Valhalla
By the end of 1999, 75.5
million people out of a total population of 275 million were involved directly in providing and
receiving what has come to be called education. And an unknown number of millions indirectly. About 67 million
were enrolled in schools and
colleges (38 million in K-8, 14 million in
secondary schools, 15 million
in colleges,) 4 million employed
as teachers or college faculty (2 million elementary; 2 million secondary and college combined), and 4.5
million in some other school capacity. In other words, the primary organizing discipline of about 29 percent
of the entire U.S. population
consists of obedience to the routines and requests of an abstract social
machine called School. And that's
only so far. According to the U.S. Department of Education, these figures are expected to grow
substantially through the first decade of the new century. Could Hegel himself
have foreseen such an end to history, the planet as a universal schoolhouse where nothing much is
learned?
At the top of this
feeding chain are so-called public colleges. As Valhalla was the reward where Vikings killed in battle got to
drink, fight, and fornicate in an endlessly regenerating loop, so public colleges are a lifetime of
comfort and security for those
systems people who play ball skillfully or belong to some political
family with a record of playing
ball.
If public colleges
functioned in meritocractic ways as their supporters allege and as I suspect the general public believes
they do, we would expect the economy of public schooling at this level to reflect with reasonable
sensitivity what was happening in the
total public economy. Spending on public colleges should be a litmus
test of how much respect is being
accorded the democratic will at any given time. With that in mind try this garment on for size: Tuition at public
colleges over the last fourteen years has increased three times as fast as household income, and more than three
times faster than the rate of
inflation, according to the General Accounting Office. What pressure could
possibly squeeze ordinary people
to pay such outlandish costs, incurring debt burdens which enslave them and their children for
many years to come?
How, you might ask,
at the very instant the inherent value of these degrees is being challenged, at the very instant
business magazines are predicting permanent radical downsizing of the middle-management force in private and
public employment — the very slots
public colleges license graduates to occupy, and at the very instant in time
when the purchasing power of
middle-class American incomes is worth less than it was thirty years ago and appears to be in a long-term
continuing downtrend, how in light of these things have public college teachers been able to double their
incomes (in real dollars) in the past
fourteen years and public college administrators raise their own share
of the take 131 percent?
I'm asking how, not
why. Greed is too common a characteristic of human nature to be very interesting. How was this done?
Who allowed it? Not any "free market," I can tell you. We're talking about several
million individuals who've managed to make their leisured and secure lives even more so at the same time
their product is questioned and
the work their attention supposedly qualifies students for is shipped
overseas for labor cost
advantages. It seems obvious to me that the whole lot of these collegiate
time-servers lacks sufficient
clout to treat themselves so well. Their favored treatment is, then, a
gift. But from where, and why?
Only from an investigation of the politics of schooling might come an adequate answer. So let's begin
to look under a few rocks together.
No comments:
Post a Comment