A friend sent me a link to an article yesterday asking my opinion. She refrained from providing her opinion until I sent mine. It is a New Yorker article about the same college issue I posted about several days, maybe weeks, ago. You know the issue, that there are too many people going after a college education who don't need it and incurring so much darned debt.
My initial reaction was do I really have to read six pages of this blowhard say the same things over and over? But, as I read, I realized two important reasons to keep reading and to respond: 1) this is actually a book review in the guise of a position piece, and 2) people who make decisions about funding for financial aid might be reading this and giving it weight.
Professor X thinks that most of the students he teaches are not qualified to attend college. He also thinks that, as far as writing and literature are concerned, they are unteachable. But the system keeps pushing them through the human-capital processor. They attend either because the degree is a job requirement or because they’ve been seduced by the siren song “college for everyone.” X considers the situation analogous to the real-estate bubble: Americans are being urged to invest in something they can’t afford and don’t need. Why should you have to pass a college-level literature class if you want to be a state trooper? To show that you can tough it out with Henry James? As Professor X sees it, this is a case of over-selection.
It’s also socially inefficient. The X-Man notes that half of all Americans who enter college never finish, that almost sixty per cent of students who enroll in two-year colleges need developmental (that is, remedial) courses, and that less than thirty per cent of faculty in American colleges are tenure-track. That last figure was supplied by the American Federation of Teachers, and it may be a little low, but it is undeniable that more than half the teaching in American colleges is done by contingent faculty (that is, adjuncts) like Professor X. [emphasis and color ADDED by ME]
Read the whole article here.
Despite the obvious issues that are being ignored (race, class), perhaps the most salient in light of this excerpt and the assertions that follow, is that neither the author or the reviewer consider how K-12 education fits into higher education attainment, preparation or achievement. More on that later.
[As a sort of aside, the comments that follow the above quote regard the feminization of the college teaching ranks -- one thing we can know for sure about Professor X, he's a man. We can guess he is a white man who went to one (or two) of those expensive private liberal arts colleges, and he didn't get financial aid in the forms of grants, but loans].
Menaud allows that Prof X has a few unpublished novels gathering dust, but this sour grapes recrimination of the state of affairs at college is as a result of allowing anyone to go to college got published, not him not being in the position he thinks he should be in. Hmmm...
It pains me to have to engage this kind of review of this kind of book because it is devoid of all the important debates that we might engage in as a result of the state of higher education [or K-12 education]. Instead, it is a replay of an all too familiar social Darwinism discussion about "qualified" and "teachable." Subsumed in the theoretically empirically argued assertions are the sexism, racism and class-ism that pervades the very foundations of these assertions.
If only there were not so many women teaching college [or getting college educations for that matter] we would not be in this predicament. Don't forget that he puts his theory about the decline into mediocrity in the lap of "postmodernism" -- like all good "majority" people assailed by reality, you can just blame societal changes of which you don't approve on postmodernism. I didn't realize it still functioned as such a reliable boogieman.
Oh, and in case you missed all the flag waving of the battered white man, see how Prof X and Menaud so casually compare the "college problem" with the mortgage/foreclosure crisis. In case you haven't noticed, that problem focused on infantilizing the working class while simultaneously chastising them for reaching for the so-called American Dream of home ownership. Oh...and praising the educated upper middle class that walked away from their homes and mortgages (mortgage -- agreement to pay) if their houses were underwater. You see, if you are in the right class and educated in the acceptable and approved ways, you will make the right financial decisions. Said financial decisions made my poor or underclass or working class people can bring down the entire financial establishment. I went to an elite college, and even I don't see the fiscal logic in that, but I sure do see the bias.
So, yeah, it pains me to have to engage this line of reasoning. It would appear if you don't mention race then it doesn't matter. Or perhaps Prof X has just learned from our society at large that race is no longer in play. Post racial, and all that, you know.
Page 5 and the reviewer tips his and Prof X's hand:
[Professor X is] on a mini-crusade to stem the flood of high-school graduates into colleges that require them to master a liberal-arts curriculum. He believes that students who aren’t ready for that kind of education should have the option of flat-out vocational training instead.
Menaud allows that this is tracking. Describes the pitfall of thinking that some people don't "need" education and someone must decide who these are as early as middle school. He doesn't elaborate on how that might not be educationally sound let alone all the other parts of it that are troubling (who gets to decide, upon which criteria will it be decided, what if the appointed decider makes a mistake? is biased? etc. etc. etc).
Menaud makes a point to say that we don't track like that anymore, but they still do in Britain, France and Germany. If only he could say that they do it in China! Oh, but I am pained to burst that bubble (not really that pained): actually we do track! We always have.
