Essays from the Nick of Time (15 page)

Praise me for a patriot or warm up the pillory, it comes down to the unpleasant fact that a significant number of our fellow citizens are now as greedy and gullible as a boxful of puppies; they’ll believe anything; they’ll attack the empty glove; they’ll follow that plastic bone right off the cliff. Nothing about this election has changed that fact. If they’re ever activated—if the wrong individual gets to them, in other words, before the educational system does—we may live to experience a tyranny of the majority Tocqueville never imagined.

Knowledge of human nature is the
beginning and end of political education.

—HENRY ADAMS

Many years ago, my fiancée attempted to lend me a bit of respectability by introducing me to my would-be mother-in-law as a future Ph.D. in literature. From Columbia, I added, polishing the apple of my prospects. She wasn’t buying it. “A doctor of philosophy,” she said. “What’re you going to do, open a philosophy store?”

A spear is a spear—it doesn’t have to be original. Unable to come up with a quick response and unwilling to petition for a change of venue, I ducked into low-grade irony. More like a stand, I said. I was thinking of stocking Chaucer quotes for the holidays, lines from Yeats for a buck fifty.

And that was that. I married the girl anyway. It’s only now, recalling our exchange, that I can appreciate the significance—the poetry, really—of our little pas de deux. What we unconsciously acted out, in compressed, almost haikulike form
(A philosophy
store? / I will have a stand / sell pieces of Auden at two bits a beat)
was the essential drama of American education today.

It’s a play I’ve been following for some time now. It’s about the increasing dominance—scratch that, the unqualified triumph—of a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value. It’s about the victory of whatever can be quantified over everything that can’t. It’s about the quiet retooling of American education into an adjunct of business, an instrument of production.

The play’s almost over. I don’t think it’s a comedy.

And then there’s amortization,

                                     
the deadliest of all,

Amortization

                       
of the heart and soul.

                        —Vladimir Mayakovsky

Despite the determinisms of the day, despite the code breakers, the wetware specialists, the patient unwinders of the barbed wire of our being, this I feel is true: that we are more nurture than nature; that what we are taught, generally speaking, is what we become; that torturers are made slowly, not minted in the womb. As are those who resist them. I believe that what rules us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions, and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us; that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed age, “the human condition” can we hope to make our condition more human, not less.

All of which puts me, and those in the humanities generally, at something of a disadvantage these days. In a high-speed corporate culture, hypnotized by quarterly results and profit margins, the gradual sifting of political sentiment is of no value; in a horizontal world of “information” readily convertible to product—the lowest, most reductive definition of utility—the verticality of wisdom has no place. Show me the spreadsheet on skepticism.

You have to admire the skill with which we’ve been outmaneuvered; there’s something almost chesslike in the way the other side has narrowed the field, neutralized lines of attack, co-opted the terms of battle. It’s all about them now; every move we make plays into their hand, confirms their values. Like the narrator in Mayakovsky’s “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry,” we’re being forced to account for ourselves in the other’s idiom, to argue for “the place of the poet / in the workers’ ranks.” It’s not working.

What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.

In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Money doesn’t talk, it roars. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it.
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There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits, everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it.

That education policy should reflect the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism, after all, has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success (and make no mistake, it
is
succeeding), we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely, the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.

We’re pounding swords into cogs. They work in Pyongyang, too.

This is exactly what life is about. You

get a paycheck every two weeks.

We’re preparing children for life.

—CHANCELLOR MICHELLE RHEE
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SCHOOLS

The question is straightforward enough: what do we teach, and why? One might assume that in an aspiring democracy like ours the answer would be equally straightforward: we teach whatever contributes to the development of autonomous human beings; we teach, that is, in order to expand the census of knowledgeable, reasoning, independent-minded individuals both sufficiently familiar with the world outside themselves to lend their judgments compassion and breadth (and thereby contribute to the political life of the nation), and sufficiently skilled to find productive employment. In that order. Our primary function, in other words, is to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily—one might say incidentally—about producing workers.

I’m joking, of course. Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital, and please note what’s modifying what. It’s about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy. And what of our privileged political perch, you ask, whether legitimate or no? Thank you for your question. Management has decided that the new business plan has no room for frivolity. Those who can justify their presence in accordance with its terms may remain; the rest will be downsized or discontinued. Alternatively, since studies have suggested that humanizing the workspace may increase efficiency, a few may be kept on, the curricular equivalent of potted plants.

If facetiousness is an expression of frustration, it does not necessarily follow that the picture it paints is false. The force of the new dispensation is stunning. Its language is the language of banking—literal, technocratic, wincingly bourgeois; its effects are visible, quite literally, everywhere you look.

