Education

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.
Read more

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?
Read more

Hypothesis: suppose the academy is not solely a market economy. Suppose that, in college courses, especially those with small populations, students exchange ideas rather than merely take them in. Paulo Freire proposed a similar idea in his essay on “The Banking Method of Education”, but I’m talking about a fundamental opposition to the commodification of ideas, a way of thinking about intellectual work that doesn’t define it as property. Step one, of course, would be to define “market” and “economy” and “property”. But I think you follow me: right?
Read more

Aronowitz writes that “underlying the controversy” over who should get into college “is the sometimes tacit, and often overt argument that college is not for everybody and should not be a ‘right.’ In the public institutions where tuition is much lower than in private schools, although it still provides as much as 80 percent of school budgets, only those who have achieved academic competence should be afforded the privilege of higher education” (103). Furthermore, “The pro-standards arguments” by which those on the right justify excluding poorer students from higher education “are directed, almost exclusively, to public colleges and universities, which account for nearly 70 percent of all enrollments. Unstated, but implied, is that if students and their families can afford elevated tuition fees, and if private schools choose to provide remedial services, as most of them do for the less well prepared, these are not appropriate matters of public concern and should not be objects of public inquiry” (103). Those “pro-standards arguments” rest on the assumption that, since taxes pay for a significant component of public education, public education belongs to the voting public, which should decide who gets to benefit from public education: they are, at heart, economic arguments. When we understand the economic nature of the arguments, Aronowitz’s observation that “The classical expectation — enunciated eloquently by Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, and more recently, by the civil rights and feminist movements — that in addition to economic opportunity, education may help usher in a more democratic society has, for the time being, vanished from the debate” to the point where “knowledge production and transmission must now justify itself in terms of its economic value or risk oblivion” (123) becomes even more disturbing. Basically, the argument is that (1) higher education is useful only for the economic benefits it offers and (2) those who pay for public higher education ought to be able to exclude poorer people from the economic benefits ostensibly offered by higher education. It’s suddenly much easier to see how we got to the set of circumstances Paul Krugman describes in “The Death of Horatio Alger”: the arguments of those on the right move us towards exacerbating class differences, perhaps because “higher education is an economic and cultural marker that retains its value only if it is a scarce commodity” (Aronowitz 118). We need to see a different form of value for higher education: not as a marker, and perhaps not even as a tool — but as something good even in and of itself, and good for communities of people.

Stanley Aronowitz sees the contemporary Research 1 university as serving a “technocratic regime”, and argues that “Technology presents itself as inherently ‘useful’ for meeting an infinite variety of human purposes. Anyone who challenges the value of this knowledge and invention is immediately labeled a Luddite, literally, an obstacle to ‘progress’. In [Clark] Kerr’s and Fritz Machlup’s discussions of knowledge industries, the role of the humanities and the non-policy social sciences in producing knowledge that may be politically and ideologically significant, but has little commercial utility, is given short shrift. . . So the tendency of humanistic scholars to distance themselves and their work from science and technology may well be an exercise in self-deception. We are all implicated in the fruits of the techno-university, even critics and opponents” (45). Again: technology has immediately apparent utility, which is why we find it so easy and so compelling to pursue understandings of better ways to apply it. Today’s values teach us to say about technology, “It’s good! It’s good! Now how can we use it more effectively?” Technology, after all, is inanimate, unthinking: how can it have effects on us, the shrewd and rational calculators who made it?
Read more

Still tired. When are my lungs gonna be clear of this vile stuff? The doc says one last (I hope) chest x-ray next week. I wish I was 24 again, smoking a pack of Camel Wides a day and able to do 2 miles in less than ten and a half minutes. Well, not the Camel Wides thing — I’d probably be 20 pounds thinner now if I smoked, but I’m well under 200, and happy to be no longer donating five dollars a day to demon nicotine — but yes, ten years later, I wish I still ran that fast.

Anyway. The essay is finished and submitted — cross your fingers for me? — and I’ve been reading Stanley Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory, and I’m already getting a little tired of him. Here’s why: while I can agree with his left-melancholic contention that “for the last sixty years the academic system of American society has been geared to practical ends, the production of useful knowledge in the first place, and since the end of the war, supplying the vast but segmented market for intellectual labor”, I have deep problems with his subsequent assertion that “the leading research universities have little to do with their presumed primary mission, education” (38), and even deeper problems with his next assertion that “Only the leading schools would provide space for the esoteric knowledge generated by humanists; after all, even a technological civilization like the United States needed its ornaments. The main task of the public four-year and community colleges would be to transmit technical knowledge to future employees of the U.S. labor market” (39).
Read more

I’ve finished Derek Bok and moved on to get myself several chapters into Stanley Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory. Where Bok was careful and restrained in his critique of the effects of commercialization in university research and athletics, Aronowitz makes sweeping and incendiary pronouncements that he sometimes fails to back up. In temperament, I’m more with Aronowitz, who takes an often dim view of the current state of affairs in academia, but I wish he took more care in his argumentation.

