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Educating Ourselves to Oblivion
Selling Education, Manufacturing Technocrats, Torturing Souls
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.
Three Myths of Higher Ed
Three myths serve to restrict our education to the narrowly utilitarian and practical. The first, particularly pervasive among conservative-minded critics, is that our system of higher education is way too liberal, as well as thoroughly dominated by anti-free-market radicals and refugee Marxists from the 1960s who, like so many Ward Churchills, are indoctrinating our youth in how to hate America.
Nonsense.
Today's college students are being indoctrinated in the idea that they need to earn "degrees that work" (the official motto of the technically-oriented college where I teach). They're being taught to measure their self-worth by their post-college paycheck. They're being urged to be lifelong learners, not because learning is transformative or even enjoyable, but because to "keep current" is to "stay competitive in the global marketplace." (Never mind that keeping current is hardly a guarantee that your job won't be outsourced to the lowest bidder.)
And here's a second, more pervasive myth from the world of technology: technical skills are the key to success as well as life itself, and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide are doomed to lives of misery. From this it necessarily follows that computers are a panacea, that putting the right technology into the classroom and into the hands of students and faculty solves all problems. The keys to success, in other words, are interactive SMART boards, not smart teachers interacting with curious students. Instead, canned lessons are offered with PowerPoint efficiency, and students respond robotically, trying to copy everything on the slides, or clamoring for all presentations to be posted on the local server.
One "bonus" from this approach is that colleges can more easily measure (or "assess," as they like to say) how many networked classrooms they have, how many on-line classes they teach, even how much money their professors bring in for their institutions. With these and similar metrics in hand, parents and students can be recruited or retained with authoritative-looking data: job placement rates, average starting salaries of graduates, even alumni satisfaction rates (usually best measured when the football team is winning).
A third pervasive myth -- one that's found its way from the military and business worlds into higher education -- is: If it's not quantifiable, it's not important. With this mindset, the old-fashioned idea that education is about molding character, forming a moral and ethical identity, or even becoming a more self-aware person, heads down the drain. After all, how could you quantify such elusive traits as assessable goals, or showcase such non-measurements in the glossy marketing brochures, glowing press releases, and gushing DVDs that compete to entice prospective students and their anxiety-ridden parents to hand over ever larger sums of money to ensure a lucrative future?
Three Realities of Higher Ed
What do torture, a major recession, and two debilitating wars have to do with our educational system? My guess: plenty. These are the three most immediate realities of a system that fails to challenge, or even critique, authority in any meaningful way. They are bills that are now long overdue thanks, in part, to that system's technocratic bias and pedagogical shortfalls -- thanks, that is, to what we are taught to see and not see, regard and disregard, value and dismiss.
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.
Perhaps I'm biased because I teach history, but here's a fact to consider: Unless a cadet at the Air Force Academy (where I once taught) decides to major in the subject, he or she is never required to take a U.S. history course. Cadets are, however, required to take a mind-boggling array of required courses in various engineering and scientific disciplines as well as calculus. Or civilians, chew on this: At the Pennsylvania College of Technology, where I currently teach, of the roughly 6,600 students currently enrolled, only 30 took a course this semester on U.S. history since the Civil War, and only three were programmatically required to do so.
We don't have to worry about our college graduates forgetting the lessons of history -- not when they never learned them to begin with.
Donning New Sunglasses
One attitude pervading higher education today is: students are customers who need to be kept happy by service-oriented professors and administrators. That's a big reason why, at my college at least, the hottest topics debated by the Student Council are not government wars, torture, or bail-outs but a lack of parking and the quality of cafeteria food.
It's a large claim to make, but as long as we continue to treat students as customers and education as a commodity, our hopes for truly substantive changes in our country's direction are likely to be dashed. As long as education is driven by technocratic imperatives and the tyranny of the practical, our students will fail to acknowledge that precious goal of Socrates: To know thyself -- and so your own limits and those of your country as well.
To know how to get by or get ahead is one thing, but to know yourself is to struggle to recognize your own limitations as well as illusions. Such knowledge is disorienting, even dangerous -- kind of like those sunglasses donned by Roddy Piper in the slyly subversive "B" movie They Live (1988). In Piper's case, they revealed a black-and-white nightmare, a world in which a rapacious alien elite pulls the levers of power while sheep-like humans graze passively, shackled by slogans to conform, consume, watch, marry, and reproduce.
