Our Educational Caste System

I said in an earlier blog that the ascendance of Donald Trump is an embarrassment to our educational system. Donald Trump is an uneducated person. He appeals to people who are also uneducated. Given his large-scale support it is obvious that this country is awash in uneducated people in spite of the fact that we have a functioning public education system.

I still stand by that but it does need some explanation. I must begin by pointing out that being uneducated has nothing to do with ability. Most of our fellow citizens are capable of much higher achievements. The ability to think straight demonstrated by many of our leaders is put to shame by the same ability displayed by ordinary citizens. Our schools fail to develop the abilities widely distributed among us.

Many of our schools fail in transmitting elementary information to our students who often do not read well, do not write well,and have little information about our history or our political system.
What is worse, our educational system is constructed to maintain an educational caste or class system.
It is really instructive to listen to call- in shows about the political primary. Clearly thoughtful persons call in and admit that they are supporting Donald Trump. Sometimes, interestingly enough, they vacillate between Trump and Sanders. Most of these callers will add a sentence or two saying that they are not well educated. Americans are very much aware of what educational caste they belong to. They are very much aware of the educational caste of the persons they are talking to. Our people is divided into separate strata that are never mentioned but are rarely out of mind.

Many years ago when I was a more alternative teacher than I may be today, I asked my students--most of whom belonged to the well-to-do middle-class--to address me by my first name. They tried but could not do it. In some way that never got spelled out I was too different, my world was too different, they were not able to address me as, in some important way,  equal. Although I was obviously older and knew more about some things than they did,  I was not actually that different but the world in which they saw me and the figure I cut in the world was totally extraterrestrial for them.

You may think that is an insignificant anecdote but I do not think so. For a college student to call the teacher "Professor" provides important security by clearly marking social lines and social differences. From their perspective my world, how I talk, what I talk about, are unknown lands, for which they have no maps and where their compasses do not work.

I am reminded of a friend from college who told me of her complete shock the first time she saw one of her instructors eating lunch. It had not occurred to her that this person would eat. Because professors are completely different.

There are many different important implications of this caste system concealed just under the surface of our lives. The sharp line between the learned and those who are not means that those who do not know something cannot, by themselves, find out what they want. They need to take courses. Ignorance is not easily remedied. You'll need help to do that.

If you work, say, for a nonprofit organization and are doing an exceptional job, but the other person in the office has an advanced degree and you do not, the other person, however incompetent will be the queen and you will be the working bee. In order to get more powerful, better paying jobs, it is not enough to know things, a recognized institution needs to certify you. There is no easy transition between layers of the educational caste system. You may be as smart as anyone, who may read more and think better than many people with higher degrees than yours, they will get the power and the prestige and you will get the minimum wage.

The educational system with its different institutional levels has become a means for choking off access to positions of power, to positions of directing institutions, to prestige, and social recognition.
The educational caste system gives the lie to our protestation that we are dedicated to "liberty for all" because liberty and power depend on educational credentials.

Our schools cooperate in this system of progressively restricting access to the most desirable positions in this society and our educational system cooperates with other forces to limit social mobility and to keep many people in the working class. (Calling them "middle-class," as is now customary, is just a way to conceal this issue.)

Our schools do a very specific job: they teach our young to internalize the caste distinctions of the educational system. They must learn to apply the differences between the educated and the not educated to themselves. They must learn to feel powerless to remedy this situation. They must learn to blame themselves for not knowing more than they do and for belonging to their specific layer of this pyramid.

If I were a person who found myself uneducated, confined to the lower layers of the educational hierarchy and if I were one of the millions of people who felt apologetic and in some way incomplete for that reason, I would love Donald Trump who is in the same educational layer. But that does not hold him back from being a loud braggart, from talking about himself non-stop, from glorying in his real and imaginary accomplishments. What is not to like about a man who does not hesitate to parade his ignorance and take pleasure in it?

The Blame Game

Now that it seems quite possible that Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for President and both Republicans and Democrats are panicking, the question is: who is to blame for this disaster? There are different answers. Some people blame the media. Some people blame the Republican Party for not taking Trump seriously when he first started campaigning. Others blame the people who support Trump.

