by Penny, Laura
Both the U.S. and Canada are made up of many different local cultures. But that is precisely why there should be national core curricula, so that inhabitants of diverse regions have some culture and facts in common. Ravitch asks, is math or Greek tragedy or the periodic table really that different in Louisiana and California, Alberta and Nova Scotia? No. Or at least, they shouldn’t be.
The thing I like about Ravitch’s approach is that she focuses on texts, not tests. Texts, not tests is a good place to start rethinking our approach to education policy, since it shifts the discussion from the usual narrow number-crunching to questions of quality. Which texts are must-reads for any educated American or Canadian? What scientific ideas and mathematical concepts, which historical events and artworks should we have in common? These are questions we could have some lively, long-overdue debates about, if only anyone had the political will to suggest that civilization matters, to insist that education is not merely a local and economic issue, but a national, ethical, and social one. But that would mean saying that people who read fare better than people who don’t, and that some books are better than others. You can’t say that on television or the campaign trail.
Rigorous national curriculum guidelines would help ameliorate the ignorance and anti-intellectualism wrought by patchwork standards, standardized testing regimes, and sappy self-esteem-inflating psychobabble. I am a firm believer in educational standards, but then, who isn’t? The problem is that the standards that currently prevail aren’t nearly educational or standard enough. If educrats and politicos, parents and voters were actually committed to education in any meaningful way, they would invest in better assessments of it than the ones a Scantron machine and a roomful of psychometric wonks can provide.
The Scantron is the robot brain that does much of North America’s academic shitwork, grading student work automatically by skimming over their pencilled-in bubbles and spitting out a score. It judges student work without wasting any time reading or responding to it. Anyone who has taught knows that grading is the gruelling part of the gig, that it can take hours to correct a stack of papers if you do it right and show the students everything they are doing wrong.
I like evaluation systems that educrats would doubtless consider hopelessly antiquated and prohibitively labour-intensive. Bubble tests are a perfectly fine way to assess factual knowledge, but students should also be tested on their ability to make arguments, to write a piece of persuasive prose or explain a concept. There should be more essay-based exams, and oral exams too, but those require warm bodies, which require paycheques. The SAT recently added an essay component, but it does not deduct marks for grammatical errors or bad content, and the graders seem to award points on the basis of quantity, not quality. That’s hardly an auspicious start, but essay-based tests are a step in the right direction.
Or we could always look to the East and the future. In 2009, Japanese researchers unveiled Saya, a robot teacher, and let her conduct classes at a Tokyo school. Saya can call the roll and mimic teacherly feelings such as sadness, anger, and disgust. It is highly unlikely that she will ever express any interest in organizing her fellow droids or criticizing whatever curriculum her programmers make her run. If we’re going to let robots like the almighty Scantron do the grading, we might as well let them teach. We’ve already started driving the humanities out of the schools. Why not go all the way, and get rid of the pesky humans too?
Chapter Four
SCREW U OR HATE MY PROFESSORS
Colleges and universities are major economic engines, while also serving as civic and cultural centers.
– A TEST OF LEADERSHIP: CHARTING THE FUTURE OF U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION (A.K.A THE SPELLINGS COMMISSION REPORT)
When I was an irritating idealistic undergraduate, I thought everyone should go to university. My friends and I enthused about those super-civilized, culture-mad countries in Europe that charged no tuition, the ones where they would pay people to go to school – like learning was important, or something. Why, those lucky bastards probably got free wine and cheese too. Not like in dumbass, get-a-job North America, where college was simply a means to an end, a private benefit to be shilled vigorously like any other high-end product. Not like in dumbass, get-a-job North America, where any major that does not directly correspond to a professional title inspires choruses of derisive howls: “What are you going to dooo with that?”
I still retain a teensy shred of idealism. Anyone who is genuinely interested in learning should be able go to university. But a decade of teaching has beaten the shining egalitarian dream of universal access out of me. There are a lot of people in university who have no business being there. Classrooms are peopled with the doomed and the dragooned, with heel-dragging heaps of burning money and wasted time. Many students are unready, unwilling, or unable to do university-level work. I know it borders on blasphemy to say such a thing in a culture that works overtime to find new “intelligences” so everyone’s kid can be special. But I’ve tried to teach plenty of students who had very little interest in learning, and much less in learning English. Why should larval nurses or engineers waste their time learning to read, write, speak, and think? Like, duh, they already know, like, English, y’know?
There are more university students than ever before. But as drink-soaked curmudgeon Kingsley Amis warned when the U.K. liberalized its universities, “more will mean worse.” Concerned professional nerds wonder if popular success has come at the cost of standards and rigour, if the university has sold its soul to fill its seats and coffers. Rising enrolments have led to increased anxiety about the state and fate of the institution, if the shelves upon shelves of eulogies for higher ed and calls to restore it are any indication.