Like those sunglasses, education should help us to see ourselves and our world in fresh, even disturbing, ways. If we were properly educated as a nation, the only torturing going on might be in our own hearts and minds -- a struggle against accepting the world as it's being packaged and sold to us by the pragmatists, the technocrats, and those who think education is nothing but a potential passport to material success.
60 Comments so far
Show AllBravo! Excellent essay! Teacher unions should be sending out this essay instead of peddling credit cards to their members. It should be required reading in all those leadership and training courses we are required to attend.
William Astore should get National Excellence in Teaching Award.
Lupita, I could not have said it better. This is an outstanding essay. I, too, wish the teacher unions would take a greater role in transforming society through education. But the first step will be for them to realize that you cannot be both loyal Democrats and true world changers at the same time.
How can any one teach a student who is not hungry?
If a student is hungry, does one need to bother how to teach him or her?
Sunil Samanta
The primary reason for the weakness of the US educational system is the failure of America's business leaders to support it.
All corporate executives want someone else to bear the cost of educating their workers while they enjoy the benefits.
q
True, but there is vast sums of money in education. Just think about how many schools there are, and how many business cater to or do business with schools. I'd assume (america's educational system) is worth trillions- but more expensive doesn't always mean better.
I see college loans, even moreso now, in a similiar light as mortgage loans and cash-back auto financing. it's a credit card where anyone can buy the product. Yes we all should have a right to education, but that's not the same as deserving one.
What is education for? Well, if we're getting practical- a system that helps people learn how to learn.
q: exactly wrong and exactly right
wrong: "The primary reason for the weakness of the US educational system is the failure of America's business leaders to support it"
the nwo/controllers closely control/own the education system and they are getting exactly what they want, as noted by the author of this peice, which is: self-centered, illiterate peons who - to the credit of this dysfunctional system - don't know anything about anything
they can't change a light bulb let alone a flat tire
a lot of them have been ingesting ritalin and other psychotherapeutic drugs since they were 4
they have 6 second attention spans
as i said - exactly the kind of morons the controllers want
but q you were righjt in pointing out "All corporate executives want someone else to bear the cost of educating their workers while they enjoy the benefits."
this is true of corporations in every sense
the single question no capitalist businessman wants anyone in their domain asking is: what damage was done to the living world to facilitate every phase of the life of this product? Asking that question opens Pandora's box...
One of the keys to preventing this question is removing the living world from daily existence...thank you, technology!
dubet, or removing that question from daily existence with.....education! Thank You!
(yeah, well, I'll be reading all your posts from now on as I said. It was those racoons that did it.)
The primary reason for the weakness of the US educational system is BECAUSE America's business leaders DESIGN IT.
It is ‘education’ designed to produce narrow-minded, usable, compliant, content, consuming conformists.
For a functioning society you need not only knowledge and data.
Humanism, philosophy, psychology, history, social and political science, as well as literature are pillars of societies of the Old World. Much of this emphasis is lost, even in Europe, in the blind pursuit of commerce.
Corporatism has bought government, government has designed ‘education’ into a business geared around the corporate needs and it serves itself at the same time because conformism enables the whole corporate/governmental System.
>>> www.scribd.com/people/documents/2169400-ep-heidner <<<
Brilliant analysis...
The Boston schools were established to train the children of immigrants how to be productive workers...
Show up on time, follow orders, don't ask too many questions, etc... (re: John Taylor Gotto)
A captive audience for the enculturation of certain values that benefit the industrialists at the time...
To create a proletariat pool of labor in the cities, and manipulating the levers of the economy...
to keep high unemployment to keep wages low...
The disparity tween the Public schools for the urban poor and the elite private schools and nanny/tutor education for the priveledged few...
Ensures that the ways and means of access to power and knowledge remains in the control of the few....
I would like to comment on this subject but i'm late for band practice..
This is an excellent critique! Finally someone has put together what is really happening with our failing education system in America and the reasons behind the failure. I must say that I value my education precisely because of Professor Ward Churchill and Marx. Where else but college would I be exposed to divergent views? Lets see from TV, no thanks.
Where else but college? How about in a book, talking to people from other places, getting curious. When exactly did we decide to leave it to other authorities, especially the government with public schools, to educate ourselves and our children?
On the matter of business support for higher education, it seems to me that the real problem is the adoption of the free-market, cometitive business model by most universities, especially those that are large and research-oriented. Their administrators and trustees are focused on business opportunities and the capture of intellectual property rights, much more so than on the education of students. Faculty are evaluated on the basis of their ability to attract private grants and establish those ubiquitous "public-private partnerships," not on the basis of their ability to teach.
