Yes, we are moving into the New Dark Ages of ignorance.
The New York Times reports today that a growing chorus of governors wants to increase STEM funding and cut funding for liberal arts.
When the Kentucky governor, Matt Bevin, suggested last month that students majoring in French literature should not receive state funding for their college education, he joined a growing number of elected officials who want to nudge students away from the humanities and toward more job-friendly subjects like electrical engineering.
Frustrated by soaring tuition costs, crushing student loan debt and a lack of skilled workers, particularly in science and technology, more and more states have adopted the idea of rewarding public colleges and universities for churning out students educated in fields seen as important to the economy.
When it comes to dividing the pot of money devoted to higher education, at least 15 states offer some type of bonus or premium for certain high-demand degrees, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“There will be more incentives to electrical engineers than French literature majors, there just will,” Mr. Bevin, a Republican, said after announcing his spending plan. “All the people in the world who want to study French literature can do so; they’re just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayers like engineers will be, for example.”
Or, as Gov. Patrick McCrory of North Carolina once put it, higher-education funding should not be “based on butts in seats, but on how many of those butts can get jobs.”
The outcry against the liberal arts is loudest among Republican politicians. Senator Marco Rubio, for example, has called for more welders and fewer philosophers.
A while back, Governor Rick Scott said we don’t need more majors in anthropology (his own daughter majored in anthropology).
President Obama said we don’t need majors in art history. (At least, he apologized, but his instinct was to demean those who want to study art history and to shower praise on those getting work skills.)
Who are these guys? A decent society needs philosophers as much as it needs welders; it is good for welders to study philosophy. A decent society needs teachers and students and scholars of foreign languages, literature, art, history, the social sciences, and the humanities.
The new utilitarians are yahoos. H.L. Mencken called such shallow people the “booboisie.”
If you don’t know who you are, how you got here, why life is worth living, what kind of life is a good life, how to balance difficult choices, then you will indeed live a life that is nasty, brutish, and short.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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This is once again typical in an anti-intellectual era. It concerns me so much to see this article in the Times, alongside a chart showing first year salaries in fields without so much as a mention that education is the lowest at $34,000. Should we soon stop funding scholarships to encourage people to become teachers? Where are our values?
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When the values of a country are being set by the wealthy, money will be all that matters. Survival of the fittest will be all about who collects the most coin, not who is the most creative, athletic, talented in the arts, philosophical, spiritual or empathetic. It will be a cold cold hard world, devoid of joy and beauty (unless you can afford it). We are moving very quickly into the dark dull ages.
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John W. Gardner
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).
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” … life that is nasty, brutish, and short.”
That’s from Thomas Hobbes’ LEVIATHAN .. which I recognize only as a result of a mandatory philosophy course I had to take as part of obtaining my Bachelor’s. 😉
Here’s the full quote … describing the world without civilization, education, and cooperation among people … or what Hobbes called the anarchic “state of nature” :
THOMAS HOBBES, from LEVIATHAN, published in the year 1668:
“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
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I do hope that Jack will send his reply to the NY Times!!
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I recently found this article at Harpers’ about how neoliberalism, how market-based models & theories of education, and how school privatization in general has has infected colleges. In this article, the author details how, in an ever-increasing way, higher education’s mission is now merely about churning out needed workers, and nothing else.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/
The author, William Deresiewicz, contrasts a certain university’s century old mission statement:
“The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.”
… has been replaced by the vague neo-liberal concepts of
“leadership
“service
“integrity
“creativity
Deresiewicsz argues, “Let us take a moment to compare these texts.
“The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three.
“A spatial structure, the sentence also suggests a temporal sequence. Thinking clearly, it wants us to recognize, leads to thinking independently. Thinking independently leads to living confidently. Living confidently leads to living courageously. Living courageously leads to living hopefully.
“And the entire chain begins with a college that recognizes it has an obligation to its students, an obligation to develop their abilities to think and live.