Despairing tomes about the ebbing vitality and integrity of universities in the U.S. and Canada abound, with titles such as Declining by Degrees, The University in Ruins, Education’s End, Ivory Tower Blues, No Place to Learn, and the granddaddy of this genre, Allan Bloom’s 1987 surprise hit, The Closing of the American Mind. I read my own weight in the damn things and then, to quote Dorothy Parker, I shot myself.
Leftish university-decline books generally place the blame on customer-service rhetoric and corporatization, and right-ish ones bemoan lefty classroom indoctrination and the dissolution of standards and canons. Lefties also tend to argue in favour of universal access and increased government funding. Right-wingers contend that there are too many losers doing useless artsy-fartsy degrees already, and pitch market solutions. Both miss the mark.
The university sells students – and their parents – careers in its shiny brochures, on its ever-expanding websites. This is also the standard party line for guidance counsellors and high-school teachers. Go to college, get a marketable degree, and spend the rest of your life being cosseted by dropouts and arts majors. But this kind of credentialism changes the relationship between professors and students. If students are paying for the degree rather than the classes, buying a chit instead of a challenge, then I am not an instructor. I am a potential impediment, someone who might stand in the way of the future the university promised them. If I “take points off” – their words, not mine – for crappy work, then I may well inconvenience them. After all, the university promised them a product: jobs.
Credentialism, in concert with the customer-centric language universities now use to address their students, has effectively demoted professors to the nerdiest wing of the service industry. I am the students’ employee – a grammar janitor, a language waitress. Good service means A’s. Bad grades are bad service, a finger in your chili or a mouse in your beer, evidence that the help has fucked up again. Good service means classes that are entertaining. Bad service means classes that are boring or hard.
Credentialism has made some students quite cynical about the value of education, which helps explain rampant plagiarism, the flourishing online paper mills and the development of services such as Turnitin.com to surveil the problem. Students buy or steal work because they can, thanks to the Internet
’s new and improved cheat-friendly technologies. However, plagiarism also shows us that college is a system to be gamed, that the piece of paper matters more than the learning that piece of paper is supposed to represent.
Want to know how to get into college? It’s pretty easy – write a cheque. Oh sure, you still have to work hard to get into a top-notch school, but the fair-to-middling majority welcome your patronage, regardless of your skill or dedication. Simply give them thousands and thousands of dollars and as far as Any University is concerned, you are fit for the rigours of higher education. If it is a “student-centred” university you’ll likely squeak by, as your instructors will have been instructed not to fail too many of the customers. Don’t want to prick their precious self-esteem! If it is not “student-centred,” your school can let you flail around and flunk, which means it can make you take those classes again, and charge you again – cha-ching! In extremis, it may turf you for poor performance or plagiarism. But you can probably get back in on academic probation if you (natch) write another cheque.
Post-secondary education is a booming business indeed. Over the past couple of decades, what with nearly constant talk about the knowledge economy and the information careers of the future, post-secondary education has done boffo box office, which is especially impressive given that the institution is in crisis. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. college and university enrolment grew 14 per cent between 1987 and 1997. Between 1997 and 2007, it grew by 26 per cent. In 2007 approximately 29.5 million students were registered at colleges and universities.1 And the experts say this number will just keep on climbing, if for grim reasons, as recessions often send people back to school to upgrade in search of better work. In Canada, 2007 figures also show that post-secondary enrolment has been growing, increasing 31 per cent between 2000 and 2006.2 In 2007–08, according to the latest data from StatsCan, over a million students were enrolled in post-secondary education, a record high.
North American colleges and universities are putting more bums in the seats, and they are also charging a lot more for the privilege of snoring your way through Psych 101. Tuition increases have steadily outpaced inflation. In fact, financial aid counsellors say that tuition increases are usually double the rate of inflation. According to a 2007 study by the College Board, tuition costs in the United States jumped 35 per cent between 2000 and 2005. The average tuition at a public four-year college has continued to rise; in 2008–09 it was $6,585, while the average cost of tuition at a private four-year college was $25,143.3 In Canada the average undergrad tuition was $4,724 in 2008–09.4 Of course, none of these figures include the numerous student fees, the outrageous markups on textbooks, and the costs of niceties such as food and shelter, which contribute to big fat student debt loads.
Administrators and educrats say that the droves who continue to enrol are evidence that tuition increases are not a significant barrier to access. But what this actually shows us is that a college education has become mandatory if one aspires to the middle class or better. Kids of all ages are taking out mortgages on their brains because they have been told a million times that university is the only route to a decent job.