The question is important. Some of us are old enough to remember when, in 1933-- the Germans voted Adolf Hitler to be Chancellor --the German equivalent of president in the system they had then. No one is saying that Donald Trump is going to commit genocide. But it is hard to overlook his tendency to be racist and sexist, to be quite supportive of violence, and to be utterly irrational. What will happen to us, should Trump become President of the United States?

The first thing we need to notice is that the people playing the blame game begin with the implicit premise that they have nothing to do with this, they are blameless. But it is useless to ask what caused this disaster if we are not willing to consider that everyone has some part in a move towards something that looks a lot like fascism. The question in what way we are responsible is  only useful  if we are looking to prevent similar failures in the future. But we cannot prevent future failures if we are unwilling to  say  honestly: We did this. We did it in this way. We need to do this and that and something else to avoid a future repetition.

What does it take to produce millions and millions passionate supporters for Donald Trump? One thing it requires are people who are ignorant, who don't see an ignoramus when he's talking to them, and who, worse, don't care whether Trump knows what he's talking about. To support Trump you need to be really uneducated. One source of this terrible event is the massive failure of our educational system. We have not been willing to pay for good schools. We have not been willing to pay our teachers decent salaries.

Eight years ago we had a president who was not as nasty as Donald Trump but he was not very smart and equally ignorant and nobody seemed to mind that. His first election might not have been quite on the up and up, but we saw him in action and he got re-elected even though there was no question of his limited education and intelligence. That too was a clear failure of the American educational system.

Lesson number one: if you want reasonably intelligent presidents in the leadership you need to see to it that all voters get a decent education. We don't do that.

But that's only part of the problem. American society is clearly divided into classes. There are families with money. They can send their children to good schools and good universities to become skilled professionals. They tend to run the government. And then there are a lot of people who are poorly educated, who used to have good manufacturing jobs and now have low skill  service jobs that don't pay a lot of money, that are not very steady. Since the early 1970s --almost 50 years ago --wages for this segment of our people have not risen substantially. For them, work has not always been easy to find. It has not been satisfying. It has continued to pay very little.

The upper class, the well educated professionals, who have political power have not been interested in this working-class. They have not cared that their wages have not gone up while pay on Wall Street has gone through the roof. They have not cared that people who used to have skilled and honorable manufacturing jobs now have service jobs which are not interesting, which it is difficult to be proud of.  They have callously ignored this working-class.

Four years ago when Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama, he told his rich friends that 47% of the American population did not work , that they were on the dole. 47%, Mitt Romney said in so many words, were not people one needed to have respect for. They were not people who took responsibility. One would not consider inviting them to join one's club.

In this unfortunate comment, Romney put into words what all working-class people in the US know perfectly well, that we do live in a class society that the upper class runs the country for its own benefit and could care less for the well-being of working people.

When you bring this up, Republicans will start talking about "encouraging class warfare." They don't want you to talk about class distinctions. They will deny their existence. But they also deny that they have any responsibility for their fellow citizens who are all working men and women. They deny that they owe any respect to the men and women who do much of the work in this country.
Well now they get what they deserve. These ignored, abused working people have now found a voice and it is Donald Trump's. The patrician Republicans, like Mitt Romney, are appalled by vulgarians like Trump but that's what you get when you don't educate people and simply ignore or denigrate them. They will get their revenge in some way and they are getting it.

Lesson number two. An upper class that denies that there are people they exploit and despise will sooner or later have to confront a rebellion of the maligned lower-class.

These are some of the reasons why Donald Trump is flying high. Every one of us is to blame because it is a failure of the American Society, a major failure. It will not do to say: it is not my fault, it is the fault of those other persons or institutions.

We will have many Trumps, perhaps worse ones than the Donald, unless we build schools that educate children and not just warehouse them, unless we are honest about the class distinctions in our society and learn to respect everyone not only the super-rich and upperclass Mitt Romney’s of this country.

