Posted on 02/09/2015 2:30:30 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
One of hazards of early morning blogging is that it allows later-in-the-day bloggers to write unfettered responses to those articles. Today, my friend Sheila Kennedy, sparks an interesting and much-needed debate over the purpose of higher education, an article posted both on her own blog and on IBJ's INForefront. I feel compelled to respond.
In the column, Kennedy quotes sources reporting that Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
had wanted to insert language in the budget stating the [University of Wisconsin's] mission was “to meet the state’s workforce needs.” He wanted to remove language saying UW’s mission is to “extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campus” and to “serve and stimulate society.” He also wanted to remove the statement “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth
Kennedy makes the argument that the pursuit of higher education should be about the search for knowledge, not for the purpose of training people for jobs. She concludes her piece saying:
Scott Walker is emblematic of the anti-intellectualism that is so rampant on the American Right. He is one of the (far too many) shallow and ambitious politicians who think education and job training are synonymous, that scholarly research and "search for the truth" are elitist non-essentials, and that humans don't need to know anything that isn't immediately useful for obtaining gainful employment. They'd have handed Socrates that cup of hemlock without thinking twice.
After all, if people are allowed to search for truth, they’ll ask inconvenient questions. They’ll challenge the martinets. They might even see themselves as citizens rather than obedient consumers.
Ironically Kennedy's approach to argument smacks of anti-intellectualism. Instead of assuming that Governor Walker simply has an alternative view of the purpose of education and arguing why that position is wrong, she instead attacks what she assumes are the motivation for Walker's position...that he hates knowledge.
I actually have a great deal of empathy for Kennedy's position that higher education should be about the quest for knowledge. I taught political science as an adjunct instructor at IUPUI at the University of Indianapolis for over 20 years. Kennedy is a professor of Law and Policy at IUPUI and has been an adjunct professor of political science. We both have law degrees and worked as lawyers. I loved the knowledge that my college and law school education provided me and thought at times of returning to get an MBA or doctorate in history. When I taught, I felt good educating people about how our political system and government really works. Most of my students were not majoring in political science, but I feel what I taught them enriched their lives and made them better citizens. Ex-students have told me that I did just that.
Unfortunately, the intellectual world that Kennedy and I would like to live in, the one which values education simply for the knowledge received, is not the real world that the young adults of today face. Many of these kids (I'm old enough now that I can call young adults in their teens and 20's "kids") are amassing enormous, often six figure, student loan debt to obtain college and advanced degrees. What education they choose will probably be the most important investment they ever make.
The job market of today is not one where you meet personally with an employer and you can impress that person with your well-rounded knowledge. Rather today's job market involves applying to virtually every employment opportunity on line. The employer puts the inevitable hundreds of resumes that will be received for any decent paying position through an automated screening process. An applicant who doesn't have the right degree with the right major is eliminated from consideration. Those who have advanced degrees beyond the education requested by the employer are eliminated as being overqualified. The remaining ten applicants or so are the only ones the employer considers to interview. It is an impersonal process that is brutally efficient and terribly unfair for those who did what Kennedy suggests in pursuing education as a "search for knowledge" instead of a means to employment.
No, Sheila, in today's job market it is essential that colleges and universities focus on educating people for jobs in the workforce. Governor Walker is absolutely right.
Schools of Education - where you “learn” how to teach/indoctrinate instead of becoming proficient the subject matter you need to know to be a good teacher - need to go by the way.
Baring people who excel in critical areas that students need to (and should) learn (to become employed and become good citizens) from teaching (unless they’re credentialed - or liberal-thinking) is criminal, imo.
Yes.
But they aren't doing that. Over the last 5 years I've been in a position where I supervise 8-10 people, sit on interview panels and participate in the hiring process.
I can tell you that the more recent crop of college grads are not ready for prime time. A few may end up being really book smart, but when the real world answer is not in the book and they have to think for themselves and do their own research/trial and error to solve a problem not contained "in the book"...they're lost, TOTALLY lost.
Wow, so now I’m anti-intellectual. I’ve really accomplished a lot of titles over the last 6 years.
With one - comes the other...of course, that’s how it used to work...
Personal choice, but schooling starting in k-8 is so dumbed down that each successive school experience is more to remediate, than to educate.
The cure is free markets. Between k-12 children lose 4.33 years of education. For most kids k-8 would be enough if properly done. They need math, reading, US history (a la Larry Schweikert) and they’re done. They’d learn to love learning and logic is very natural.
It should be a balance of both with an emphasis on critical thinking. Concur that you have to take the job market into account, but colleges & universities should not be transformed into vocational schools either.
Sorry. Education is not training robots for the work force. Education is to teach and search for truth and the good. Then training in a specific trade or profession will result in a more cultured populace. We are not monkeys. We are humans. Governor Walker is ignorant and mistaken.
Until education is taken back from union control, it is doomed to mediocrity. We have proponents of Pre-K for 3 year-olds (parents want it for “free” daycare, teachers want it for more jobs-for-life with no accountability, and Dems want it for more unionized jobs to funnel dues to the Democratic Party); in the meantime, NJ doesn’t even require kindergarten.
So you are a great proponent of the insightful new “Race and Gender Studies” degree programs, huh?
the teachers there have job security, they don’t care one way or the other if students get a job or not.
Bogus premise that higher knowledge is not achieved through the private sector. That said, universities have contributed a tremendous amount of practical knowledge to both public and private sectors. Yeah, yeah, I know... the article concerns unfettered academia...
But a minority, the really serious ones, are after a career and they will be focused on getting real useful knowledge. They might even recognize that they have a whole lifetime to discover Great Art and Great Literature and become a Wiz at History.
If students were in it for the money they wouldn't be studying Literature and Psychology. Here is what they would be taking. No soft majors in this group.
College can and should be for both purposes.
“With one - comes the other...of course, that’s how it used to work...”
I agree entirely.
I think it’s even simpler than what the article states.
If one is paying for college out of their own pocket, it should be for whatever they want, i.e. to find a job, expand knowledge, or whatever.
If, on the other hand, one asks the government, aka other people, to pay, then those who pay have every right to set conditions on what is learned and why.
That is a big problem with higher education today. People want to learn whatever they want, but they also want you and I to pay for it. If we are subsidizing their education, don’t we have a legitimate right to know if we’re getting good value for our investment?
“With one - comes the other...of course, that’s how it used to work...”
Yeah, but back in the day, there weren’t so many of these soft degrees. And, Government loans weren’t as easy to get. Example; read the other day about this woman who was $200,000 in debt from obtaining a Masters Degree in Education (teaching degree) from Harvard. Now, unless things have changed “a lot” over the past several years there’s no way she can pay this off in her life time. And, she knew this. Hence her whining for the government to pay it or forgive it. I say, too bad, live with it.....
I would argue that people getting an education for the purpose of getting a job ARE searching for knowledge.
In my field, I am inundated with new knowledge all the time. There are thousands of people engaged in research, contributing more to the knowledge base all the time--if I don't make some sort of effort to keep up, I will no longer be employable.
I'm sure that there are jobs where learning the basic skills is enough, but most of the high-tech jobs require constant learning.
As for "well-rounded" education--I don't really know what that means. I have practically used almost every subject I had to study as "general education", except for history, which I considered a waste of time when I had to take the classes, and has little bearing on what I do. Don't get me wrong--I do use history that is pertinent to my profession, but the rest of it is a waste. Understanding the human cost of epidemics and pandemics throughout history (which I did not study in history class) is important for keeping current public health work in context; knowing that two specific ethnic groups engaged in a 15 year war sometime in the 9th century is utterly useless (and forgotten the moment I walk out of class).
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