Educational Evolution
Higher education is touted as an essential feather in one’s cap if a white collar income is your goal. It is seldom touted as anything else, in fact; almost no mention is ever made of its shaping effect on mind or character, or of the importance of a citizenry knowledgeable of history and literature and capable of evaluating the underlying moral dilemmas that face us in the modern age. It is represented almost entirely as a purchasable commodity that leaves one essentially unchanged except for crippling debt and the much vaunted degree on a resume.
Not long ago, I thought about this when I read this disturbing prescription for the economic crisis that faces many families in America’s broad middle swath. It comes courtesy of this editorial by “conservative” columnist Michael Gerson, yet it bears almost no resemblance to traditional conservatism:
Conservative economics offers three positive alternatives: Provide a growth-oriented economic environment (including opportunities to sell overseas). Give workers the education and skills to succeed in a modern economy. And subsidize the wages of lower-skill jobs to provide a decent living.
Only the first recommendation sounds recognizably “conservative.” The other two? Scary. I get worried when I hear free people referred to merely as “workers” dependent on government to to give them “skills” in a “new economy” they do not understand. And subsidizing wages? Since when is it government’s job to decide what constitutes a “decent living,” or to meddle in selected industries’ wages?
This piece on the news the other night provides an example of “skills training” happening. The secretary of education has earmarked $17 million to help anyone who wants to attend a coding bootcamp that has a high rate of success in job placement once the program is completed. It costs $21,000 for 6 months of intensive training in computer coding. “We have moved to a skills-based economy,” states the CEO of the boot camp.
It raises some questions. I think “skills training” is great. But it is not “education.” Are these students going to boot camp to supplement their education, or to replace it? Interesting that the secretary of education will invest so much in skill, but not in creating critical thinkers who may question the status quo — the amount of power wielded by the federal government, for example. Those who attend this boot camp will have a great chance to become one of the more elite members of society. Do they have any awareness of values, any ability to evaluate costs vs. benefits in the field of technology? If they are going to have a megaphone as voices in our society, shouldn’t they have educated character as well? Shouldn’t their technical skill be balanced by equally important knowledge in the humanities?
Steve Jobs dropped out of college. (Interestingly, he was often asked to speak at convocations — a sign of the identity crisis higher education is caught in, if you ask me.) But he apparently never regretted it. He made his millions, and he has wielded enormous influence on the direction we have gone — in social relationships, in education, in our concepts of art and artistic property, in publishing. He has had a privileged seat at the president’s table, and a correspondingly huge influence politically. All of this has been surrendered to a person who did not survive higher education, and whose intelligence, great though it was, was extremely limited and focused.
One wonders how a free society can last when our power institutions throw their weight behind such limitation, churning out “workers” rather than serving educated, free-thinking human beings whose voices are supposed to matter.