The next generation of American citizens

 

A while ago, just before Election Day, I asked the students in my college level political philosophy class whether they were going to vote the next day. Out of a class of 30 maybe three or four thought they might go and vote. Some of the others said that they lived far away, or they had just reached voting age and had not registered yet. But by far most of the students said that they did not really know anything about politics and therefore felt unable to participate in the election.

When asked whether they had had civics classes in high school, all of them, without exception, said their high school had not offered any classes explaining our political system and how it works.

This is a familiar fact. Anyone who is at all interested in the lack of political participation of today's youth knows that they have never been taught how our system works or what its history is. They have been told that ours is a free country but no one explained to them that a country where more than half the population is disengaged from political processes cannot really claim to be free anymore.

There are plenty of people with Internet websites who are trying to restore civic education to our schools. But to judge by the small sample of students I talked to about this, these efforts have not been successful--at least not locally.

A frequent explanation of this state of affairs is that in the early years of the century it became clear that our children are not nearly as proficient in their native language and in mathematics and science as children in European countries. Our government therefore began a mighty push to improve language and science education in the form of the "No Child Left Behind" Act. Language and science where on the top of the agenda. The President, Congress and leaders in education simply forgot about civic education.

I suspect that that is a misrepresentation. We are told almost daily that the goal of primary and secondary education in our country is to provide needed workers for American businesses. Hence we need people who are literate and who can do the required arithmetic and simple math called for in a lot of jobs.

Being politically savvy is not necessary for being a good worker. On the contrary citizens who are innocent of knowledge about our political system, how it works, who is powerful, how they get to be powerful, what the role of common people is in our political system, will be much more pliable, more easily befuddled by propaganda about American freedom which we must defend in the hot deserts of Iraq or the craggy mountains of Afghanistan. People with even a modicum of political education would not be taken in by such mendacious propaganda.

If our young people were politically knowledgeable, who would volunteer to fight our wars for oil and domination?

If our young people were politically knowledgeable, they would understand that going and voting is only a small part of their political obligation. They would know to put energy into their unions so that they would make great efforts to defend workers instead of providing cushy jobs for union bureaucrats. They would know that they needed to demonstrate and join together in order to be heard over the loud noise made by billionaires.

That would not be in the billionaires, or even the millionaires interest. Perhaps we no longer have civics classes and our schools because billionaires and millionaires have bought out American democracy and using it for their own purposes. From their vantage point, schools are there to produce a future workforce, not to produce active citizens. Those just get in the way of making our government serve business interests.

What is education for?

 The bankruptcy of American culture is vividly illustrated by our debate about education. Everyone is moaning about the shortcomings of the American educational system. Students do not learn enough. They are not prepared for the demands of the workplace. Education is too expensive. Educational results are very unequal. Here too the obstacles confronting the children of the poor are much greater than the difficulties encountered by the children of the middle class.

All of these complaints are justified. Our educational system does not teach students what they need to know. It charges too much for what it provides. The prevailing inequalities are only intensified by the schools and colleges our children attend.

In the midst of all this fretting, no one asks the question that should surely be first, namely what should be the goals of our education? You cannot criticize a set of institutions plausibly unless you begin with a clear idea of what you expect those institutions to accomplish.

The  bulk of the complaints we hear, however, have an implicit answer to the question about the goals of education. Everyone assumes that the function of education is to train people to take jobs in American business.

That seems all right, but we do need to ask whether preparing young people to take jobs is the only or even the main function of education. When we think of our college generation, young men and women just setting out on their lives, what matters most for them? What do we hope for them as their parents, as their uncles and aunts, as their friends? Are we prepared to tell our children that what is most important in their lives is that they do a good job and earn a good living? Why did we expend a great deal of effort to teach them to be honest, to be respectful of themselves and others, to live their life thoughtfully? Why did many of us want out children to grow up into good citzens?

When our children are as old as we are now, how do we hope they will summarize their lives? Is it enough for them to say 'I was good at my job and made a good living'?

Here is what I would hope my children will say when they are old – not necessarily in this order: I want them to believe that their life was interesting, and that one of the sources of interest were there many connections with other people's lives, with other families and the children raised in them. I am want them to be proud of what they learned over the years about many different things. I want them to look back with satisfaction on what they accomplished together with their neighbors to improve the place where they lived. I want them to bask in the respect of their neighbors for their contribution to the common life. I want them to be proud of having been good citizens.
I want them to remember fondly the many people they loved well and the love they received from their family and friends.