Start with the newspaper of record. In a piece by
New York
Times
editorialist Brent Staples, we learn that the American education system is failing “to produce the fluent writers required by the new economy.” No doubt it is, but the sin of omission here is both telling and representative. Might there be another reason for seeking to develop fluent writers? Could clear writing have some relation to clear thinking, and thereby have, perhaps, some political efficacy? If so, neither Staples nor his readers, writing in to the
Times,
think to mention it. Writing is “a critical strategy that we can offer students to prepare them to succeed in the workplace.” Writing skills are vital because they promote “clear, concise communications, which all business people want to read.” “The return on a modest investment in writing is manifold,” because “it strengthens competitiveness, increases efficiency and empowers employees.” And so on, without exception. The chairman of the country’s largest association of college writing professors agrees. The real problem, he explains, is the SAT writing exam, which “hardly resembles the kinds of writing people encounter in business or academic settings.” An accountant, he argues, needs to write “about content related to the company and the work in which she’s steeped.” It’s unlikely that she’ll “need to drop everything to give the boss 25 minutes on the Peloponnesian War or her most meaningful quotation.”

What’s depressing here is that this is precisely the argument heard at parent-teacher meetings across the land: What good is it in the real world? When is the boss ever going to ask my Johnny about the Peloponnesian War? As if Johnny had agreed to have no existence outside his cubicle of choice. As if he wasn’t going to be a husband, or a father (or listen to Rush, or Glenn Beck, while driving home from the office). As if he wasn’t going to inherit, willy-nilly, the holy right of gun ownership and the power of the vote.

At times, the failure of decent, intelligent, reliably humane voices like Staples’s to see the political forest for the economic trees is breathtaking. In a generally well-intentioned editorial, one of Staples’s colleagues at the
Times,
Nicholas Kristof, argues that we can’t “address poverty or grow the economy” unless we do something about the failure of our schools. So far, so good, though one might quibble that addressing poverty and growing the economy are not the same thing.

But never mind, because the real significance of the failure of our schools is soon made manifest. “Where will the workers come from,” Kristof worries, “unless students reliably learn science and math?” If our students “only did as well as those in several Asian countries in math and science, our economy would grow 20 percent faster.” The problem, though, is that while our school system was once the envy of all (a “first-rate education,” we understand by this point, is one that grows the economy), now only our white suburban schools are “comparable to those in Singapore, which may have the best education system in the world.”

Ah, Singapore. You’ll hear a good deal about Singapore if you listen to the chorus of concern over American education. If only we could be more like Singapore. If only our education system could be as efficient as Singapore’s. You say that Singapore might not be the best model to aspire to, that in certain respects it more closely resembles Winston Smith’s world in
1984
than Thomas Jefferson’s? What does that have to do with education?

And the beat goes on. Still another
Times
editorialist, Thomas Friedman, begins a piece on the desperate state of American education by quoting Bill Gates. Gates, Friedman informs us, gave a “remarkable speech” in which he declared that “American high schools are obsolete.” This is bad, Friedman says. Bill Gates is telling us that our high schools, “even when they are working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.”

What
do
our kids need to know today? As far as Friedman is concerned, the answer is obvious: whatever will get them hired by Bill Gates. “Let me translate Mr. Gates’s words,” he writes. What Mr. Gates is saying is: “If we don’t fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids.” Really worried now, Friedman goes to talk to former Harvard president and head of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, who explains that “for the first time in our history,” we’re facing “competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China, and Asia.” The race is on. “In order to thrive,” Summers says, we will “have to make sure that many more Americans can get as far ahead as their potential will take them,” and quickly, because India and China are coming up on the inside. It’s “not just about current capabilities,” Friedman concludes, by this point quoting the authors of
The Only Sustainable Edge,
“it’s about the relative pace and trajectories of capability-building.”

Sustainable edges. Returns on capital investment. Trajectories of capability-building. What’s interesting here is that everyone speaks the same language, everyone agrees on the meaning of the terms. There’s a certain country club quality to it. We’re all members. We understand one another. We understand that the capabilities we should be developing are the capabilities that will “get us ahead.” We understand that Bill Gates is a logical person to talk to about education because billionaire capitalists generally know something about running a successful business, and American education is a business whose products (like General Motors’, say), are substandard, while Singapore’s are kicking ass. We understand that getting ahead of low-wage, high-human-capital communities will allow us “to thrive.”

Unlike most country clubs, alas, this one is anything but exclusive; getting far enough beyond its gates to ask whether that last verb might have another meaning can be difficult. Success means success. To thrive means to thrive. The definitions of
investment, accountability, value, utility
are fixed and immutable; they are what they are. Once you’ve got that down, everything is easy: according to David Brooks (bringing up the back of my
Times
parade), all we need to do is make a modest investment in “delayed gratification skills.” Young people who can delay gratification “can master the sort of self-control that leads to success”; they “can sit through sometimes boring classes” and “perform rote tasks.” As a result, they tend to “get higher SAT scores,” to gain acceptance to better colleges, and to have, “on average, better adult outcomes.”
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