Education, like health care, is an economic sector where for-profit models are inappropriate and planning, not the mythical invisible hand, should be the basis of policymaking.
To the extent that what claims to be a "university" orients itself toward the job market, it is a de facto tech school.
Dead right. I was thinking of making the same point. As you imply, the word "university" should signal something other than a place to go to learn a trade. Mind you, I think everyone should learn a "trade" of some kind (plumbing? music? mathematics?), but it shouldn't squeeze out all other kinds of learning.
I got a degree in History, once. The phrase that comes to mind here is "Will you have fries with that? Sorry to tell u Prof. but taking such a deg. course today is a ticket to McDonalds or less. I'd rather have my kid be a plumber then tell him to get a deg. in History or Psychology, Sociology or any of the other Liberal arts. They're fine for kids with endowments but worthless for everyone else. As, I cash my latest UI check I'm pondering where I went wrong and listening to dip shit Profs. like this numb nut was one of them. He's just worried about losing his cozy job is all.
Sioux Rose
SEAGLASS: You raised an interesting point. I think the "new recession economy" is going to place a higher stock in those who can repair things ranging from washing machines to leaks in the roof. Many will not be able to buy anything new; plus the US may finally have to face the music as per its trade/debt imbalance. Therefore those who know how to extend the lifespan of those items we do own and require (the Cubans having learned this lesson very well), will have more prestige and likely rewards in the not too distant future. (It will simulate the lesson extracted from Lina Wurtmueller's film, "Swept Away" on a national scale.)
I wish with all my heart that you are right. There are few things I cannot repair. Washing machines and roofs are really easy. After over 40 years, I gave up on repairing consumer electronics because of the cheap Chinese products. I am currently failing at repairing computers because when they no longer boot up, they hit the dumpster, replaced by c**p from D**l and other criminal organizations. I am also failing at installing solar electric systems (even with the help of a really great business partner) because no one wants them. I pray to the Mother Goddess (or anyone else who may be listening) that this is the bottom. Americans have to be the stupidest and most wasteful creatures on this planet. Perhaps if I don't drop dead from lack of simple medical care, I will mine the landfill for goodies. This is where America's wealth is hidden now. All the nicest things that I have (even my cat) came from dumpsters. Look carefully under bridges if you ever visit Washington, DC. The homeless sit on slightly out of fashion leather office chairs discarded by our overpaid overlords. They use slightly worn desks and file cabinets of unpopular colors as building materials. What luxury! Seriously, folks, does ANYTHING happening is this land of disposable muck make any sense whatsoever?
You bring up a good point. I think that a logical extension of the author's point would be that not only do we have to teach the historical mistakes of the past, but we need to be training our populace in ways that will allow them to help to rebuild a more just and sustainable world in the future. That includes such things as the building trades, green architecture, environmental science, law, and , dare I say it....the arts, that help to keep our spirits alive to fight the good fight for a better world.
Seaglass,
Your statement is filled with inaccuracies and a scary anti-intellectual attitude. For example, you seem to to think that Psychology and Sociology are worthless "Liberal Arts". In reality, psychology is a biological science and sociology is a social science (they are not liberal arts). To say they are worthless is one of the most stupid things I've heard in a long time. None of these sciences or liberal arts are worthless -exactly the opposite is true.
Your statement that professors are dip shits who worry about losing their cozy jobs is equally inane. University professors are the people who actually acquire (i.e., develop through science or other research) our culture's most valuable knowledge. These are the scientists, the researchers, the scholars who are trying to improve society. At the same time, they are the educations, the teachers who pass this knowledge on to the next generation. They are underpaid and their jobs are extremely difficult. And for those who have tenure, they don't have to worry about their cozy job.
It's really a good idea to keep your mouth shut when you don't have any idea what you are talking about. You might want to visit one of the conservative forums - you'll find many like-minded colleagues.
Then again Seaglass reveals to us the good example of exactly what this article points to. An education in a limited system leaves a person limited to real education and then prejudiced and angry toward a world they do not fully understand.
"An education in a limited system leaves a person limited to real education and then prejudiced and angry toward a world they do not fully understand."
I bet you will be angry once you do fully understand:
'Collateral Damage' by E. P Heidner, part I and II.
>>> www.scribd.com/people/documents/2169400-ep-heidner <<<
yachtie, I did start to read that and thanks for the link. It is quite a story and I have not finished it yet.
SEAGLASS: What's wrong with being a plumber? Part of this whole trend to glorifying academic education has been to denigrate those who, for whatever reason, do not pursue higher education. Making an honest living ought to be respected, no matter how it's earned.