But post-secondary graduates are not impressing employers much. One report, conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, found that 63 per cent of employers think college graduates “lack the skills to succeed in our global economy.”5 A study by business think tank the Conference Board called Are They Really Ready to Work? answers with a resounding no. Its authors write: “Only about one-quarter of four-year college graduates are perceived to be excellent in many of the most important skills, and more than one-quarter of four-year college graduates are perceived to be deficiently prepared in Written Communications.”6
The employers surveyed by the Conference Board listed the most important skills that college graduates require to be work-ready. The top ten are
oral communications
teamwork/collaboration
professionalism/work ethic
written communications
critical thinking/problem solving
writing in English
English language
reading comprehension
ethics/social responsibility
leadership7
And then, at the very bottom of the list – in twentieth place – is poor ol’ humanities/arts, which a piffling 13 per cent of employers rank as valuable. This in spite of the fact that at least seven of the skills they specifically request – things like reading, writing, critical thinking, and ethics – get more of a workout in the humanities and liberal arts than in any other program.
The employer types surveyed by the Conference Board have a reflexive disdain for the seeming uselessness of the humanities. Then they bitch and moan because college grads can’t read, write, think, or speak very well. It doesn’t take a lot of critical thinking or problem-solving skills to see the obvious contradiction here. No wonder colleges are failing, even by these bullshit boss-friendly, job-o-centric standards.
And here’s a fun fact about the Conference Board: in May 2009 its branch in Canada had to apologize for three of its reports because they were plagiarized, hastily cobbled-together cut-and-paste jobs like so many fraudulent undergrad papers. The punchline? The offending reports dealt with intellectual property and copyright issues.
For employers, the ultimate elusive performance indicator of the success or failure of academia is how much they can save on training by sloughing off the costs onto colleges, students, and taxpayers. Reading, writing, and thinking matter because CEOS are peeved that their pedigreed underlings cannot bang out an email or a report. Ignorance is to be deplored, not for its deleterious effects on the body politic, public discourse, or our personal lives, but because it might inconvenience or embarrass management or adversely affect the bottom line.
But this assumption – that education is good because it equals mo’ money – is precisely why many students cannot be bothered to learn how to read or write or think. They can’t see how ethics or historical knowledge or linguistic skills might be of any use to them in their future careers. They grow impatient, annoyed by persistent pedagogical deviations from the end goal: getting paid.
The idea that universities should be career training academies, posher, better-appointed versions of DeVry, is one that goes all the way to the top in North America. After the economy started tanking in Canada in 2009, Prime Minister Harper floated a plan to divert funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to graduate students doing business degrees. This was exactly wrong. It wasn’t the philosophers, historians, and sociologists that SSHRC supports who led us into fiscal peril. No, it was people with business degrees. Making it a political priority to fund more of them is like clinging to a chunk of the Titanic crying, “We shoulda built a bigger boat.”
Obama has said that he wants to see every American complete some post-secondary education, but the first post-secondary stimulus funds went to community colleges and job training. The Bush administration also believed that university + college = job training, as we see in the Spellings Commission report quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The line describing universities as economic engines that are incidentally civic and cultural is a pithy summary of the report’s ethos, its unwavering commitment to money over brains.
The Spellings Commission was Bush’s attempt to initiate some NCLB-style “measuring is the gateway” accountability measures at the post-secondary level. The only disciplines that the Spellings report refers to are the STEMs: science, technology, engineering, and math. Save for a glancing reference to foreign languages, which are important because America needs to sell things to people who talk funny, the report makes no reference whatsoever to the humanities or liberal arts. Those terms don’t appear once in seventy-six pages of buzzwords. Instead, we see thirty-six references to accountability, nineteen to consumers, sixteen to efficiency, and fourteen to employers
.8
The conversion of universities into job-training centres, and the increase in college enrolment for that same reason, is seriously exacerbating our ignorance and anti-intellectualism. It should be the other way around. Higher levels of post-secondary education ought to lead to more lively intellectual debates, a greater respect for civilization and culture, and a more nerd-friendly public. The volume and vehemence of anti-nerd invective make it clear that this is not the case. It’s a paradox worthy of Yogi Berra, like the club nobody goes to anymore because it is too popular. Put a B.A. on every wall and they become wallpaper. University has become a rite of passage rather than a right or responsibility.
The university has grown increasingly anti-intellectual, adopting the pragmatisms and populisms of the culture at large and increasing its roster of explicitly careerist programs. This only brings in more knuckleheads who should not be in university. This only creates more bullies who hate university and bash nerds.
Plenty of people enrol in college and end up failing to complete their degree or taking much longer than advertised to finish it. In fact, 42.5 per cent of American students who sign up for a basic four-year degree do not manage to complete it within five years.9 There’s an achievement gap here too, with a greater percentage of low-income and minority students taking longer to finish, or never finishing at all. (Again, as with K–12, Canadian students do a bit better, with only 15 per cent failing to complete.)10
Many students quit because they can’t hack the cost, can’t afford to pay tuition and lose income. Others cannot hack the classes and course work. Presumably these ex-students, who have little to show for their efforts but a heap of debt, bafflement, and resentment, dislike whatever reminds them of the tedious, useless life of the mind. The same is likely true of the students who managed to slide through on the least possible effort and see their E-Z degrees as proof that college is just a costly joke.