“Finally, the sentence is attributed to an individual. It expresses her convictions and ideals. It announces that she is prepared to hold herself accountable for certain responsibilities.
“The second text is not a sentence. It is four words floating in space, unconnected to one another or to any other concept. Four words — four slogans, really — whose meaning and function are left undefined, open to whatever interpretation the reader cares to project on them.
“Four words, three of which — ‘leadership,’ ‘service,’ and ‘creativity’ — are the loudest buzzwords in contemporary higher education. (‘Integrity’ is presumably intended as a synonym for the more familiar ‘character,’ which for colleges at this point means nothing more than not cheating.)
“The text is not the statement of an individual; it is the emanation of a bureaucracy. In this case, a literally anonymous bureaucracy: no one could tell me when this version of the institution’s mission statement was formulated, or by whom. No one could even tell me who had decided to hang those banners all over campus. The sentence from the founder has also long been mounted on the college walls. The other words had just appeared, as if enunciated by the zeitgeist.
“But the most important thing to note about the second text is what it doesn’t talk about: thinking or learning. In what it both does and doesn’t say, it therefore constitutes an apt reflection of the current state of higher education. College is seldom about thinking or learning anymore. Everyone is running around trying to figure out what it is about. So far, they have come up with buzzwords, mainly those three.”
William Deresiewicz talks about Scott Walker changing Wisconsin’s state university mission to “to provide the needed members of the workforce.”
He later asks a different university president the most important thing students should learn, and received this one-word response:
“Leadership.”
Deresiewicz eventually articulates why neoliberalism with this “leadership” emphasis troubles him.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/8/
William Deresiewicz:
“The worst thing about ‘leadership,’ the notion that society should be run by highly-trained elites, is that it has usurped the place of ‘citizenship,’ the notion that society should be run by everyone together.
“Not coincidentally, citizenship — the creation of an informed populace for the sake of maintaining a free society, a self-governing society — was long the guiding principle of education in the United States. To escape from neo-liberal education, we must escape from neo-liberalism. If that sounds impossible, bear in mind that neo-liberalism itself would have sounded impossible as recently as the 1970s. As late as 1976, the prospect of a Reagan presidency was played for laughs on network television.
“Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right.
“Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of intellectual and moral purposes.
“That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar American society: high-quality, low- or no-cost mass public higher education. An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources. An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it.”
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Julie Tran’s quote “The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in it’s students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously and hopefully.” is exactly what those involved in destroying education at this point in time want to have happen. They want “robots ” who will do their bidding without the desire or ability to challenge them.
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That should have said it is what they DON’T want to have happen
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American corporations have moved away from training their own workers to expecting public institutions to do it for them. This has saved them countless millions in costs and improved their bottom line.
This isn’t much different than Wal-Mart relying on public assistance to subsidize their employees wages, since the company doesn’t pay them enough otherwise.
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This is not just happening in public colleges and universities. The president of Mt. St. Mary, a Roman Catholic college, who is a businessman instead of a scholar, is calling for the same thing. I smell ALEC, the Koch brothers, and other Friedman disciple rats.
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Yes. We live in Western Maryland, not exceedingly far from Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, MD, and the local newspapers have been filled with this.
The K-12 (even including pre-K) education has for a number of years been in the process of becoming training for good little cogs in the corprorate wheel, thanks to the charterization of public schools and decreasing their funding, and the increasing strictures upon even “regular” public schools to test and test the kids and teach to the test (at the expense of classes in the arts, music, literature, and even critical thinking skills), and now this is bleeding into the colleges.
It’s really a damned shame. 😦
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I recently heard on the news in Florida that the state schools will accept a computer language in lieu of a foreign language as a language requirement. I am sure this decision is influenced from the college and career ready team.
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The thought of it them all at once, ALEC, the Koch brothers, the Friedman disciples, is hard on the stomach — the smell would overwhelm the senses.
