nearly irrelevant.

The corporate capitalists that directly or indirectly run most everything convert all to the bottom line of “profit” and usefulness to business.  This, Hedges says, creates an anti-intellectualism, a distrust of intellectual inquiry. “And as small, liberal arts schools have folded—at least 200 since 1990—they have been replaced with corporate, for-profit universities.  There are now some forty-five colleges and universities listed on the NYSE or the NASDAQ.  The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit school with some 300,000 students, proudly calls itself on its Web site: ‘Your corporate university.’  The only mission undertaken by for-profit universities, and increasingly non-profit universities, is job training.  And as universities become glorified vocational schools for the corporations, they adopt values and operating techniques of the corporations they serve.  It may be more cost-effective to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts and whittle down or shutter departments like French or history that do not feed vocational aspirations, but it decimates the possibility of a broad education that permits students to question the assumptions of a decaying culture, reach out beyond our borders, and chart new alternatives and directions.” (110)

When money becomes everything, when Mammon sets the effective curriculums and effective paths, education is transformed into a processing function to churn out unquestioning systems managers—and make maximum money doing so.  The frenzied pace of society, along with credentialism, then leads to more demand for online classes, as they cost the least and are the most profitable (one reason because they can draw from a wide geographic area).  These online classes are rarely evaluated for true results, because the results would often be glaringly bleak, and besides, nothing must get in the way of profit.   Online classes are what people want, because they need a “convenient” way to get a degree, and institutions want to “give them what they want,” primarily because the classes are so profitable.  Sure, there are exceptional classes and exceptional instructors, but most online courses are sub-par at best.  They give the illusion of education, and the customer and the provider are largely happy with that illusion.  They may not quite be degree mills (yet), but they are on the road.

American education has prided itself on being much vaunted and much desired around the world.  The growing elements of illusion described above are reducing that.  For example, German high school exchange students coming to America essentially give up a year of their education in coming here—American education is held in such low regard, that a student must take the year over upon returning to Germany.  Even many college bound students are electing to decline opportunities to come here and instead choose to go to college/university in their home country.

Because although it doesn’t have to be that way, “American greatness” that politicians and their rabid followers like to thump their chests about is increasingly a hollow façade.