Aronowitz takes some harsh swipes at Clark Kerr, some of which hit their mark, and cast Kerr’s book in a rather different light for me. Basically, the title of Aronowitz’s book refers to the perceived single most important purpose of Kerr’s university as producing economically and socially useful knowledge, like a factory manufacturing goods for society’s consumption. Aronowitz is not happy with this construction, and contends that in the first part of the twentieth century, “there was no unambiguous democratic purpose in the maintenance of these institutions” of public higher education; rather, “publicly funded colleges were integral to the strategy of economic development. If the business of government is business, so should be the business of public higher education” (26). Pretty tough stuff.

Anyway: like I said, I’m only a few chapters into Aronowitz, and it’s reading more like a polemical history than anything else. With Aronowitz and Bok and Kerr, I’m trying to put together an understanding of the university as an economic site and a classed site, within which I hope to locate writing instruction as an economic process and a classed process, and in doing so connect the university and writing instruction to the classed and economic uses of technology.

I’m working tonight on revising something for publication, so just a quick note from Derek Bok, who writes that “For-profit, on-line education aimed at unwary audiences carries a grave risk of exploiting students. . . The promise of the new educational technology lies in developing highly interactive classes that make good uses of simulations, case-method discussions, games, and other means of provoking discussion among students and instructors. But this is the most expensive type of distance education and will probably cost as least as much as much as conventional campus courses. The way to make big money with the Internet is to attract large audiences with polished lectures by well-known figures, supplemented by attractive visuals and carefully crafted materials, but with a minimum of feedback and interactivity in order to keep down marginal costs and take full advantage of economies of scale. The courses that result may seem attractive, but they will fall far short of achieving the full potential of the new technology” (170-171). Yet again, while I might wish for a less measured and careful tone from Bok — he does not equivocate, but I feel his topic demands more passion than he gives it — I cannot help but agree. One might combine the arguments of Bok and C. Paul Olson to point out that education is by nature a labor-intensive process, and our contemporary trend of replacing labor-intensive processes with capital-intensive processes (such as those associated with the computer) simply cannot be applied to all things.

To be honest, I didn’t relax as much as I could or should have over the holidays. I know a lot of people who find the holidays overly stressful for various reasons, and I’m one of them — not so much over the gift-giving thing, which I really like, but over the felt obligation to run around and spend time with everyone possible and work too hard at enjoying the season. Between December 23 and January 2, I put over 2000 miles on my car, which isn’t bad for a former trucker who still holds a Class A CDL, but is pretty exhausting for someone slowly recovering from pneumonia. And there’s the emotional exhaustion on top of that. My New Year’s wish? For a holiday sometime soon — within ten years, maybe — when the longest distance to travel will be across town rather than across five states.

Anyway. Suffice to say I’m back home, happy to be doing academic work again, and grateful for good friends who live less than a hundred miles away. I’m also almost through Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace. Bok contends “that all students should be admitted on grounds germane to the academic purposes of the institution: that is, on the basis of their capacity to benefit from the educational program, enhance the development of their fellow students, and serve the needs of society” (106) and notes that “the profit motive shifts the focus from providing the best learning experience that available resources allow toward raising prices and cutting costs as much as possible without losing customers” (108). A later paragraph is worth quoting in its entirety (and yes, I know I still haven’t gotten around to writing good blockquote formatting into my stylesheet; it’s on my list): “The constant struggle for more resources can also obscure the larger message of a true liberal arts education — that there is more to life than making money. Competition for students has already caused many colleges to emphasize vocational programs at the expense of traditional majors while aggressively proclaming to prospective students what their degrees will be worth in the marketplace. The importance of material values can only increase in the minds of students if universities repeatedly demonstrate by their own behavior that they are willing to ignore basic academic principles when they get in the way of the search for more resources” (110). While I wish Bok had more to say about the arts and humanities — he focuses very much on the perils of commercialization in athletics and the sciences — I can’t help but agree with his perspective on the intersection of economics and academics.

Now: how does this connect to computers and writing instruction and socioeconomic class? Hm. Well, I figure if I could sum that up in one sentence, I wouldn’t have to go and write some big long dissertation about it. I’m working on it, though.