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Chris in Florida,
Mount St Mary is the college from which Bridget Anne Kelly graduated. She had the “leadership” to become NJ Governor Christie’s Deputy Chief of Staff and announce “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
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Notice the similarities between the college president’s analogy of counseling out/shooting the struggling students with a Glock (saying not to think of them as cuddly bunnies) and drowning them to Eva’s Got to Go list and her getting rid of the kids who struggle and need help? These edupreneurs have an ugly, horrifying vision of a future that borders on eugenics and a master race of grit-endowed winners and disposable losers in education. Chilling at the least!
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Frustrated by soaring tuition costs, crushing student loan debt and a lack of skilled workers, particularly in science and technology, more and more states have adopted the idea of rewarding public colleges and universities for churning out students educated in fields seen as important to the economy.
This paragraph is a model of efficient mendacity.
First, there is no shortage of STEM workers. Any supposed shortage exists simply to apply downward pressure on wages. It is more accurate to say that there is a “shortage” of Science and Technology workers who are willing to work for the low wages that industry would like to pay.
Secondly, it is curious that states are simultaneously frustrated by the (mythical) shortage of Stem workers while also complaining of high tuition and crushing loan debt, since those issues are things that states theoretically could address. Yet instead of making tuition affordable, they want to cut teaching in other areas simply to try and produce more workers for a STEM shortage that doesn’t exist.
It seems that they want universities not to be place of learning, but to be another contributing factor in reducing wages for workers.
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I was going to say the same thing, there is no shortage of computer and software engineers, systems analysts, and the like, especially with the increasing amount of work that is outsourced overseas. Plus, there is a lot of age bias in engineering; once engineers hit late middle-age, they have much harder times finding jobs.
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Absolutely. H1bs were pushed by Silicon Valley to lower tech worker wages. Then, they started sending work overseas which also transferred our expertise and global advantage to countries that don’t like us very much. It is what John Kerry called the “Benedict Arnold” businesses before he was ruthlessly swiftboated by the Republicans during his presidential run. Couple that with companies now pushing subpar software that is “good enough” and you see the myth of the STEM shortage. Mostly, once past 35 or a woman, tech companies won’t even look at you, no matter how good you are. Silicon Valley is like a big frat house of nerds and geeks. BTW, when I called my then Congressman Kasich to complain about raising the H1b cap and the myth of a shortage, I was ridiculed on the phone and basically told “tough”.
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Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently show there is no shortage of qualified STEM graduates in this country.
What there is, instead, is a shortage of STEM graduates who will work for the (comparatively) low wages companies insist on paying.
The same thing is heard about skilled trades in manufacturing: employers are always whining about their inability to find skilled workers, but what they’re really doing is complaining about having trouble finding skilled machinists and tool-and-die makers willing to work for $15.00 an hour.
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Exactly right, Michael
Companies outsource to lower costs not because they can’t find skilled workers
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Michael – The liberal arts have a way of introducing the notion that all people have intrinsic worth. Can’t have young people believing that crap. Might get ideas about how they want to live and what they deserve to be paid, among other things.
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You’ve hit the nail on the head, Christine.
If you teach young people critical thinking skills, if you expose them to history, great literature, and so on, they might “get ideas” about their rolls in society and how they should be treated.
Cogs in the machine are what is wanted, cogs who will be content to work hard for less pay, and not question their bosses. Or authority in general.
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Even if you are ignorant enough to see education as just a job training program, the Arts can still be sold as necessary for any “job” that requires thinking, awareness of culture, etc. Think law, medicine, politics, journalism, teaching Actually, I can’t think of anything that isn’t enhanced by having a liberal arts education. A great thinker once said,”One needs a liberal education so one can tell if another man is talking rot.” Boy do we need that skill in today’s election year. We can’t have a working Democracy without an electorate that can’t be manipulated by propaganda and lies. This article shows that our representatives in government have hit a new low. God help us!
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”One needs a liberal education so one can tell if another man is talking rot.”
Precisely why the Kochs and their ilk would like to put an end to a liberal education. (But not for their own progeny!)
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I have two science degrees. I worked as a scientist (geologist) for over two decades before I transitioned into teaching earth science.