I want them to acknowledge frankly their failures, their acts of cowardice, their avoidance of opportunities to be decent persons.

This is only a partial list and different people might draw up very different lists on what makes a life a good life, a life well lived. But what is amply clear is that doing a good job at work and making a decent living considers other people merely as employees, as people one might hire for one's business. It is not considering young people as human beings preparing to live human lives.
Someone might agree that there is a lot more to life than earning a living, but also assert that none of those other accomplishments can be promoted by formal education.

But that is obviously false. A good education takes a person in their late teens who knows the world in which they grew up and introduces them to a much larger world by teaching them history and introducing them to matters political, by transmitting to them the pleasure of reading, or of the arts. Our young people, many of them prospective parents, can acquire a much more sophisticated sense of the process of growing up which they will be directing when they have children. We would want them to learn that adult life is also a continuing process of change, of learning, of adjusting to the demands of different ages.

When we think about education, just as when we think about many other things, we have been conditioned to think of ourselves only as cogs in the great capitalist machine. We have lost sight of the many wonderful possibilities that human lives present. We have allowed ourselves to be terribly impoverished.

Money in Politics II

In a previous blog I considered the price in human lives and human misery we pay for an economic system that regards the pursuit of private profit as the main goal of economic activity. The primacy of private profit shows up in the contamination of democratic processes by wealth. No longer does every citizen have one vote. Most of us do, indeed, have one but the rich have as many as they are willing to buy. One consequence is the failure of private or governmental regulation to protect textile workers in Asia against building collapses, fires and brutal exploitation from their employers.

But that is only one example of the power of money in politics. And another interesting example has recently received a good deal of attention: the role played by super foundations in our public life. The Gates Foundation, for one, has taken an interest in education. It has supported a number of serious changes in education. It pursues its agenda quite independently of what people in general want. It pushes through changes in education and only once they are being implemented, does the public at large hear about these activities.

A concrete case in point are the so-called "Common Core" standards in education. They have been adopted by education bureaucrats in a majority of states. The project is to institute uniform standards for primary and secondary education in all states.

That seems like an attractive idea. If there are standards of what schools should teach our children, surely they should be the same in Texas, as in Washington, or in Massachusetts. Geography has nothing to do with what constitutes a good education. Being well educated does not change when you cross state lines.

That seems plausible, but national standards of a good education circumvent local decision-making. Americans have been insistent for a long time that local schools should be run by the local citizens who pay for those schools and whose children are educated there. From the perspective of democracy that would seem to be a reasonable demand. If democracy allows all citizens to run their own lives, it should also allow them to make decisions about the education of their children.

The common core educational standards, pushed by various foundations, make an end run around local democratic self-determination. In different parts of the country, local communities are protesting that these new educational standards were adopted by education bureaucrats without either consulting state legislators, or teachers, or parents. They have been imposed by people who consider themselves more knowledgeable about education than ordinary citizens.

This controversy illustrates the traditional tension between experts and the decisions of a democratic public. The ordinary people who make democratic decisions are not always right. Sometimes the experts know better. Advocates of democracy must acknowledge that difficulty. If we value democracy we must continue to support popular decision-making even if, sometimes, the experts are right and the people are wrong.

The controversy about common core standards, however, is also an example of the role of money in politics. Foundations are so enormously powerful because they have a powerful amount of money. The Gates Foundation's $40 billion speaks very loudly. It speaks much more loudly than the voice of ordinary citizens, than the voice of teachers and parents in smaller and larger communities all over our country.

For the sake of preserving our democracy, local communities have to be extremely vigilant about the influence of the large stashes of money of different Foundations. Bill Gates is a successful computer entrepreneur. He is rich enough to buy bushels of education experts. But he should not be allowed to displace the decisions of citizens by his personal choices.

When Education Becomes 

a Business. . .

One of the important side effects of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the extensive publicity given to the large debts our students carry to pay for their education. One of the causes of the steep increase in student debt is the steady rise in college tuition – a faster rise than the rate of inflation. Getting an education has become more expensive every year.