And, what's wrong with being a chemical engineer or a geneticist who has more exposure to social sciences and history? You don't have to have a career/degree in a subject to be able to have a knowledgeable conversation about it.
A history education may only be useful for things like voting
Sioux Rose
I had a few responses to this well-written piece.
First, the emphasis on technology seems to dovetail quite well with military technology leaving pilots and humans increasingly out of the locus of combat.
Second, the emphasis only on career as a way to earn money breeds contempt for compassion and altruism. Indeed, it's a rather ironic limited goal given the corrupted scope of our nation's money supply thanks to the great gift just donated to the banker caste.
And then the subject of history not being required, wow! Brings to mind the song, "Don't know much about history, don't know much about geography...."
When everything serves Mammon so much that's endowed with beauty gets so casually erased.
sorry. double post
So true. These people do not think that peasants such as us can appreciate, or deserve beauty.
We can't appreciate beauty. We can only feel its loss mutely, and hurt someone to give voice to our loss.
Ask yourselves: if you were among the 2% who own most of the wealth in this wide land, would you really want a system that produced an educated populace in touch with its revolutionary heritage?
The public (another word for SOCIALIZED!) school system in this country used to be the envy of the world. Sadly, slowly but almost completely, it has been reconfigured as the Credential-Industrial Complex, whose job it is to produce interchangeable parts to fit into the well-oiled machinery transferring wealth ever upward.
"The public (another word for SOCIALIZED!) school system in this country used to be the envy of the world."
I'm afraid that's a myth grown in America. Europeans generally thought American education was decidedly sub-standard. American schoolkids spent all their time (when school was actually in session, which wasn't very long) in football or something called "glee club." Their universities/colleges were, for the most part, comparable to European high school. When I first came to this country, I was astonished to find my first task was to teach university students "Composition." Astonished scarcely describes my shock; in my country no child got to the age of 8 without being able to write a "composition": in fact, as all exams, in every subject except math, required the answers to be in the form of essays, it was impossible to escape. Even science was essay form: every experiment had four parts: what was to be demonstrated; materials/equipment used (this alone was a list); process of the experiment (in complete sentences); what was proved, with explanation. In French/German/Latin/Greek exams we wrote essays on the literature in the appropriate language. And this was in secondary school (from age 11 to 18)
I wouldn't suggest that our curriculum would be suitable today; we now have so many more things to learn about. But I do believe that the biggest problem with American schools at all levels is that they have bought into the idea that they exist to provide fodder for the corporate world; that they exist, in other words, to train workers. In my day (and in the Old World) corporations sought employees they could train themselves in whatever skills they needed practised. So they looked for academic knowledge (for white-collar jobs) and signs of the ability to learn (for all kinds of jobs). This they saw in the educational record of the applicants. Somehow corporations have managed to shuck off the job of training their workers and have gotten the public to train them in their colleges, thus saving the corporations time and money they can better spend on multi-million dollar handouts to their starving execs. And a whole industry has grown up of people writing books and teaching courses on how to question job applicants and (for job applicants) how to answer those questions asked. It's a whole industry that didn't exist even 30 years ago, and I doubt the process of selection is one iota improved for it.
Rainborowe
Another way to look at it would be if you are among the 2% of those who have attained the position that our current education system promises to give, and you control the ultimate decision making tools that could or could not change the system, and per the article you are in truth to be totally lacking in any real education......what could you really come up with even if you did want to improve the education system if not the best of more of the worst?
As a retired university professor, I agree with much of what the author says. However, one huge mistake is his claim that:
"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."
This is utterly backwards, and understanding this mistake is crucial to understanding the problems facing universities. What has happened since the original anti-tax movements (e.g., California, 1978) is that state funding of higher education has dropped enormously. At my university, for example, state funding amounted to 40% of the university's budget in the early 1980's, but to only 20% in recent years. This may seem like a small 20% decrease, but it is actually huge and has crippled universities across the country.
Because universities are being starved for funds, they have been forced to: (1) increase tuition and lower enrollment standards; (2) cut programs and departments; (3) terminate faculty, (4) decrease class offerings while increasing class sizes; (5) and in general search for external sources of resources to make up for the continuing shortfalls. This has in turn opened universities up to resources from corporations, which of course tend to favor lucrative fields and training programs at the expense of humanities.
So the fundamental problem is financial, fueled by republican anti-tax policies and our countries general anti-intellectual attitudes.