I would not have been as effective and successful in either career without the liberal arts coursework I was required to take. At the time, I resisted taking those “distribution” courses….I wanted to take as many geology courses as I could, but once I entered the workforce I soon found out how valuable those humanities courses were to me, both as an employee and as a person.
The way I teach science now HAS to have elements of the humanities incorporated into it. I couldn’t do it otherwise. These different disciplines cannot stand on their own, they are subjects that must be integrated into the larger whole that society considers to be an education.
I love science deeply, and yet, without my education in the humanities I feel I’d have little way to appreciate and express that appreciation to others.
Foolish, foolish people, ignoring thousands of years of human development, advancement, and growth.
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Exactly, rockhound2. Mr. Zorba is a molecular biologist, and he says essentially the same thing.
Science, and teaching science, cannot be isolated from the rest of society and human history. The humanities, sociology, psychology, history, and so on.
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The denigration of the humanities, including history and geography, is creating generations of people who cannot see a historical trend if it hit them in the face, and causes people to fall for bigotry, propaganda, and logical fallacies that, frankly, explains the slavish devotion of Donald Trump supporters.
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I have a BA in French, and an M. Ed. in ESL. I started my career as a French teacher while I studied for my master’s degree. After completing my M. Ed, I was hired to teach English to a mostly Haitian population, and I am sure my competence in French helped land me the job. I used French with parents all the time since they spoke little to no English, but they understood French. I even took courses at NYU in Haitian Creole which I learned quickly due to my foundation in French. My facility in languages was an asset to my job, and was an ice breaker with parents that were always delighted and shocked when I reached out to them in their language.
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The Neoliberals want us to believe that the purpose of a college education is employment, yet they have no idea what employment in 20 years will involve.
In addition they have cooked up a false preference for STEM programs claiming there is a shortage of qualified STEM job candidates and STEM college graduates. Neither is true. They are building another layer of false policy building upon a previous layer of false policy. Why can’t we not shoot holes in these stupid arguments. We need to be employing ridicule against these nonsensical politicians as they do not understand what they are asking for … or if they do, they are crooked through and through.
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What is wrong with this line of thinking is assuming that an undergraduate degree in a certain field is a terminal degree. Many graduates with liberal arts degrees often go to get graduate or professional degrees in other fields — including law, business, med school, vet school. Do their average salaries get factored into these statistics?
Also, there are frequent articles that bemoan a lack of “soft skills” among job applicants, which goes beyond just knowing stuff — the ability to communicate effectively, think critically, creativity, knowing how to present ideas to a public. Steve Jobs was known for favoring liberal arts majors among his employees, because they were better able to relate the products to a mass public.
The focus of this thinking seems to be that you’re not worth anything unless you can earn money. This doesn’t lift one to higher levels in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which is what on thing that I have understood education to be about — making connections with others, self-actualization, etc.
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Over half a century ago, the historian, urbanist and critic Lewis Mumford presciently saw us moving into what he called the Electronic Dark Ages.
Observe people leashed to their phones, increasingly/willfully ignorant despite the tsunamis of information they are exposed to, and we see that Mumford was prophetic.
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Well, this is very innovative and progressive, I must say:
“Last month, a group of Uber customer service representatives in the US received a script unlike any they’d seen before. For the most part, it was a survey on driver satisfaction, but at the end it switched to another topic: why a union wouldn’t make sense for drivers.
Uber’s customer service reps were told they’d be using the script when contacting the company’s drivers in Seattle. They received a spreadsheet that included the names of thousands of drivers, ordered from most to least active. Over the next several weeks, reps worked their way through more than half of the list. A former customer service rep who was assigned to the calls said Uber didn’t offer much explanation for the new assignment, but she and her teammates made their own assumptions.”
Groovy “disruptive” Uber is using the same old anti-union techniques companies have relied upon for decades.
So much for -“It’s a new model for work!” It’s the same old low wage model, dressed up in a bunch of techno-blather.