In fact, I have been arguing (I think pretty effectively) that public education was created for the express purpose of sifting and sorting, also known as TRACKING. Whether or not that tracking serves us as a society any longer is open for debate. And debate we must. Unless we make strides in talking frankly about education, our problems in education will be much worse than the state Prof. X laments in his book.
Instead of considering the validity or existence of tracking, Menaud follows the assertions, as he sees them, to a kind of conclusion:
it may be because the system has become too big and too heterogeneous to work equally well for all who are in it. The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus.
So, back in the good old days, everyone went to college knowing everything ... right? Um, wasn't the theory that Prof X was so hot to protect was that we went to college for the love of knowledge itself? To get a liberal arts education is to dabble, learn critical thinking skills that are tested over a range of content area and then using those skills in a professional type job?
To lament that people who want marketable skills are not well served by higher education is to forget that, in fact, there are already various levels of college education available. There are precious few vocational education experiences available that are not for profit in great measure because the public does not want to fund them. But there are wonderful programs across the country in community colleges that fill the vocational and technical training fairly well. The issue is that those students who are not well prepared by their K-12 educational experience will have a difficult time getting past remedial academic courses in community college as well.
Again we come back to the state of K-12 education ... and if we picked up that rock and looked underneath, we would see that disproportionately, there are black and brown and poor kids who are not getting the training they need for anything in K-12. Yes, we have mitigated tracking in schools, but we still have tracking BY school. And sifting and sorting has turned into dumping. We don't care if they get a good education and when they don't succeed against all the odds, we call them
unteachable. Back to the article...
Menaud falls back on the idea that motivation is the crucial element that is missing and difficult to inject back into the student. The issue is not that there are not options for different kinds of learners or occupations, etc. It is not so simple a problem that we could fix one piece and all else would fall in line. If only that were true, I would wave my magic wand.
At the end of page 5, he draws a little picture (with words, of course) of the history of college education since WWII (every one's favorite sign post):
If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification. [emphasis and color added]
I include this quote here not because I tire of writing my own words, but rather to show the simple cursory way he acknowledges race (and when it finally makes an appearance in the scene, in his mind). He continues:
These students did not regard college as a finishing school or a ticket punch. There was much more at stake for them than there had been for the Groton grads of an earlier day. (How many hours do you think they put in doing homework?) College was a gate through which, once, only the favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college. For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was a token of its transformational powers. [emphasis original]
He self identifies himself as Theory 2 loyal... that is of the three theories of who college is for... this is the "democratic" one that thinks people go to college to learn for success rather than for acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
Where to start with what is wrong with this review and with this book? It is easy to point out how devoid of actual context both the book and its review are. But, far more salient to the actual assertions made, is how devoid of educational context these are.
Has no one here heard of NCLB? Has no one followed the debate about school failures?
Clearly not... or they have only heard the pieces that say teachers are stupid and lazy. I don't expect anyone else to have developed my theory of how American public education is about creating sheep and culling from the herd the "best and brightest" for college. It makes it all the more important that I get that paper right, to be sure.
However, are we all really living inside of paper bags? Aren't some of those college educated people able to construct a line between K-12 education and college achievement??
According to those college profs and their study, K-12 students are not required or expected to learn anything because all they need to know they will master in three semesters of college?? And if they don't they are dopes who shouldn't be in college, they should be learning how to cut hair or lay carpet?
Yeah, it makes my head hurt and my soul ache... and it makes me want to scream.
I need to activate my Jon Stewart plan and get people talking about this crap ... not congratulating themselves for figuring out what's wrong with education and
fixing it by trying to
exclude large swathes of people.
I am perfectly willing and able to agree with the notion that not all people need college. I am even willing to agree that different people need different kinds of secondary and higher education experiences.
My quarrel with this and so many other arguments assailing our current state of college education is that of who decides and who chooses which experiences will be available to whom.
Yeah, everyone should have the right to decide where he/she wants to be. It might not be efficient in a social Darwinism way. But given the opportunity to choose a path that that feels comfortable might turn out to be pretty darned efficient in a democratic society.
Say you took K-12 and rounded out the academic experiences with technical and hands-on applications for ALL students, not just those someone finds
deserving. You might have students who would find their place in a constellation of choices fairly easily. Some of those students' ideas about where they wanted to be might not coincide with their parents' ideas. Some of those people would be the wrong color for the powers that be... or the wrong class, or the wrong gender.
This is the conversation we need to have, NOW. We need to start talking about what it is really like in the so-called post-racial, economically distressed society for poor and black and brown and immigrant children.
We need to talk about it in terms of where we would like to see our society go ... in realistic terms, because we are not going to the back of the bus quietly. We will not be kept in jobs you don't think your kids should do.
We need to do it before there are a lot of people in the street screaming about it ...
I could go on, but I won't ... gotta save something for the paper after all.
Thoughts appreciated.
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