Where does all this money go?

Here are some interesting facts: in the 1970's about 20% of all college teachers were part timers, adjuncts. Adjuncts earn less than full-time professors, they have no job security, no health care or pension benefits. Many of them teach courses at different schools. Many of them are on food stamps.

Today about 50% of all college courses are taught by adjuncts. As is true for many employees, more and more college teachers have precarious, temporary jobs and have a hard time making a decent living.

The rise in the cost of college education does not seem to be due to the cost of actual teaching. The college wage bill has tended to go down because more and more teachers are, frankly, underpaid.

Where then does the money go? "Between 1975 and 2005, decades of rising college enrollments, the number of full-time faculty grew 50% while the percentage of those employed as university administrators swelled by 85% and administrative staffers by 240%" (Thought and Action: the NEA Higher Education Journal volume 25 (2012), 9).

Add to that, that top level administrators' salaries have increased substantially. It is no longer unusual for a college president to make a six-figure—as in $ 600,000.00-- salary.

These changes in higher education reflect a trend of considering colleges and universities as just one more business. Hence the successful effort to shrink the wage bill and increase the number and salaries of top managers. Universities are treated as if their main task was to make a profit. The focus is on the athletic department, on the winning football team where huge sums are invested. What counts is the bottom line. Learning, education, scholarship, scientific research count for little unless they can be commercialized and bring in profits.

Many of the new highly paid administrators are not scholars or even particularly well educated. They are business men; they are pretending to run a business where that is completely inappropriate. Education is about increasing knowledge and skills, expanding personalities, equipping all of us to lead the best lives we can live, making us better and more knowledgeable citizens, and the parents of happy and promising children. These values cannot be measured in dollars and cents. Leading the best lives we can, being good citizens, being excellent parents is different from having or producing a lot of money. You may leave your children a lot of money but be a bad parent; good parenting enriches your children in non-monetary ways. Being a good citizens does not necessarily bring in money. The rich often are very poor citizens. You may be a person with many resources but money is not one of them. You can be rich and be a clown like Donald Trump.

Money and wealth are not the primary goals of education or of educational institutions. The new administrators and presidents of colleges and universities, being mainly into money, enrich themselves while destroying their institutions.

Ever since Calvin Coolidge said that "America is business is business" we have thought that whatever we do in our lives should be thought of as a profit and loss undertaking. Applying that completely inappropriate motto to education leaves us with a faltering education system that costs more and more and is less and less effective.

This is just one instance of the mischief done by considering everything we do as a business. Health care used to be about helping sick people become well and about well people remaining well. Today it is mainly a for-profit undertaking. As a consequence America spends more on health care than any other country in the world but the health care we get is inferior to that in many other countries.

We are still suffering from the effect of having allowed banks to be moneymaking enterprises. Not for-profit banks, like your local credit unions, provide perfectly good services and do not go bankrupt because they engage in risky speculations and lose their shirt.

Education is one of many parts of our society which suffers seriously from America's love affair with making money.

It is time that we remembered that money is not everything.

The Aims of Education

Earlier this year, results from a national test showed that less than one third of all elementary and high school students were proficient in science. 40% of 12th graders tested at the very lowest level in science. Recent tests of school children in Massachusetts showed very discouraging results.

I am quite sure that many people who deplore the continuing deterioration of American education are perfectly sincere in their worries. They expect our schools to benefit all children by helping them learn as much as possible.

But at the same time it becomes clearer all the time that many of our leaders hold a very impoverished idea about the goals of American education.

Not too long ago it was a commonplace that education in the humanities was a essential to develop the minds of students. Knowledge of literature, of the arts and of philosophy was thought to make young people articulate, creative, and clear thinkers. Hence liberal education was considered an important part of everyone's education. The aim of education was to create well-rounded persons equipped to live their lives as well as possible.

In recent years the rhetoric has changed. We do not hear much anymore about the desirability of well-rounded persons. Today, everyone from the president on down repeats that the goal of education is to produce a work force for the coming years. Our leaders no longer seem interested in the development of the capacities of all young people to be creative, articulate and clear thinking citizens. The only purpose education serves now is to prepare people to do a job.