Incidentally, Uber is run by a former Obama Admin official. Literally got his government job based on the support of rank and file labor union members and then launches an anti-union campaign the moment he goes thru the revolving door.
This is what Sanders means when he says it’s rigged. He’s right. And they all know it.
http://qz.com/619601/uber-is-using-its-us-customer-service-reps-to-deliver-its-anti-union-message/?can_id=&source=email-todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-22216&email_referrer=todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-22216&email_subject=todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-22216&link_id=8
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An Uber driver is the latest serial shooter in Michigan. Perhaps the “old way” of checking credentials has some merit.
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A good way to keep students from what is really important. This has been going on for some time.
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Remove the liberal arts and that removes REAL choice. It is also a lie that liberal arts majors can’t get jobs. As the following link shows, there is no college major with 100% unemployment.
For instance, Civil Engineering has a 12.4% unemployment rate compared to Fine Arts with a 5.6% unemployment rate.
I would not recommend Dentistry and I don’t think Dentistry is a liberal arts major
Oh, and music education has an unemployment rate of 2.4% and Performance Arts was 7.1% compared to Computer Engineering at 6% and Computer Science at 4.2%.
http://www.studentsreview.com/unemployment_by_major.php3
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There is a substantial debate about whether or not there is a shortage of science and engineering majors. There is little debate that we need more diversity among STEM and computer science professionals. However, addressing that need at the expense of deep, broad, and critical understanding of the social world in which the products of science, engineering and computing knowledge is developed and implemented is dangerous. Innovation unhinged from human values is even more threatening. See more at: http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Science-and-Human-Values_pub.pdf
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I agree. All scientists and business leaders would benefit from exposure to the arts and perhaps, some ethics as well.
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Oh, where is Mencken now that we so desperately need him? The late, great, Paul Fussell filled those shoes for awhile, as did Murray Kempton (who got his start in journalism as Mencken’s copyeditor). Charles Pierce of Esquire magazine (and author of the excellent “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free”) is sounding more and more Menckenesque.
But we are mostly bereft of the kind of acerbic social criticism that serves to put philistines like Matt Bevin in their place….
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John Oliver rocks, as does Samantha Bee, especially in her coverage of the Republican debates.
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Oh, I watch them both, and enjoy them. But Mencken was a horse of a different color, and wielded his intellectual superiority to, say, a Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, with razor sharp with and a prose style that to me is simply enviable.
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In England these people are called “Philistines”
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Ray Bradbury was indeed prescient, as we can see from Paul Thomas’ blog, mentioned by Diane earlier:
” ‘The old man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage.’
Fahrenheit 451 ends with Montag as a criminal on the run who finds himself on the outskirts of the town among refugees, mostly outcast professors.”
https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/fahrenheit-451-60-years-later-why-do-we-need-the-things-in-books/
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The chart in the article shows the lowest paying major is education. Then way at the top of the article I see an ad for entering a teaching residency program and earning a master’s degree–one of the Gates-funded teacher prep programs.
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I have long supported an education rich in history and literature, natural science and theoretical math. As a teacher, I encounter many students who do not want this at all. They just want to get a job. We used to honor these children by teaching trades, attempting along the way to instill citizenship ideal and love of community. Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation” met its challenges with this background.
But the standards movement eroded the idea that the teacher was in charge of his own class, so the independent thinker is giving way to the interpreter of scripts and statements, wondering if the statement means this or that to whomever is making up the test, that great arbiter of thought these days. Try to find time to teach a kid what kind of bird he is seeing on his way to school. Try to develop a discussion over any book not covered on some test. Try to argue that the test is not the great arbiter of absolute truth. You will be met with a flood of words like domain and accountability that give the appearance of respectability but are vacuous.
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One of the biggest, most critical and severe national security issues in the US is the lack of highly trained and qualified translators for non-Western European languages, let alone specific, non-prestige dialects of the more popular Western European languages. Additionally, the US desperately needs historians, anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, and psychologists who understand at a fundamental level non-Western European/Anglo-American cultures and societies. Finally, we need religious historians, theologians, and philosophers who understand the world views, beliefs, and lived experiences of non-Judeo-Christian cultures and societies. All of these are liberal arts and all of these are as fundamental to national security and the global economy as STEMers—if not more so.
