Education as an "issue"
Dear readers,
OK, first about "issues." I'm not in favor of dividing up the political revolution into "separate issues" because what usually happens therein is that "issues" are distilled into a set of political promises (made, of course, by some politician or other) which never come to pass. Rather, what's at stake is political power. The political revolutionaries of the Sixties understood this, which is why the Civil Rights Movement was not just about the rights of Black people to eat at segregated lunch counters or to sit where they wanted to sit in municipal buses. It's hard to imagine Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the "I Have A Dream" speech in terms of "see, we have to get this legislation passed, and if we can compromise the writing to elicit the attention of Senators X, Y, and Z..." No. What happened was "free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we're free at last!" and we are all better off for it.
At any rate, at the Daily Clinton (pre-March 2016 version), education was largely ignored. Teacherken would discuss education, but at some point teacherken moved into his "must-read article by Charles M. Blow" phase, perhaps because very few people at the Daily Clinton wanted to discuss educational issues in any depth. There were also some other very cool people who came in and wrote a few education diaries, though they too gave up at some point for lack of attention. We can only hope to do better here at C99%.
Education is nonetheless a potential nexus of revolutionary action. What's already on the burner is the "opt-out movement," the attempt to prevent the Powers That Be from establishing the planned-out stranglehold upon the public school system through relentless, obsessive high-stakes standardized testing. As suggested above, it's not just about tests.
One can see that, given the continuation of the horizon of neoliberal capitalism, maybe a few people people will get training of some sort or other in the future, because how could the elites do without doctors or lawyers or investment counselors, but education has become a different matter entirely. First off, the elites don't really want to pay for the educations of poor people. The obsession with testing is an attempt to 1) create a "crisis" in education and 2) "solve" the crisis through completely inappropriate methods. It is assumed that if things become bad enough people will give up.
Secondly, the conditions of educational labor are pitiful today. Unless you are a tenured professor, hours are long, pay is low, and opportunities to do progressive research are few and far between. K-12 educational labor is hobbled by the obsession with testing, burdening already overworked teachers. College labor is increasingly farmed out to adjuncts with no job security and little pay. The debasement of educational labor provides the necessary conditions for the imposition of ideological conformity upon the learning process. To some extent this explains the overreliance upon testing as a vehicle for school reform -- the tests subtly impose an ideology that might at first glance seem natural but which is in fact an ideology, a substitute for thinking for oneself.
Thirdly, the elites don't like unions either. This is why Teach For America is so important to them. If they can bring in newbies to wreck things for people who have been doing it for twenty years, and then dispose of them as so much cheap labor, this is a stepping stone toward getting rid of the unions.
Lastly, they're not interested in education as education. This is what the "get an education so you can get a better job" Obama schtick is about. You know he doesn't believe it himself -- he sent his daughters to the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, founded by John Dewey -- a landmark institution of progressive education if there ever was one. Malia and Sasha got a real education, one which taught them how to make up their own minds about things. The 99%? Maybe if they're lucky they can get into the University of Phoenix or something like that.
Education originally became an issue in the 19th century, when the growing complexity of capitalist development in the United States created an increased demand for education, and thus also for educational institutions. The landmark history of this development is David Nasaw's Schooled To Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States. There was, of course, the earlier issue of public schooling, before the growth of the universities and high schools -- which was that educational institutions were considered necessary in the middle decades of 19th-century America to domesticate the poorer classes, to keep their children "out of trouble" despite the pitiful wages of their parents.
The creation of public high schools, however, brings up the issue of unequal allotment of opportunity. As public institutions, high schools, and public schools in general, are supposed to promote equal opportunity, but as mechanisms for sorting out a limited pre-managerial class from what is supposed to be a larger, less-skilled working class, the high schools must be radically unequal in actual practice. Inequality in the high schools is, of course, enforced through systems of grading and tracking which have usurped learning as the most important purpose of the schools themselves. Nasaw goes into this in great detail.
On top of grading and tracking, the parents' income inequality powerfully translates into educational inequality for the children. Annette Lareau's ethnographic study Unequal Childhoods shows how this works in practice: the lower-class parents are kept busy earning a living while the lower-class children fend for themselves (especially during the summer months when the schools are out of session), ultimately leading to the individualistic poverty one sees in depressing ethnographic studies such as Jennifer Silva's Coming Up Short, while the upper-class parents put their children through directed activities in processes of "concerted cultivation" which serve as preparation for life in managerial careers.