I think his growth projection comparison to the economy had more to do with the ever growing belief that the only thing our young adults need to understand about their education is the paycheck it will promise them. That message has grown and grown and grown and it's ultimate bursting will cause great social damage or the social damage we see is it bursting. The lack of money going into what really matters parallels our economic bubble that was a bunch of money going toward what not only did not really matter, but what would harm us terribly.
At least that is what I read.....
It used to be that one wouldn't have to complete high school just to work. Nowadays, you need a bachelor's degree and years of experience even for level entry jobs. Even a masters degree doesn't guarantee job security these days.
Of course. When the cuurriculum is "life", that enables us to embrace the job training sub-curriculum with relative ease, allowing far more energy for the big challenges - civic and social life. Ehh? Get to work on that K-12 curriculum, people! Take the kids on field trips to protest the school board meetings! Get them in the board's face! Just imagine what kind of adults they will grow up to be! Rebels!!!
Brilliant, but not enough.
"...What do torture, a major recession, and two debilitating wars have to do with our educational system? ...And here's one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly:"
THIS will be a compelling lesson:
'Collateral Damage' by E. P Heidner, part I and II.
>>> www.scribd.com/people/documents/2169400-ep-heidner <<<
"...you've effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it."
I couldn’t agree more.
"...Like those sunglasses, education should help us to see ourselves and our world in fresh, even disturbing, ways"
YOU WILL SEE THE WORLD IN DISTURBING WAYS, YOU WILL !!!
the first lesson: your body is made of this planet...you are earth, and earth is you...
This is an excellent beginning critique on the fact that American students are being uneducated in today's day and age.
I think one piece missing but easily recognized is the assumed need and demand for exclusive 'specialty' training. Corporations believe and understandably so that all their workers need to know about is whatever narrow slot that they will be squeezed into. The wisdom that to be good at what they do, they need a basic education that includes all areas of the world in which they will work, plus an in depth understanding of their specific niche of that world, is completely missing. This creates a truly valuable worker, because lets face it, all niches are just a niche within the whole, not a whole to which all else is but an unimportant secondary niche. So when you attend 'higher' education it's prevailing purpose is to expand your knowledge primarily in the niche of your choosing. If this were a smart way to educate we would apply it to lower education as well. Higher education is shirked upon and that is a plain fact, shirked on a then given usury fees for the quality given. It's fast food education because it is not public, it's private and profit, quality product is not the goal.
The other crucial piece of education that is necessary for a child to thrive is the education at home offered by a full time parent. This one lesson, that you as a human are more important than anything is the lesson we either value or devalue human life within. How can we expect a child to become an adult that can exemplify that learning if it is never even considered something to be taught?
Pay mothers or fathers to be that stay at home educator and turn higher education into public education and you will see changes abound. The cost to not do this pales in comparison to the little it would cost to do it. We can see the cost for not doing it in action as billions of dollars are consumed trying to save adults that never did get that education of value and yet are considered our best experts in the 'values' markets. It is difficult in extremes to change these adults, but we can prevent children from becoming adults like them.
DougD...retired university prof really has his panties in a bunch. he has outed unknowingly himself as having lived his entire adult life in a cushy job bellying up to the university trough; having weaseled his way into a situation where young people must sit though his agonizingly stultifying pontifications in order to get their expensive degrees. Even now , as his arteries harden from the indignation of being ignored by all but common dreams subscribers, and his dog...between kicks, he screams that psychology is a biological science...that sociology is a social science...that the 'professorially unwashed' ought to "keep there mouths shut". I've got two words for this guy...and his b.s.
And I have one thing for the mouth your two words come from. Soap.
You don't know what you are talking about. It is not remotely a "cushy job bellying up to the university trough. Faculty do not weasel their way into a situation where young people must sit through boring lectures for expensive degrees. You just can't go around making things up because it makes you feel good. Reality exists.
This kind of inane, anti-intellectual discourse is a real embarrassment to the progressive movement. It's to be expected on a conservative site, but not on a liberal one.
The sad thing is that, though he means well, the truth is that all of this will mean nothing within ten years as the industrialized world collapses due to peak oil, coal, natural gas, and metals.
This was a side trip, this vast hedonistic, planet-destroying forced march known as industrialized civilization. As fossil fuel becomes scarce, so will people. In a world where each calorie of food requires ten calories of fossil fuel to make, a reduction in fossil fuel carries a heavy and disastrous price. Wither then the engineering degree? Of course, these feckless technophiles will assert that they will come up with a solution, but that is simply the paradigm speaking, not any coherent sense of physics.