Now it is quite obvious that there are very different jobs in this world. Many jobs are quite routine, the person doing the job has to be good at taking orders, and to fit into a complicated bureaucratic machine. Their main virtue is to follow rules, to go by the book. People who do jobs like that do not need to be articulate. They do not need to be creative or think for themselves. If they did, they might not like their job and might prove to be difficult employees.Better that the people destined to fill routine and bureaucratic jobs should be thoughtless, poorly educated, and not particularly knowledgeable.

In line with this change in thinking about education, the University of Nevada has abolished its philosophy department. Howard University came very close to doing the same thing. The State University of New York in Albany abolished its foreign language departments.

These are just the beginnings of moving against traditional liberal education. In our world where business calls the shots, education no longer is intended to make persons the most capable they can be so that they can have good lives. The role of education now is to provide a workforce for business. Best are workers with limited education who will not complain if their jobs are stupid and boring because their education prepared them for boredom, for doing as they are told and to accept orders from above.

For many students the aim of education is to produce competent drones that are not rebellious but do as they are told.

But wait! Are these drones at work not also citizens? Are they not parents whose job and ambition it is to raise their children to be intelligent, eager to learn and independent thinkers? But we are no longer hearing about that.

Business calls the shots. Business wants drones. Business does not care about democracy; it prefers docile, ill informed citizens who are easily manipulated by advertisers. 

That is the real crisis in American education.

Let's Give Texas Back to Mexico!

We have it on no less an authority than Barbara Bush that students in Texas currently rank 47^th in the nation in literacy, 49^th in verbal SAT scores, and 46^th in math scores.

More than half of the Texas legislature—products of that prodigious educational system-- signed on to a bill to fix education in their state: The proposed law will allow students and faculty at Texas State Colleges and Universities to carry firearms.

A wretched primary and secondary education will no longer stand in the students' way. They can now extort A's from their teachers with their handguns. Teachers, in their turn, can punish plagiarists by shooting them, or can wake up students by shooting a few rounds into the classroom ceiling.

No doubt, before long, some enterprising digital entrepreneur will produce a smart phone that can shoot real bullets.

Gun violence is big in Mexico. I think the Texans would be more comfortable as part of that country. Let's give Texas back. The Mexican-American war was a big mistake.

The Crisis in Education

Teachers, school administrators, education experts meet almost any day of the year in one place or another to discuss education. Conferences about education occur almost daily throughout the year. Someone at any of these conferences is bound to talk about “the crisis in education.” For many years now, education in the United States has been deteriorating. Everyone knows it. But all the experts and all the education conferences have not managed to reverse the downward trend. There are unending discussions of schools, buildings and equipment, teachers and teacher training, class size, and many other topics. All of those are important. Many different factors have to come together before children and young persons can receive a good education.
In the United States, however, there is one more problem which does not receive a lot of attention: the vast majority of Americans do not believe that education is important.
How can I say such a thing when we spend huge sums of money on education, on beautiful new school buildings, equipped with computers and the latest audiovisual technology? Yes, it's true that we are willing to spend considerable sums of money on schools and teachers and equipment. But when it comes to education, most Americans think that it has no value except if it prepares you for a better job and for making more money. Most people do not think that education is good in itself. You go to school to enhance your financial prospects, not to learn anything.
Look on the Internet and google "the value of education," "the benefits" or "the importance of education," and you will find article after article explaining how college graduates will earn more money than people who only finished high school and that people who dropout of high school before finishing will earn even less and have more problems finding work. Education makes money; that's what it is good for.
As a consequence, many students at all levels go to school to earn a diploma, not especially to learn anything. In order to earn a diploma you have to pass courses and, preferably, earn a good grade. Learning anything is not the object. Three months after the course is over, most of the content is forgotten. Most importantly, the students did not acquire a thirst for knowledge. Few emerge from school asking questions, looking for answers, trying to understand the world in which they find themselves.
A good education develops the curiosity of children. They discover that learning things about the world is exciting. They learn to ask questions; they learn to wonder about events they do not understand. When they learn to read and write, they learn to formulate questions and articulate their thoughts about the world. When they learn how our government works, they learn one of the important prerequisites for being good citizens. They learn that they live in a society where they can influence their lives together with others. When they learn history, they learn to see themselves as belonging to a human race that has over centuries tried out different ways of living out human lives.
We hear often these days that parents should read books to their children. And so they should. But equally or more important is that parents read books for their own enjoyment and growth. Many American homes have no books except perhaps some college texts that have never been put in the trash. Children in those houses learn that grown ups do not read, that books are only for small kids. Once you have learned how to read, all you need to read is what you have to read in school or at your job.
Children do not learn to be curious if their parents' conversation includes only gossip or last nights' game. Children are encouraged to follow up their own questions when they see their parents talk at dinner about interesting things they found out in the course of the day, or topics they encountered they would like to know more about. Children do not learn to value education if their parents do not ask them what they learned in school, but only ask about their grades. What good are good grades if in earning them your child did not learn anything that will make a difference to the person she is growing up to be? Maybe your child is learning things in school you do not know and you might be glad to find out about. Learning from your children enriches your life and shows them that learning is good in itself.
Education should open everyone's eyes to the immense variety of the world, of persons and places and societies to know, to experience, savor and try to understand. You miss all of that if making and spending money is in the center of your life. You miss what education might provide in your life, if you only go to school to earn more money in the future.