The problem of education as a mechanism for reproducing class inequality is not going to be solved through "better" education. Giving out more and cheaper degrees to young people (say for instance through Bernie Sanders "College For All Act") might make a lot of people smarter, which is arguably a good thing in itself (also being one of the reasons I support Bernie Sanders). But the class problem has to be solved through class struggle. If we wish to prepare young people for a better world, we will at some point need a better world to prepare them for. Preparing young people for better jobs will at a minimum require better jobs to prepare them for. Education is thus often perceptible as a decoy issue -- an issue to distract people from what's really necessary which is changing the world.
There is, of course, education for changing the world -- what Paulo Freire called "critical pedagogy." Perhaps in the current political environment, critical pedagogy has to be put into education "in the interstices" -- which is to say as an insurgent movement within public and private school systems, rather than as something in its own right. But that, too, has to change. We need modes of education, ways of facilitating the learning of large groups of people to think outside the box, before the box smothers us and the whole process of being nice participants in neoliberal capitalism comes to a bad end. Would there be any interest here in an "education" group here at C99%?
Comments
Education is an area
where we all have a vested interest, whether we have school aged kids or not. There should be more discussion of it.
Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.
Personally I'm a fan of "Classical" education.
As in Greek, Latin and the Classics.
I've only studied two out of the three, and one day hope to learn Greek, but the advantages of having a grounding in the most ancient stories of civilization are obvious to me.
Course I'm also a HUGE fan of History class (Which is also losing out rapidly in modern schooling. Replaced with "Social Studies" which is just a general overview of American stereotypes of the world)
I know this supposedly makes me racist and sexist because I believe in the older methods of education... I just personally don't feel a debate is a debate when you have two groups of people screaming invective at each other.
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
There's nothing wrong with teaching content.
The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci thought as much -- which is why much of the section on education in the Quaderni del Carcere is about why the masses should learn Latin. But present-day "education" isn't about content, but rather the allotment of class privileges. This is why education must be so designed to allow students to see, with their own eyes and their own minds, what a rip-off such a version of education actually is, and how a better educational world is possible.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
Good essay - strikes at the heart of identity politics
The March on Washington was planned, in large part, by A. Philip Randolph, a member of the Socialist Party and Bayard Rustin, a Communist Party member until 1941. I think both these men exercised a very positive influence on Rev. King and steered him to the class struggle as the umbrella for the effort to gain rights for African Americans.
Clinton is totally a spokeswoman for indentity politics and has gone so far as to say that economic inequality is only one of many forms of inequality and a relatively minor one at that. She implied that racial and gender inequality were of greater importance.
If you believe that neoliberal crapola then you are endorsing the continued rule of those who control the political economy. I would say that this is the main reason Charles Koch as indicated he could support her for president given certain conditions. The Kochs stay billionaires by knowing how to protect their wealth.
The richest 1% owns 40% of the nation's wealth; the bottom 80% owns 7% of the nation's wealth. If we as a nation fall into the identity politics trap, this will continue or get worse under Clinton.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
This is absolutely right
I can hardly express how strongly I agree with this. More at some future point; errands today....
By the way, the "tenured professor" advantage has eroded massively. Hubby is such, in the sciences--we live okay on the pay, though all of our money goes to health expenses, as the "premium" state insurance we pay thousands for doesn't cover most things we need. So because of my chronic illness we scrape the bottom of the barrel every year. Now old enough to cash out some IRA money without penalty, so that helps.
Anyway he works 70 hour weeks and has for the last decade or so. He has never taken a vacation in all that time. He is forced to assume duties that are not in his contract, such as teaching an additional summer class, for no additional pay. The administrative duties being shoved onto faculty are more and more horrible. To get research funding and to support his grad students, he has to write dozens of (time consuming) grant proposals, most of which are turned down as it's increasingly competitive and corrupt. The competition for limited funding has led to corruption within the university. He has been plagiarized over and over, with university administrators actually lifting his written proposals and using them without attribution. He has to do careful accounting for all of the grant money, because they will literally steal it out of accounts if he's not watching.
The time left over to do actual science is so small, it's shocking.
Oops, gotta run, you shouldn't have gotten me started!!!!!
Yup, that sounds about right.
I was in Australia for a decade as Australia was following the US from a collegial governance model to a top down executive governance model, and that was the direction that Australia would clearly be getting to in another few decades.
Indeed, it was downhill for the entire decade I was in Oz as far as quality of academic life, yet the positive differential between quality of academic life in Oz and in the US was unchanged when I returned (to be one of those adjunct faculty referred to in the OP, when lucky, an even more low paid and less secure "instructor" when not).
All of that is basically why I am here in Beijing preparing Chinese students to be ready to come and study in a second language, and if we do our jobs right, more often than not kick the buts of the American students studying in their own language.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
The great lie of the Education Myth...
