Education and power

It is a fine thing indeed, to awaken each morning knowing that Democrats will soon control Congress and put the brakes on some of Bush's worst violations of constitutional law and human decency. But we cannot grow complacent - the hardest work is yet to come. The changed Congress still represents the same old country. Politicians get elected the same way they always have - by telling the public what they want to hear. Changing what the public wants to hear is the real trick, and in this respect, the Democrats are every bit as much an enemy of a free society as the Republicans.

What can can we expect from our new congress? Unfortunately, not a lot - their platform is almost embarrassingly tepid. Raising the federal minimum wage to $7.50 is, of course, a much-needed measure, but it is long overdue and is a political no-brainer. It is also, after a full decade, too damn small.

Cutting rates on student loans is a friendly gesture that will - maybe - make things a tad easier for certain middle-class families, for a limited period of time. But it is nonetheless a glaring example of the Democrats' complete lack of vision. Several decades ago, it was possible to expect an exemplary education at a minimal cost at a state or local university. Making education readily available for any and all willing to pursue it was considered a fundamental civic duty of our government - now it is a means by which fatten the creditor's purse. Making it easier to pay for private education is a worthy goal. But why is there no talk of direct subsidies to the public education? Our political culture has developed an obsessive mania for applying the business model to every aspect of our private lives, to the point where no currency can change hands for any reason without first earning some amount of compound interest for an otherwise disinterested third party.

The Democrats are "concerned" about education, but for one reason only: the continued economic dominance of the United States. From their own website:

The talent, intellect, and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people have made this nation the leader in economic and technological advancements. House Democrats believe American leadership is fueled by national investments in an educated and skilled workforce, groundbreaking federal research and development by public and private sectors, and a steadfast commitment to being the most competitive and innovative nation in the world.

America's global leadership in technological advancement and innovation is being seriously challenged by other countries. The warning signs could not be clearer. The rest of the world is increasing its capacity, its investments, and its will to catch up with us. We cannot ignore this challenge.

And their remedy:

Create an educated, skilled workforce in the vital areas of science, math, engineering, and information technology;

Invest in a sustained federal research and development initiative that promotes public-private partnerships;

Guarantee affordable access to broadband technology for all Americans;

Achieve energy independence in 10 years by developing emerging technologies for clean and sustainable alternatives that will strengthen national security and protect the environment; and,

Provide small businesses with the tools to encourage entrepreneurial innovation and job creation.

I would like to point out that these policy points are listed in the Democrats' official New Direction For America, a publication in which I can find no mention of the appalling educational end economic ghettoization which we have imposed on vast segments of urban and rural society. Nor can I find any indication that the Democrats believe in the intrinsic value of a well-rounded education - they do not suggest that, along with all the talented science and math teachers we are supposedly going to blessed with, we might also do well to have equally qualified teachers of English, History, Art, or Music for those intellectually curious students who don't want to pursue a career building ipods or missile guidance systems. The humanities - for centuries recognized as essential to human happiness, and, in fact, crucial to innovation (modern science was created by a reinvigoration of the humanities) - are not mentioned in their educational plan. Instead, the Democrats see only one purpose in education - have a head for numbers and wigits, and maintain the U.S. economic hegemony...or else. We have been "warned."

There is a serious cultural problem here that neither party is willing to address. Any forthcoming solution to the problem will have to be birthed and nurtured, first, at the grassroots level, and it may be decades before either party is willing to pay it any heed. The problem is this: we have trivialized education. It is a grave threat to our society.

This might seem, at first, like a strange charge to make against a society that habitually obsesses over education. It is an issue in every election year, and every off-election year. This has been the case for decades. We need therefore ask why, after so many initiatives and efforts, so little progress seem to have been made.

Americans have deeply contradictory attitudes regarding the education of their children. There is almost universal acceptance that an education, pursued as far as one's abilities allow, is in every way essential to economic security and happiness. And yet the very same people - both parents and students - profess nothing short of contempt for the entire teaching profession. They want their children to go to the best elementary and high schools, but would regard their children as failures if, in their adulthood, they pursued a career teaching in any of those schools. They want to send their kids to the most prestigious colleges - witness the vast college-prep industry - and yet they are in perpetual suspicion of the political motives of the men and women who will instruct them. The Holy Grail of education is the ivy-league college, and yet those very same schools are thought by a great many of their customers to be Orwellian concentration camps for churning out post-modern leftists. They want their children to be "exposed to new ideas", but are often horrified when any new ideas come home for Thanksgiving break.

As concerns the education of the "proles", as it were, there is, once again, widespread acknowledgment of an ongoing crisis, and yet an astonishing passivity at all levels to do anything decisive about it. The most common plea is that the situation is "very complicated," and that we shouldn't just "throw money" at them.