My own grandfather was career Army, serving in WWII, Korea, and training troops in the very early stages of Vietnam build-up before retiring. He spent a significant amount of time observing and/or working with the Soviets (the big bad of the time) and several cultural groups within the Middle East. He was adamant that the Soviets were NOT a real threat to the US or the West. He rather facetiously summed it up as “they barely had shoes and their commanders made them dig latrines rather than use flush toilets in Berlin”. Instead, he said that we should be concerned about the Middle East because we did not understand the cultures and societies there at a fundamental level. Sadly, it appears that he was right. Liberal arts are how we address these issues.
Jefferson believed this, as did many (if not all) of the Founding Fathers. To them, a proper education was a classical one, with plenty of languages, philosophy, history, and literature, not just mathematics. How have we gotten so far that understanding?
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Agree, but we need to be extremely wary of the current “classical” education model in vogue with a number of ultra-conservatives, homeschoolers, and Christians-with-a-capital-C.
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Washington Post, 2/18/2015: We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training
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We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training
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Completely aside from the hatred of the liberal arts is the victim-blaming meme that there are not skilled workers. In fact there are millions of highly-skilled, intelligent people, with degrees in various majors or with no degrees, now un- or underemployed. People really need to start punishing any politician, of whatever stripe, pushing the ‘skill gap’ doo-doo.
It’s a scam designed to push corporate training costs onto government and often seems to come from the same people who are pushing for spending cuts overall.
Neither primary schools, secondary schools, nor universities are vocational schools. Let’s start forcing the ‘skill gap’ people to admit they are against learning. Make it plain – fine, you don’t want a university, you don’t want a high school, you want an IT training centre. Make them admit they don’t want universities, or just don’t understand what they are.
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“,,,reformers… declare ‘We’ve got to blow up the ed schools.’ ” -co-written by an employee of a Gates-funded organization and published at Philanthropy Roundtable (can be found in the K-12 tab). It follows that all academic departments would be targeted.
The title of the article is “Don’t Surrender the Academy”. The richest 1% assume they own America’s universities, including the public institutions. …they have the right to “blow them up”. …and, later, the right to take their endowments.
Please contact your U.S. senators and ask them to deny confirmation of John King as Secretary of Education.
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That’s Frederick Hess who wrote “Don’t Surrender the Academy”:
EXCERPT:
————–
https://www.aei.org/publication/dont-surrender-academy/
FREDERICK HESS: “Instructors at education schools often throw up obstacles to some of the most promising ideas in school reform, like teacher accountability, non-traditional recruiting, alternative certification, use of monetary incentives, and school choice. Unable to get a foothold in colleges, reformers have largely surrendered the commanding heights of academe to ed-school professors devoted to protecting the status quo in school management.
“Reformers take refuge in the foothills—starting nonprofits and small businesses to train principals and superintendents, relying on think tanks and advocacy groups to spread their ideas, and turning to unconventional sources like Teach For America as talent pipelines. The reform community has enjoyed some success with these tactics, but it’s been inevitably limited. There are 8,000 school superintendents in America; the Broad Superintendents Academy produces a dozen great new ones annually. In a nation of 3.3 million teachers, TFA provides no more than 6,000 raring to break molds per year.
“Moreover, many of those TFA alumni eventually head off to schools of education (where you must punch your ticket in order to progress along the tenure and salary assembly line set up by most school districts). There they spend years being tutored by professors who believe school choice is morally dubious, ‘efficiency’ is a troubling concept, strict discipline constitutes cultural imperialism, and the real solutions to lousy schools are reducing poverty, adding ‘professional development,’ and increasing expenditures.