...is that their are jobs waiting on the other side of that high-priced, debt-financed education we're all programmed from birth to obtain. As a result, America certainly has the most educated burger flippers in the world! But what a terrible waste of human potential thanks to debt servitude. IMHO, two things need to happen almost simultaneously. First, we need to destroy the myth of the Loser Job. No job should be beneath dignity and dignified pay. If it requires doing it should pay a living wage, no matter how menial. Second, the Public Sector MUST start paying far more for the work being done by public employees, and that work must include full benefits. Why? Because instead of racing the Private Sector to the bottom they should but pulling the Private Sector upward, due to increased competition. I'll add that these aren't radial new ideas; they were implemented in this country from 1945 - 1981. They are the reason my father, who worked for a large city's public works department patching streets, could afford to raise a family of seven on one income until the inflation of the 1970's forced my mother back into the workforce after a 14-year hiatus. Not everyone wants to or should go to college. Those who don't shouldn't be condemned to poverty, especially in a county that generates so much wealth...
I want my two dollars!
Right -- bringing back education --
means bringing back class struggle. Until that point, why bother? You'll pick up a ton of debt, and for what?
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
The concept of education for economic viability
is about to go the way of the dodo, if it hasn't already. Thanks to automation there are hundreds of qualified people for every job, even for the elite jobs. In 1980 an auto plant needed 20,000 people to produce 1.2 million cars. in 2000 it was 2000 people for 2 million cars. And how many managers does it take to flick the ON/OFF switch?
Except for a relatively small number of true elites - the Steven Hawkings of the world - well, not just that level but you get the idea - all we need are handfuls (a few thousand? a million?) of repair techs and janitors, even cashiers are on the way out. Human carpenters and even cooks will soon become luxury servants.
So education? We will still need MIT and such for the research facilities (and there will have to be more of those than I'm making it sound, but relatively , comparatively few) and a (relatively few) Cornells and Georgia Techs for the couple of hundred engineers we'll need. (most engineering is now done by "data entry clerks" according to a chemical engineer I know) Computers are already better diagnosticians than human doctors; soon all we will need are pharmacists' assistants and someone to monitor the robot surgeons.
What does this mean for education? We need to fill in the holes our dystopia has created; culture and citizenship.
On to Biden since 1973
I really like thinking about an economy with few jobs
due to smart, agile, robot slaves.
However, I think we're being over sold on the notion. The fact of the matter is that in order to save the planet we need every available labor hour we can produce, both human and robotic.
There's tons of work that needs doing that we're not doing, and I fear that the automation argument is being put forward by a bunch of mainstream economists as a way to not address the fact that we need full employment immediately, because the only way to get to full employment is by government buying up idle labor, which goes against their neoliberal beliefs.
Maybe once we save the planet - which probably includes things like the controlled dismantling of some of our coastal cities and far-flung suburbs - then we can talk about a world in which our robot slaves do most of the labor humans used to do, while humans need to figure out how to include things like gardening, home cooking, being a student, etc.... as monetarily valuable so we can all afford to buy the products produced by our robot slaves.
Well yes.
At the present time we need massive cleanup and infrastructure maintenance, but that's short term. I was talking about the result, not the process.
We will almost certainly not see human labor being totally unnecessary for the foreseeable future, but we are already at the point where we need way too little labor to support the population - the vast majority of work is dehumanizing make work, worse than worthless. We can reallocate - we need to rebuild bridges NOW, but a suspension bridge lasts 50 years, and it won't need much maintenance, especially once we stop commuting.
You are absolutely right that we need a new way of thinking about economics, but it is the average working stiff that has to rethink also.
On to Biden since 1973
Actually, I think something along E.O Wilsons'
Half Earth thing needs to happen, along with building, then rebuilding, a smarter and smarter grid as our technology improves, dismantling cities and suburbs, decommissioning nuclear power plants along our coasts, etc.....
I don't see all this as the short term at all.
While I agree with David Graeber that we have created a bunch of bull shit jobs, I disagree with him regarding wondering where our flying cars are.
Both folks like him and our economists need to put their brain power to imagining how we organize our economy and society to address climate collapse rather than a future of robots and more bullshit jobs, etc....
Actually, I think something along E.O Wilsons'
Half Earth thing needs to happen, along with building, then rebuilding, a smarter and smarter grid as our technology improves, dismantling cities and suburbs, decommissioning nuclear power plants along our coasts, etc.....
I don't see all this as the short term at all.
While I agree with David Graeber that we have created a bunch of bull shit jobs, I disagree with him regarding wondering where our flying cars are.