Unfortunately, these for profit and allegedly not-for-profit colleges and universities will be teaching the skills of the dying paradigm and not the skills of the low-energy future, and this will doom the society to collapse, chaos, and insanity.
I appreciate what he says, for I know it's true. I teach English as an adjunct. The problem is, he is focused on the seating arrangement on the Titanic and not the iceberg.
Glub, glub goes Western Civ.
Unlimited growth is impossible.
Here is a link to a Terry Jones [of Monty Python fame] look at history of the Roman Empire: http://www.documentary-log.com/watch-online-d/158/barbarians/. Now, if you put the word, America, instead of Rome, it provides a great deal of insight into Astore's defence of history as necessary knowledge. I believe that history is very important to societies because it does repeat itself. It is just the names that change.
However, as an academic, I have noted that many students should not be channelled into academia. Some are more geared toward practical endeavours as suits their strengths regardless of "class," upper, middle or lower. This is the best thing that a parent could do for their children/child: let them be what they desire to be. That alone would change the dynamics commanding world politics because of family wealth.
One of the best professors I have ever studied under constantly challenged us, the class, to challenge him and the theories he propounded. He used to always ask us: "Are you going to just accept what I tell you without questioning me?" He is one of the greatest, and I have always since questioned theories presented as "there is no alternative" no matter what the science, ideology or popular stance.
Education is a wonderful tool and rather than being used for corporate exploitation of labour, it should be a means to promote the natural creativity of children and their inquisitive impulses. Let them explore without pounding them into preset moulds and the world could be a wonderful place in the true sense of wonder. Exams, tests and grading are the bane of education. Stimulation, experimentation and encouragement are the opposite. Innovation in education is a must for a fully adapted child.
Nobody I have ever read has said it any better than this man. The 'Reniassance Man' is dead.
No Wonder we, as a society, are dead in the water - in the highest places.
I have a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. But my high school English teacher is arguably the person who taught me the most about life. She, though Chinese, had me read classics like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tolstoy, and Dickens. And these were to ignite a passion for literature that continues to this day: the way the world REALLY works.
I'm still science oriented, of course. I design spacecraft for a living, and was once in a PhD program in Atmospheric Science (hence a respect for Global Warming). And, of course, love 'Analog' magazine.
But, what I'm proudest of: my most recent book was 'A Thousand Cranes' by Kawabata, and I'm currently reading 'The Prince of Tides' by Conroy. My daughter volunteers now to help AIDS orphans in Africa: evidence of my life 'well rounded'.
To understand the educational system you need to know it's history.
I recommend you read John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education".
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
Mr. Astore, I agree with above commenters. This is an excellent diary. You are talking about the work that teachers should do if human happiness depends more on what’s in our heads than in our wallets.
I’ll share just a bit about the rewards I found in teaching English as an adjunct at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY. The criteria for admission was simply a high school diploma or a GED, which might make some people think the students were inferior to, say, the Freshman class at Harvard. But I have to say that I was continually impressed by the strong reality-based intelligence of my students. Ideas mattered to them.
A few examples: Luis had been homeless since his mother died, slept on other people’s couches but never missed a class. He read everything I suggested and was full of insights into literature I had not even considered. Maria , a nurse in Mexico, ended up working as bar girl and potential alcoholic. She had never heard of AA when I told her about it, went to meetings, quit the bar and started working as a nanny for a wealthy family on Sutton Place, while still never missing a class – and she described her entire odyssey in a memoir that will probably never be published. Byron’s acute interest in political science, developed in his native West Indies, led him to write one of the best analyses I read of the then-ongoing electoral fraud in the 2000 Florida presidential recount. “In my country I learned how these things are done,” he told me.
People like Luis, Maria and Byron are certainly as intelligent as the more privileged students in our Ivy league colleges, and fascinated by literature and politics for their own sakes, unrelated to their plans for future jobs. They are , however, driven by their sense of economic necessity to choose vocational courses that promise dependable incomes – Luis settled on the pre-accounting program and Maria wanted to use her previous experience in Mexico and train as an EMT. Byron just disappeared so I’m not sure what he did. He was talking about Mortuary Science when I last spoke with him.
People like these three will, in all probability, pursue careers that will never earn them the rewards and respect that tend to accrue to graduates of big name colleges. However, the richness of their inner lives and their self-awareness may well result in happy and fulfilled lives. To the extent that I was able to recognize and encourage them in valuing their own thoughts and experiences, I feel some satisfaction.
bravo/a to you!