It’s telling that schooled once meant becoming educated, today it’s slang for getting humiliated.
Two hundred and nine years ago, in an infant republic, a great American president observed: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
One hundred and sixty-three years ago, another great American president signed the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges. This was done the year after the Civil War commenced, a matter of months before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. He signed the legislation over the objections of senators like Minnesota’s little-remembered Henry Mower Rice, who squealed “we want no fancy farmers, we want no fancy mechanics.” That great American president knew what needed to accompany the end of slavery. Speaking in Milwaukee, he declared: “Free Labor insists on universal education.”
Eighty-seven years ago, with the Great Depression wreaking havoc and world war looming on the horizon, a third great American president identified the principal weapon required to ward off fascism: “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”
Nowadays, poll after poll show increasing numbers of Americans are losing faith in higher education, questioning whether it’s worth the cost. More and more Americans are cooling on schooling despite one analysis after another showing higher education remains a good investment that pays a handsome return. That suits today’s American president just fine and has for some time. Nine years ago, he said: “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
Keeping people uneducated is a dog-eared page in every despot’s playbook. The power-hungry are forever on the lookout for ways to control people and ignorance has always been a reliable handmaiden of tyranny. What’s curious is how, in the last decade or two, scholars themselves started telling young people they might be better off skipping college.
I’ll grant you that college is not for everyone. I’ll also grant you that there are many paths that can lead to a happy and successful life. But I still find it weird that so many Americans have grown so skeptical and dismissive of higher education. And I find it downright dangerous that America chose to more or less stop teaching civics. As a nation, we tuned out the timeless wisdom of Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR and put a man who is at war with higher education in the office they once occupied.
The whole purpose of schooling has been downsized, whittled from the broad enrichment of civil society to the narrow aim of workforce preparation. With business and industry cheering them on, policymakers formulated school-to-work programs that were all the rage in the 1990s. They flopped.
The next scholastic fashion trend was STEM, focusing students on science, technology, engineering and mathematics to prepare them for a successful career. This fad isn’t faring any better. There’s nothing more STEM than computer science. Big Tech needed coders, software developers, hardware engineers. A generation of kids were funneled into the field. Once the tech industry discovered it could use artificial intelligence to perform these tasks and began employing AI tools, the jobs these kids trained for started evaporating.
The cratering of tech industry jobs is a cautionary tale. Business and industry have jobs that need doing, and they want schools to churn out workers with the skills they demand. Catering to this by making vocational training the primary if not sole mission of schools is a mistake, especially here at the dawning of the age of AI. Much of today’s work will soon be technologized out of existence.
When the training students receive becomes obsolete, business and industry don’t care and don’t take responsibility, they just carp about educators failing to keep up with changing times. Odds are the lesson parents and politicians take from all the complaining is there’s a pressing need for some new fad putting schools ever more in the service of the economy. Here’s hoping we beat the odds, because this would be both a horrible waste and a missed opportunity.
The future direction of American education should be based on the message our nation’s youth sorely needs to hear: Don’t train for today’s jobs, they’ll be gone tomorrow. Develop lasting skills that equip you to adapt to rapidly evolving conditions. Don’t dwell on memorizing information, concentrate on learning how to think, analytically, strategically, imaginatively, compassionately. Learn the scientific method. Learn how the world works. Study history. Study economics and politics. Learn what makes people tick. Study human behavior, study language. Cultivate creativity, resist the temptation to let a machine substitute for your own artistry. Do these things, you’ll not only make a good living, you’ll make a fulfilling life, you’ll keep a democracy, you’ll stay free.
Yes. Not at all surprising to me that public education funding for elementary through high school education has been happily diverted to private schools by the same people who dismiss higher education. A financial elite with and elite access to understanding how the system of government, finance, and extraction of resources (human and natural) has been emerging for some time now...starting with elite-limited access to higher education schools (for the elite upper class to maintain control of the same). Now the same "keep them dumb and useful as malleable workers" planning is underway for all levels of education. The most threatening to this "dumb and controllable" strategy is universal good education....especially liberal arts colleges, where questions are encouraged and discussed freely about all aspects of culture, history, science, religion, etc.
We are living in constantly changing and evolving human circumstances and culture. A population which is diversely educated has the greatest ability to adapt, create and respond effectively to those changes in a healthy and effective way...and to do so while maintaining communities of respect and cooperation. A population without understanding is and feels vulnerable and easily frightened by change, and has few skills to adapt. Such a population fragments as a community...and fights within itself for survival based on perceived differences rather than cooperation and collaboration.
Politics isn't about left vs right: it's about top vs bottom. This is a variation of the same dynamic.