Knowledge Factory, Closed

I’m done with Aronowitz, and as my past responses to him may indicate, I’m pretty ambivalent about his ideas: on the one hand, he offers some useful insights; on the other hand, the value of those insights is attenuated by his apparent political and intellectual myopia to any position other than his own radical leftism. (The funny thing is, I’m looking at another book by him that seems very close to my interests; 2001’s The Last Good Job in America: Work and Education in the New Global Technoculture. That’s not for a while yet, though; I’ve got to get to Feenberg if I’m gonna get Chapter 1 underway.)

But yes, I find considerable value in his point regarding students that “given sufficient space and time — mostly freedom from the obligation to work after school and the psychological freedom whose presupposition is some kind of economic security — most can master any knowledge placed before them and acquire the structures needed to be knowledge producers themselves”, although “When conditions fail to free the student’s imagination, by the time he [sic] enters college at almost any level, he has become persuaded that the main point of education is to earn the credentials needed to enter the work world with some kind of comparative advantage”, to the point where “Education becomes almost entirely instrumental to professional and career goals” (167). That’s a wonderful causal link he’s suggested between economic inequalities and the reproduction of the instrumental perspective; one that really illuminates the connections I’m trying to make between class, the instrumental view of technology, and education.

Unfortunately, he immediately turns around and suggests that the last bastions of intellectual practice are in reading literature, and then immediately bemoans the widespread “conservative. . . censorship in K-12 schools” (168): again, the shortsighted leftist elitism; again, as someone who’s very much on the political left myself, it really bugs the hell out of me. Aronowitz strikes me as one of the reasons why the left has done such a phenomenal job of self-marginalization, which is unfortunate, because some of his ideas really shouldn’t be marginal, like his suggestions that “If learning as a form of life could be even partially severed from the credentialing system, the university would welcome the broad participation of working adults as much as it now does traditional full-time students, encouraging the formation of intellectuals as well as bestowing credentials. Even though higher education would still serve the practical needs of society, it would not define society primarily as ‘business.’ In short, the whole spirit and purpose of higher education would change” (172). Ultimately, “colleges and universities must become public spheres, available to the larger community as well as to the community of scholars” (172-173). One place where these things already happen (to a degree), as I’m sure John might point out, is in the community college.