“A few dozen reformist scholars at think tanks and in academic departments are dwarfed by the tens of thousands of faculty in teacher-preparation programs at state colleges of education. Not coincidentally, the lion’s share of reform-minded academics today almost all work in departments outside the education establishment: Eric Hanushek, Terry Moe, Checker Finn, Paul Peterson, Caroline Hoxby, Marguerite Roza, Dan Goldhaber, Paul Hill, Macke Raymond, and the like are all found in economics departments, policy schools, or think tanks.
“This won’t do. Economics departments and policy schools can only offer perches for a handful of education specialists. And because these thinkers are not instructing education students, they are isolated from the rising generation of teachers and school leaders. Their remove from education networks on and off campus also makes it tough for them to alter professional norms, build new communities of thought, or connect with young talent.
“Teacher-preparation programs make lots of money for the colleges that run them. They enjoy strong back-scratching relationships with the local school systems surrounding them. Schools of education are closely connected with the national associations of superintendents and principals (many of whom are alumni), and they have the ear of school boards and state legislators. Even if a reform-minded dean should sweep into such a school, the rank-and-file faculty members who embody the field’s conventional wisdom will routinely outnumber and outlast him.
“Given their steady revenues, credentialing authority, political relationships, and millions of alumni uninterested in major change, ‘blowing up’ the existing schools of education is just not a viable option. That poses a thought: If they can’t beat ’em, maybe education reformers should join ’em? There would be many payoffs if new thinkers were planting their flag and bringing reform research and analysis to ed-school campuses.
“For one thing, faculty at major universities have an outsized influence in setting the nation’s research agenda, steering professional academic associations, directing federal research funding, and training the next generation of education thinkers. A university setting can confer greater credibility on reform-friendly scholarship. Op-eds and declarations by Ivy League professors come with a built-in megaphone that amplifies even banal arguments and findings. Terrific studies by independent scholars or organizations can also be influential, but don’t have this same institutional heft.
“Also, universities can provide stable financial support. It costs up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary, benefits, and research, travel, and office expenses to support a top-flight scholar at a think tank. Salaries and overhead support, teaching assistants, access to the college fundraising apparatus, and other university amenities massively subsidize faculty at education schools. Why should reformers cede that turf?
“Further, the presence of pedigreed, reform-minded scholars can make it more comfortable for graduate students, young faculty, and aspiring educators to question ed-school dogma. Education researchers frequently drift into conventional thinking not necessarily out of conviction, but because that’s how pretty much everyone around them thinks and talks. They enter a community where academic publication, perks, and jobs all come more readily if they, like everyone else, assume certain things. The range of “legitimate” thinking can and should be expanded.”
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Has any country on Planet Earth ever improved its educational system by doing what Hess recommends, and by taking the anti-intellectual, market-based approach to training its teachers?
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Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mom said,
“The memory is loaded with unintelligible words, to make a show of, without the understanding’s acquiring any distinct ideas: but only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of mind, which teaches young people how to begin to think. The imagination should not be allowed to debauch the understanding before it gained strength, or vanity will become the forerunner of vice: for every way of exhibiting the acquirements of a child is injurious to its moral character.” from “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”
I have this posted on the wall of my classroom, it is from “The Scholar Gypsy” and it speaks of the longing we all have for something more than facts:
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose tomorrow the ground won today –
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
The humanities point the way to that “spark from heaven” most wish to discover. Facts alone cannot give us this. It is “inspiration” it is untestable and perhaps unteachable, it certainly cannot be tested. Perhaps it does not build or invent, but it points the way to why we build and invent, or perhaps to why we ought to build and invent.
I understand this is not an argument, it will not answer the engineer types or the oligarchs, and perhaps it is like faith, if you have never experienced it or felt its touch, it makes no sense to you. Scrooge does not understand why his nephew values Christmas though it has never put a scrap of money in his pocket. Those that champion STEM possibly are in a similar state, we cannot know how to value something we have never tasted. How do you explain a flavor to someone who has never tasted it? What is needed is not more data, but enlightenment. But to receive it you must be open to it.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
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