Back to school time, when the nation again turns our children and young adults over to professional educators for the serious business of … what exactly? It would do us some good to think about that a bit harder.
Today’s standard political rhetoric is that education is essential to job readiness and creates the local conditions for competitiveness in a globalized economy. Underlying much of our public conversation is the suggestion that we must push our kids towards the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields and rigorously measure their attainment. This is how we ensure America will continue to be the engine that drives the world’s prosperity. With a decade or more of high-stakes testing driven by these bromides, our educators are implementing precisely what our political system has been selling.
I’d suggest that this political argument plays to citizens’ fears and confusion about what’s ahead in the 21st century. Our politics now relies on education as the great populist hedge against an unknowable, globalized life. And like virtually every policy based on fear, it has us chasing a poor substitute for the best we could do. Education is an investment in our children, and our children are not merely widgets in the economic machine of our nation.
In the environment we’ve created, education ceases to be about learning, or even about knowledge itself; it becomes simply the slow, expensive purchase of job credentials. When we prime our consumers of education to seek a certificate that will give them access to the highest-paying job available, the curriculum inevitably narrows. There is little room for the humanities, which also means there’s little space to help students learn how to ask and answer the biggest questions about life — the “why” questions that motivate and inspire action and that offer glimpses into wisdom.
And this is where the damage is done. Students entering college this year have roughly the same outlook you would expect of a person entering trade school. For them, going to college isn’t about discovery or exploration of either the world or themselves. They’ve been coached to think of college as the completion of their job training. That’s not only a joyless outlook, it’s terribly limiting.
America’s cultural bent toward optimism and creativity were absolutely crucial to the rise of our prosperity in the 20th century. Not that 20th century norms of education were perfect, but two things were clearly in place that seem to be slipping away now. There was widespread belief that education meant access to opportunity of all sorts – not merely economic opportunity, but also social mobility and cultural esteem. Plus, primary and secondary education included inculcation into a powerful national mythos. It included, unself-consciously, aspirational ideals about risk-taking, curiosity, sacrifice and community values. American education, at least as I experienced it, had a values component that was strongly encouraging to native optimism and creativity.
I did not feel like school aimed to make me a cog in an impersonal machine. I thought I was growing up to join a long line of heroes who had made the world a better place. Lose that narrative, and you strip a sense of purpose from the kid being educated. Nothing against STEM, but the thing it most certainly lacks is narrative.
W.B. Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” That piece of wisdom is fading from our schools. If the spark goes out, our nation will suffer.
