Dear Stanley

Almost done with Aronowitz. He asserts that “America’s colleges and universities have assumed the task of perparing a substantial fraction of the adult population for professional and technical careers, but this cannot be the engine that drives higher education” (157), which of course makes me happy, but also makes me ask — in my contrarian fashion — have they? Does one go to college with the set goal of becoming a politician, a lawyer, an engineer, a doctor, a chemist, a minister? Well, of course: some do, although others — I would argue — discover what they want to do in pursuing their educations. I got a lit degree, I joined the Army as an enlisted man and drove tractor-trailers, I went to graduate school for creative writing and discovered I loved teaching: not exactly a straightforward career path.

I’m not sure how Aronowitz sees such practices: are they a problem?

In discussing a hypothesized mass “return to school”, Aronowitz suggests that workers of the future will choose between “vocational or general education objectives” (158): apparently, the distinction — for Aronowitz — is clear-cut, particularly when he contends that “The current academic system has fudged the distinctions between training, education, and learning” (158). To which I want to ask: has it? Or are those distinctions unnecessary and elitist? Where are those distinctions, anyway? Is learning for work any less important than learning for life? I’d alter the distinction: we’ve collapsed the distinctions in favor of training, until all that is training is good and useful, and all that is not training is not useful. This is instrumentalism at its worst: it obscures other values. As Aronowitz points out, “many have thrust training to the fore and called it education” (158) and “the academic system as a whole is caught in a market logic that demands students be job-ready upon graduation” to the point where “colleges and universities are unable to implement an educational system that prepares students for a world of great complexity” (158). Well, OK: actually, there’s still a false binary being perpetuated there, and I don’t know quite how else to get a handle on it.

The thing is, Aronowitz perpetuates that binary in his sneering Marxist elitist presumption that “logic and rhetoric” and “computer literacy” cannot be anything other than “vocational and remedial” (161), and then he turns around and — like so many Americans — buys into the ideals of romantic individualism that foster the growth of capitalism: “real thinking entails marching to your own drummer, ignoring rules the thinker regards as arbitrary” (159), he argues, implicitly offering David Duke his own countercultural legitimation.

The problem is that for Aronowitz, so-called “critical thinking” carries with it a moral perspective: not only is his “critical” antidote to mainstream educational thought a critique and a leftist perspective, it is also implicitly morally superior, and so cannot fall victim to the failings of Lyndon LaRouche or David Duke. In fact, in his ringing peroration that indicts expanding access as mere “tinkering” and “relevance” as “the trend toward a more vocational curriculum”, Aronowitz almost convinces me that the only intelligent perspective is a radical one.

But, frankly, it ain’t so. “Critical” does not necessarily equal “leftist”, and as much as Aronowitz would have it otherwise, one can be on the political right and be very, very smart, and this is the arrogance that has gotten the left in trouble before. I’m further out into the minuses from the political and economic right (like, further left and libertarian than Al Sharpton) than almost all of my peers , but I’m not myopic enough — as Aronowitz and many others on the left appear to be — to presume that the only intelligent people in the United States are liberals.

In their refusal to engage one another in dialogue, both political parties in this nation seem to have forgotten that democratic communities involve tolerance and dissent. In which case, maybe it’s about time to buy some guns.