This is an astonishing statement, especially since it betrays how easily even the most "educated" among us fall victim to the spell-casting wiles of professional spin-doctors and obfuscators. In every other profession on Earth, from prostitution, to law, to engineering, acting, or dentistry, there is a common-sense understanding that "you get what you pay for." If your company is not attracting enough qualified applicants for a particular position, then you must consider raising the salary for the position. This usually does the trick.

Apparently, public school teachers live in a parallel universe, where the laws of supply and demand do not apply. We have spent untold billions over the decades developing new teaching methods, philosophies, national testing, and classroom technology - and yet we are loathe to spend the money required to hire more qualified teachers. Never mind that these grand schemes are next to useless if the teacher's knowledge of their subject does not extend past the textbook they use (as is the case for many), or that a qualified teacher will have no need of some overarching teaching-philosophy to which they must adhere.

There are several reasons why this problem perpetuates. The first is that the politicians of all stripes can always benefit from an ongoing crisis that threatens "our children." Knowing that any initiative will take about a decade to have any discernable effect (if any), they can rest assured that even if their political careers hold them in the same office at that point, they will most likely no longer be serving the same generation of parents (whose kids will have graduated and moved on).

The second, greater problem is that we mistake this as a political, rather than a cultural, problem in the first place. No progress will be made by any politician or citizen, so long as we regard education as a matter of social status above all else. Listen to the language that is employed - that we need to be educated in order to get ahead. We have no problem stating this with the utmost sincerity, but shall we consider the corollary - that we need to leave others behind to make it happen?

The time has come to speak honestly. "We" don't actually give a rat's ass about "the children." We only care about "our" children, and we desperately want them to leave everybody else's children in the dust. This blatantly prideful elitism - which would have been shunned from polite society a few decades ago, is so commonplace that we have ceased to analyse its meaning. From honor-roll bumper stickers to college merchandise, our society wants to boast. It does not, in fact, seem to matter whether or not "the children" are actually educated, since we have lost the notion that being educated has any objective meaning at all. We only care that they are doing better than most everyone else. Why else would parents mortgage their homes for the exorbitant fees charged by the "best" schools, when those very same parents are convinced that most of the liberal arts teachers at that school are little more than doctrinaire Maoists and "PC" feminists? Why pay for education that is deemed largely worthless? Status, of course, and "connections." And this need persists, even though many recent studies have shown that, when all other factors are controlled for, choice of school has a negligible effect on one's ultimate success.

One might now object that I have strayed far from the original topic of this essay - the Democrats' agenda - and taken on a subject only of concern to an elite few. Fair enough, but let's now close the ellipse.

The relegation of education to status-making has had an effect, not just at the top, but throughout the hierarchy of achievement. If "getting ahead" is the goal of education, then anything short of being on top essentially becomes a failure. Notice, now, that we do not simply ask whether our public or private schools have met a certain base-line requirement - we rank them, well into the thousands. We use "metrics" to quantify the unquantifiable, creating a false objectivity at the cost of the real one (A momentary digression on the definition of "objectivity". An objective measurement is made by means of a stable, external referent, like a ruler used to measure human height. You may arrange a thousand people in a row from tallest to shortest without a ruler, and the tallest among them might still be a dwarf). Public schools must make gains in this competitive environment before they receive funding, and in this environment there are great rewards to the school that can get away with "inflating" their grades.

How is this done? You'll probably remember from your own education. If you were an "honor" student, and most likely as well if you weren't, you'll recall all the times your teacher graded a test to "scale" when everyone did badly on it, when "make-up" work was offered to the student who botched something earlier on, when a teacher who liked you happily fudged the numbers here and there to get you across the line from C+ to B-, and so on. And you'll remember all the times you were told that the SAT was a crucial test, but also essentially meaningless because the proper test-prep course could boost your score mightily. Or the college elective classes where "passing" on a multiple-choice test required scoring better than, as one astronomy professor of mine put it, a "monkey score" - i.e., choosing answers randomly.

At what point, as you moved along this conveyer belt, did you realize the total irrelevance of actually understanding things to your success in school? How long thereafter did you realize that the entire professional world now operates on this principle? Was it your first office job, when it seemed that every smiling co-worker had nothing but contempt for the company they worked for, and that their every waking moment on the job was spent towards a goal of personal aggrandizement? Was it when you realized people less qualified than you were able to advance ahead of you because they padded their resumes, "faked it 'till they made it," and you, in your foolishly sentimental attachment to honesty, did not? Was it when you realized that half of your classmates cribbed notes and cheated on tests, read the Cliff's notes rather than the Dickens novel itself, and were perfectly content to score an "A" on a test with 42% of the answers incorrect? Welcome to the post-modern age. You are what you pretend to be. You learned it in school.