Both folks like him and our economists need to put their brain power to imagining how we organize our economy and society to address climate collapse rather than a future of robots and more bullshit jobs, etc....
Critical thinking is the important part of any education, IMO.
As an educator, I would give our society a D- when it comes to making our citizens well-informed critical thinkers. As evidence, I present HRC and Trump.
Global warming, income inequality, and a whole host of issues that are important to the 99% require a solid base in math, science, statistics, and critical thinking to name a few things Americans increasingly need but seem to despise. The war on science and anti-intellectualism (hello Trump) makes is difficult to discuss the important facts.
The Arts and Humanities have been deemed frivolous and unnecessary luxuries that won't help the bottom line. Most Americans live an unexamined and ignorant existence, measuring worth in dollars and cents, reducing human morality to who can secure the most resources. We are people, not adding machines. We need to understand our place in the universe through science, the arts, and the humanities.
A decent education should foster awe and wonder, not just boredom and facts. Meanwhile, we focus on producing cogs and consumers for the machine, rather than enlightened citizens.
Peace out, tmp.
Meanwhile they are packing up and moving artworks
upstairs at the Louvre, closed to the public, because the Seine exceeds her banks. Peak yesterday or today. I blamed a friend who was there last week. I am considering withdrawing a standing invitation to her to visit.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
Yeah, they have had some crazy storms this year in Europe.
Texas too.
Peace out, tmp.
You have to remember
the powers that be don't want critical thinkers, they want blind obedience. Religions tend to be that way as well.
I must disagree when you say that education became
an issue in the 19th century. Education has always been an issue -- or at least, certainly as far back as Socrates.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Your sigline is my existence
but I try to keep them mental. Eyerolls are not my style.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
For 7 years, my sig line at GOS was,
"To put the torture behind us is, inevitably, to put it in front of us."
When I decided to dip my foot in here, I just couldn't muster the energy to decide on any one particular sorrow.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
In the sense in which I'm using the word "issue" here --
education became an issue in the 19th century because the 19th century, at least in the United States, was the era in which public education began.
Now, my knowledge of the classical era is limited, but AFAIK there was no public, taxpayer-supported education in classical Athens, nor in the Roman Empire of old. If you wanted education back there and then you hired a teacher, and conversely teachers had to make a living by finding patrons. "Issues," then, have to do with public uses of public money.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
It was also an issue in France...
...Victor Hugo being a huge proponent of publicly-funded education of the masses. It is a major theme running through his masterpiece Les Miserables. He is attributed with the quote, "He who opens a school door closes a prison."
I want my two dollars!
You are largely correct about publicly-funded
general education for the masses, which AFAIK was, in western civilization, pretty much a Scottish invention.
What is interesting is that even though education was not to my knowledge publicly funded in Greece circa 500BC, the issues of education were vociferously debated: What to teach, how to teach, and who to teach. The actual arguments have scarcely changed across the millennia.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Right.
I was so focused on saying something about education as a political issue that I didn't think of education as a philosophical issue. Mostly I guess I'm hoping we can do better than the Daily Clinton, which for the most part ignored educational issues while Bush Junior and Obama messed up our schools with "reform."
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
As a product of 1950s and 1960s public schools
I too have been concerned by what I've witnessed.
I graduated high school in 1969. I've always felt I received a more than adequate education and had the privilege of knowing some top-notch teachers. Around the mid to late 1970s, however, I began noticing something odd. My nieces and nephews didn't seem to know what every kid their age knew when I went to school. By the 1980s this situation had become pronounced and very widespread.
High school graduates couldn't read, they couldn't write, they sure as hell couldn't spell. Their deductive reasoning was completely on the fritz. Wry humor was lost on them (and my sense of humor isn't that weird). Geography, history, how our system of government works... they didn't seem to have a clue. Well you've seen the clips of people who don't know where Idaho is and/or can't name the Vice President... of the United States.
Admittedly I didn't focus on education simply because I never had kids in the public schools, but I knew something was going on. I also knew this had to have something to do with the change in our leadership. Republicans took back the White House with Nixon 1969, and remained in power for twenty of the next twenty-four years... with that little interlude of Jimmy Carter in the middle.
But recently I came across an interesting factoid. Our old friend ALEC was formed in 1973, and, according to this article, one of their focus points from the beginning has been education.
This problem has lumbered back into the forefront of my consciousness recently by the presence of a school complex near me. My neighbor's granddaughters go to school there and the woman is constantly telling me things that arouse my ire. I already had several issues related to this school that had nothing to do with the job they were doing. But now that I know it's gone from being an exceptional school to being what can charitably called a second - or even third rate - indoctrination camp makes my blood boil.
