What drives this essay emotionally is not disdain for and disgust with dim-bulb students. X says he really identifies with his students and their struggles in life, and wants to help them along. “I could not be aloof even if I wanted to be,” he writes. But he can’t compromise academic standards out of pity or solidarity.
What it all boils down to, he says, is that a cruel hoax is being played on these students. “America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting someone’s options,” he writes. And he sympathizes with this ideal — but he’s the one who has to see how little it has to do with reality. His students aren’t college material. They don’t read (some of them can’t really read). They don’t share even the rudiments of a common intellectual culture on which to build. He says he tries to explain the basics of narrative to them in terms of movies, but they haven’t all seen the same movies. They are more or less well-mannered, hard-working barbarians. The only thing they all share is a sense that they are good people for being in college, and that they can be anything they want to be.
Prof. X says the whole system, premised on a false egalitarianism, is to blame here. One key question this excellent essay raises by implication is this: if quite a lot of Americans are incapable of doing college work, what does that do to the Thomas Friedmanesque understanding that in order to compete in a flattened, globalized world, US laborers are simply going to have to get retrained and better educated? What if there are natural limits to their ability to expand their cognitive skills? What then?
I mean, look, what if things were flipped, and the Friedmans of the world were telling the “knowledge workers,” for lack of a better term, that staying competitive in this globalizing world economy meant having a stronger back. Ergo, nerdling, you’re just going to have to start spending a lot more time at the gym to develop a longshoreman’s body, or get left behind. We’d laugh at this, because we have no problem grasping that nature has not endowed all of us equally well in terms of physical strength and capabilities. The nerdling would be able to improve his strength to a certain degree, but to tell him his physical limits are defined only by his desires and will to succeed is to play a cruel hoax on him.
Are we not doing that with some of the people who are in college now?
Read it all and make sure to check out the comments as well.
A provocative article with more than a little truth in it.
I teach at one of Maryland’s top-ranked high schools, which is a technical high school. The “vocational” was dropped from the name a long time ago, although we still have voc-ed track programs like automotive tech and construction.
The reality is that many of our students need some post-secondary education, although it is often in the form of a two year degree for business training or a technical program for specific automotive skills that we simply do not have the resources for.
And the good news is that Maryland has an excellent community college system to facilitate a lot of kids going who can’t really afford to or whose grades are good but not great. I have had a number of kids work hard and be successful on that track, even though they often faced financial challenges or were not the strongest students academically.
Having said that, he is right about the over-emphasis on college and university education. For every kid I have taught who has made it in college, I have another that probably had no business there. He is quite correct in his critique of Tom Friedman and (dare I say) Bush’s “ownership society,” which make assumptions about society that are simply false. Some people are really best cut out for hard physical work! There needs to be a place for them too.
One thing that concerns me is that anti-intellectualism is so deeply engrained in American society. We could do better; our kids often don’t care about learning because no one in their family ever has. In that sense, the rush to put people in college may be making up for what ought to happen, it is just that the results are not pretty.
The writer is quite correct in that there is a serious moral issue in accepting students who have no chance to succeed. Accredidation agencies, which are self-governing and often self-interested, ought to take a harder look at this problem.
Randall Stewart
But wht happens when the not-too-bright reach the barrier, that virtually all the new jobs require intellectual capabilities they do not have? This is coming, you know, and you can see it. After all, the hydraulics on my tractor can do the work of fifty men while the workings of my computer are beyond my ability to comprehend. One resolution to this problem is the establishment of Betas, Gammas, Deltas and soma. Has it occurred to you that DVD’s and virtual reality are soma? You can see with you own eyes the creation of the Alphas. All you have to do is visit MIT and Princeton. How far are we from this solution? Think how much energy now is channeled into separating the bright from the not bright in the school systems, how eager schools are to create lists of their students who go to prestigious colleges, how much money is poured into SAT preps. And when they have been separated, educated, and turned that education into big salaries, what is left for society that does not fit this model? Larry
Well, back in my day at UMCP (late ’70s) if you had a high school degree, you could get in. They failed some huge percentage of the freshman class (50%?), but it provided a way past the credential-crazy monster that was– and is more so today– college admissions. In the interest of higher status, they’ve gone to competitive admissions, which means that it is now a difficult place to get into.
I’ve seen reports that employers are requiring degrees for almost any kind of managerial job, creating a demand (for example) for “hotel management” curricula.
Larry:
I have often worried (in my career in public ed) the “Brave New World” scenario. It is particularly scary in Baltimore, where there are three school systems: one private for those who can afford it, one public for the well-connected middle class, and another public for everyone else.
The University of Maryland system is very good, and places like Towson and UMBC have grown a lot to accomodate for the increasing competitiveness at College Park.
Randall