It is difficult to grasp the extent to which a vast cynicism now underlies the assumptions we have about the world. Our achievements are a palimpsest of our (re)devising. In what state do we find ourselves when a world-class university only asks its student to be better at astronomy than monkeys? We, in fact, have incredibly low expectations for students - bottom to top. Consider now that, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was entirely normal and common for the poorest children in England - those whose parents were coal miners for instance - to read a Shakespeare play at least once a month at the age of thirteen? And their reading was not limited to Shakespeare, but also included Milton, Coleridge, Homer, etc. When one school in a troubled section of Los Angeles pulls this off now, by getting a group of ten-year-olds to read and perform Hamlet, we consider it an awe-inspiring miracle. Our great grandparents would've considered the same achievement common.

Did you ever feel that life was somehow...empty? Was it after that latest episode of Survivor?

Our children are not stupid. They are bored out of their minds from the first day of school, insulted by our patronizingly low expectations of them, made cynical by the time of adolescence when they realize that the whole system is fixed and not interested in their actual achievements in the first place, rebellious when they realize their teachers are not knowledgeable of the subjects they teach, bored again by the shallowness of their badly-written textbooks, and bitter when they realize that being "on top" is not in the cards for them, and that society therefore has no use for them aside from grilling cow meat.

There are very few of us - from top to bottom - who can remember as more than a rarity the moments when learning something made us happy.

There is no mystery regarding the problem of education. Pick up any science or math book written more than 50 years ago, and you will encounter what seems to be a masterpiece of literary elegance and clarity of thought. We could use these books now, and pay our high school teachers what we presently pay our tenured college professors, and in a decade you would have the beginnings of a revolution in American education (obviously it would take much more than that to be fully realized, but with an influx of qualified teachers and quality texts, a serious improvement is all but guaranteed. European schools pay their teachers more - is this a coincidence?)

Not going to happen, is it?

Why?

A few years of no progress - that might be someone's mistake. Four decades of backwards progress? That is by design. The design is called the "corporate model."

American society has become so commodified that every aspect of our lives is now comparative and relativistic. Remember what I said about objectivity? In the corporate/consumer model, there is no external referent. Values are one-dimensional (in both the literal and Marcusian sense). We have no sense of the "well-rounded" education, of learning as a spiritual pursuit. These are luxuries that can no longer enjoyed - not with an industrialized China, no sir. We must compete.

Let's summarize, and reflect. We are given a fake education, where we are passed up the ladder whether we understand things or not. We soon lose any attachment to the notion that we should understand things. We stop asking questions out of curiosity, and focus, instead on what helps us move "up." Somewhere around this time, we may start to feel unmoored, lost, unhappy that the world appears to be getting darker, more complicated and vicious, and less comprehensible. But since it benefits us materially to not be bothered by this, we choose not to let it bother us. Before long, the only way any of us achieve any stable view of our place is by direct comparison to the progress of other people. Those elements of a greater culture - the great authors and the great books and the culture of skepticism and reason they engender, most of which we've never read, but which were once called "pillars" for a reason (because they always stood firm, were always there as guideposts outside of ourselves and our specific point in history) - no longer guide us. We can't latch onto them. So instead we retreat into ourselves, live for ourselves, and accept that the world "outside" will always be vicious and incomprehensible.

We accept powerlessness, mitigated by our fantasies of power. My kid's on the honor roll. My kid beat up your honor student. I'm a multi-tasker, a team player, a self-starter, a personal manager. Quoth Thom Yorke: "A pig, in a cage, on antibiotics."

Who benefits from our powerlessness? Those with power. As of next January, many of those in power - or some semblance thereof - will be Democrats. Let's close the ellipse: Democrats want you to feel helpless. Doubt me? How were you feeling when you and your neighbors voted for them? Thank you. Your sense of helplessness put them in power. Will they solve your problems for you? They will not. They will perpetuate them, but mitigate them just enough so that you get burned a little bit less for a certain period of time. They, like you, have learned that reality is written in the act of pretense, not discovered by looking with an unbiased eye at the world at large. If the Republicans say that there is a "War of Terror," and the Democrats say it too, well, that's everybody, ain't it? There must be a War on Terror, because Republicans and Democrats are arguing about it.

Somewhere, inside of us, there may be a voice that was not entirely quashed when we attended high school or college that asks: why do we support dictatorships if we claim to support democracy? Why isn't Suadi Arabia in the "axis of evil?" Why is Venezuela? If the rights of men and women are inalienable, or "God-given" as the president states, why do we treat the lives of Iraqis as if they are so much more expendable than our own? From somewhere in the shadows, a voice replies with, perhaps, the reptilian croak of Henry Kissinger; that the games of power are complicated and nuanced beyond all measure, that the world is dark and incomprehensible, and that you, citizen, are at a loss to change it. And most of us will turn inward.

The Democrats have learned the same lesson that the rest of us have, "fake it 'till you make it."

If we want real change, we will have to demand access to reality - to knowledge, culture, and direct power over our own lives. The political effect must be instigated by a cultural cause - bringing knowledge to the people.

We have the tools - but how will it be done?