You're right, education in this country is much more than an issue. It's nearly a disaster. And it's one that's going to take a long time to remedy.
Meddle not in the affairs of Dragons - For thou art crunchy and good with ketchup
If my children were of the age to be moving through the public
school system now, I would opt out. I live in a "good" school district, Cornell all about, and our co$t/student is over $20K/year. My school taxes pay for about 1/3 student, I hope that student does well.
I also own property in Ontario, and pay taxes there as well. There I can opt to send my school taxes to a bilingual school or a French-speaking only. Every year I get that option. There may be others that I have ignored.
The graduate students at Cornell were just granted the right to unionize. I am not sure of the status of non-tenured and contract teachers. When I was non-faculty, I was a moocher off of SEIU, and received COLA raises off federal funding for that. The custodial staff has been unionized under UAW for nearly 20 years. The grad student fight took that long, but now University spokespeople are all kissy-face. Good for them.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
Back in the first half of the 1970s
we had a cadre of teachers who tried to expand the curriculum - and we also had the "back to basics movement". The teachers were well meaning, but soft on requirements (I was allowed to avoid geometry and calculus) Proper lack of respect for the rules requires at least a working knowledge of the rules - and knowing that is not the student's job. But as for the knuckle draggers from the "back to basics movement" I remember a single quote, "I didn't learn anthropology and I don't want my kid to learn it either!" And then there were "budget cuts". Shop class used surplus WPA equipment. As a result all we learned was how to qualify for a job at a Packard factory.
Teachers who cared got no support, just open hostility. No wonder so many gave up and went through the motions and taught to the test.
God this is nothing but a rant, I'd better stop.
On to Biden since 1973
In shop class we learned “mechanical drawing” (drafting).
You had to have a T-square, a 45˚ triangle and a 30-60˚ triangle. It was all done with pencil and paper (time and expense didn’t permit us to progress to the india ink and vellum stage). Like slide rules, all quickly became obsolete with the advent of electronics, computers, and CAD.
The most useful thing I learned in intermediate school was touch typing. I signed up for it despite the wisdom of the day that typing was something only “secretaries” did. Even though typing as an elective was not gender segregated like the mandatory shop and home economics classes, typing class was overwhelmingly girls.
Don't know if i will be much of a contributor, but
education is very important and is under attack, as are libraries, which ae a necessary adjunct to education, especially among those less well off financially.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I am a teacher.
Public high school. Special needs students. I teach what I am required to teach. I work at a very diverse, urban/suburban magnet campus which is majority Hispanic, more than 50% free lunch, nearly 10% special education (not including 504s). Many teachers can't handle one prep or one ethnic group. Last year I had four, next year I will have five preps, math and science. I have a teaching degree and a master's degree. I make less than a new hire, and less than in surrounding districts. This is not a rant, it is a reality check. My principal requires me to teach from a paperback 'fundamentals' book outlining 'best practices.' It isn't fixable, education, IMHO, because we want a big, individualized something for nothing.
There is nonetheless hope.
First the test-makers must be put out of business though.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
Great article
I know the intrinsic value of quality education but don't really have the chops to offer real world solutions on the matter. What I know does not work, is simply looking through the the capitalist lens and seeing big costs and no benefits.
I live in VT. My property taxes are 2.7% of my homes est. market value annually. 75% of that amount is for public schools. I don't have a problem paying for our schools, which are comparatively quite good, but many struggle and others complain about the burden.
It's a serious sign of our social illness, that the msm talk track is to view investing in people wasteful (education, labor, healthcare) while spending on fast cars, expensive hand bags and exorbitant vacations is T-terrific. One of the things I hope comes out of the Bernie campaign, is a refocus on education with a University right here in VT that has a mission of promoting democratic socialism.
In an effort to accommodate the restrictions
handed to them by the Walker administration (not to mention the outright antipathy underlying those restrictions) and 35 years of ever-worsening national austerity economics, the Verona, Wisconsin school district has modified their retirement plans effective next year.
As a result, this August they will be losing to retirement FORTY-FIVE teachers and support staff, with a combined experience of 930 years, representing about 5.5% of the entire district staff.
The school board knew this would happen. They just couldn't find a way around it. If they replace all of those teachers with n00bs, or even folks with several years' experience, they'll probably "save" more than a million dollars in salary and benefits in addition to the savings of 2 or 3 million per year for the reduced retirement benefits.
The district actually did better than they might have -- another 40 or 50 employees decided to stay, even though they were eligible for retirement.
Nothing quite like the "efficiency" of the austerian "market-based" solutions.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.