How high IS our standard of living?

A young man I know plays in a band. He is a dedicated and promising musician. He went off to college planning to prepare himself for a career as a high school music teacher. But every time he opened the paper, he saw another story about school systems cutting their arts and music programs because they did not have enough money. He was forced to give up that plan.
His story made me think about the work life of many other Americans. Ours is a competitive system that most people consider good because it produces ever more new and cheaper goods. But goods become cheaper when they are cheaper to produce. Production costs are often lowered by substituting machines for human beings. Jobs that, at one time, required skilled workers are now done by intricate machines. Workers have become machine minders, feeding raw materials to the machine. Any child could do that. It takes little skill to do that work and it is very boring.
Richard Sennett, a sociologist, describes how baking bread used to be highly skilled work. Now the loaves all ready to be baked are trucked to the store from a central kitchen. The workers in the local bakery put the frozen loaves into a very sophisticated, computerized oven, push some buttons and wait until the machine is done and signals them to take the bread out. All they do is mind the machine. When the machine breaks, they are forbidden to try and fix it. Instead they must call for the technician who repairs the oven. The people in the bakery have no skills; they wait on the machine; in case of malfunction they wait on the technician. Mechanization has produced more and cheaper goods but it has also ruined many a good job and replaced it with a very tedious one. The price of more consumption goods is often the work life of those who produce them.
Reflecting about this, we must ask what constitutes a “high standard of living.” In terms of economic statistics, we are doing very well. We have more things, newer things, and more money than most other people in the world. But does money buy happiness?
Robert Lane, a sociologist at Yale University, has documented in considerable detail that the explosion of goods and money in the last decades in the US has not increased happiness. Most people, his research shows, lead good lives to the extent that they have lively and extensive relations to family, friends and neighbors and to the extent that their jobs are challenging and allow them to take some pride in it. But people are becoming more and more isolated; relations to family and friends are more distant and are loosing intimacy. Work no longer nourishes self-esteem because,. more and more, it is done “just for the money.”
If our children cannot get a decent education unless we send them to private school; if the good job you had migrated to Asia and the job you have now pays less and is less desirable; if the jobs that were once available demanded a good deal of skill and the jobs that exist now are routine and numbingly repetitive, are we living a good life? Will the HD television set, the cell-phone that plays movies and gives you access to the internet and to e-mail really compensate for being bored at work and being unable to get a decent education for your children?
We call ourselves “the richest nation in the world” but cannot afford music classes in schools.
We need to stop talking about how high our standard of living is and ask ourselves: what really matters, whether electronic gadgets are more important or satisfaction at work, a better image on the tv or a good education for children.
Do we really have such a high standard of living if we loose happiness with every year?