From Pine View Farm

Get an Education or Learn a Trade? 4

In the Roanoke Times, Tom Arcaro has a thoughtful piece on the purpose of education.

Buried in it is a statement that helps explain why technocrats and wingnuts seem so determined to rip the charter from public education and give it over to profiteers for-profit charter schools (emphasis added).

The blind algorithm of capitalism, extolled in its virtues by neoliberals both domestic and international, creates the kinds of systems that will keep it moving forward. Eisenhower understood that the military-industrial complex was a natural outgrowth of a maturing capitalism, and the same phenomena have occurred to produce the education-industrial complex.

Are these two ends of higher education — to serve democracy or serve the economic system — mutually exclusive? No, not literally, but I have never in my three decades teaching in higher education had a parent ask how majoring in sociology will make his daughter a better global citizen.

Institutions of education “create the public” more than just teach it.

. . . and an informed polity is inimical to conservative dogma.

Read the rest.

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4 comments

  1. George Smith

    April 7, 2013 at 4:19 pm

    As an observation, MSN and Yahoo — and just about everyone else — run weekly pieces, paid for by resume banks and such, on what jobs pay the most, and which careers to avoid. It’s all about filling corporate America’s immediate term needs. Period. You read these “top 5” paying jobs columns for a few weeks, and they’re always the same. There’s a reptilian and repellent nature to all of them and one quickly comes to detest the writers and editors who are responsible for them. Underlying it all is a many decades long American ethos — and ethos is not a good word for it, it doesn’t get at the inner poison — that one is primarily defined by one’s job, the circumstance of always having a job, and how much that jobs earns. Which dovetails into what I mentioned previously, that to have a low-paying job that leaves one in poverty is a personal choice. 
    You could write really thick books on it. For instance, the reconfiguration of the old word “equity” in America — which means quality of fairness in a system to what one, as billionaire, has in whatever he owns. Two weeks ago I read one of these careers and jobs columns and the author had come up with five things the really wealthy are said to understand better than the rest of the proles. Number one was equity. Now I ask you, equity, defined in this manner, is not something one just goes out to pick up. You have to buy it, or be contracted into it, as by inheritance. Who do you know, in their jobs, or anything else, have ever been in a position to get equity? So we have this deep perversion of language, and I say this as someone who really knows language, as well as thought.

     
  2. Frank

    April 7, 2013 at 4:43 pm

    When they say “equity,” I think they mean this as the number one definition, not as opposed to the number one definition.

     
  3. George Smith

    April 7, 2013 at 9:59 pm

    Exactly. In the new usage equity equals virtue in the American system. Equity was the very essence of the rotting heart of Mitt Romney, which he and the billionaires who supported him interpreted as virtue. The public didn’t see it that, which astonished him. You could see the total amazement in him that he wasn’t elected president, even weeks afterward. Equity has come to mean, in our system, the ability to ruin a vast holding and everyone under the top tier involved in it for getting more, for getting even more “equity” in something else. Rinse and repeat. Equity is what you count on, or counted on at Facebook, to make you an instant multi-millionaire in an inflated IPO. Equity is an essential part of the rigged economic game, something that the 1 percent has, not something large numbers of Americans have access to. Equity means nothing to people whose 401k’s have taken a beating and ruined their plans for retirement. Equity means one thing for the topmost, quite another for everyone else. Wouldn’t we all like to have equity?!  

     
  4. Frank

    April 7, 2013 at 10:21 pm

    I’ll be brief.  

     

    I have long believed that Karl Marx was a lousy prophet, but he was a hell of an economist. His prophecies were infected by hope, the last evil released from Pandora’s box.

     

    He hoped that a future of oppression could be avoided and conjured up his fantastickal “workers paradise” as an outcome.

     

    And we know how that worked out.

     

    We are seeing the dialectic become real in our time, as the uneasy truce negotiated by trade unions falls sore wounded.

     

    I am not optimistic. All I foresee is dystopia.

     

    I’m glad I am old. I fear for my children, but at least I will not have to watch.