More Money than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, & Idiots Think They’re Right

by Penny, Laura

  6. The money-minded are too negative.

  If only. Again, the money-minded have the opposite problem. They are great fans of positive thinking, spending heaps of cash on motivational speakers and yes-you-can seminars. They are never negative about their own bailiwick, about the imaginary world of credit and investments. They reserve their negativity for the losers who are dumb enough to actually buy their spurious mortgages and investments. Or they wax negative about every other field of human endeavour.

  It is preposterous that a group of people who enrich themselves by making meta-bets on bets on assets that do not exist get to serve as the arbiters of reality, the judges of the useful and the useless. How dare these paper-churners, whose trades take place in milliseconds, denigrate institutions that have lasted for more than a thousand years or texts that have endured for centuries?

  Free marketeers claim that the market is the ultimate reality, the serious business of the world, precisely because it has become so unreal. Market fundamentalists need to impugn the reality of the liberal arts, of the sciences, so that their ideals, illusions, and delusions prevail. They hate any competing interpretation of the world, any ranking or hierarchy that is not monetary. This is why they detest government and do everything in their power to lobby and infiltrate it, to ensure that democratic values do not interfere with market values. This is also why they hate grades, and mock them constantly. How dare a nerd like me judge someone, based on my imaginary expertise? It’s the market’s job to figure out who is smart and who is stupid.

  In February 2009 the New York Times ran an article called “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” When ever the economy tanks, as it did during the Reagan recession, enrolment in the liberal arts drops. And budget cuts at universities generally start with the so-called frills like reading, writing, and history. Hell, even the American Association of Universities and Colleges recommended scuttling the old ivory-tower view of education and emphasizing the practical (i.e., fiscal) benefits of a liberal arts degree.

  This is an understandable reaction to the cost-cutting climate, but it is also capitulation to the ignorance and anti-intellectualism that currently prevail. Nerds had nothing to do with this crisis. They have nothing to apologize for or explain. Why should disciplines that have existed for thousands of years, books and ideas that humans have deemed valuable for centuries, have to justify their existence to the money-minded? And how can they, when they have such radically different values? The narrow, calculating, attention-deficit-disordered priorities of the moneyed make it impossible for the humanities to justify themselves without tossing their own values and joining the technically brilliant, ethically vacant idiots on Team Money.

  If there were more liberal arts nerds, fewer business majors, and less social pressure to become a business major, then the 2008 market crisis might not have been so complex and sweeping. Another Times article, from March 2009, wondered, “Is It Time to Retrain B[usiness] Schools?” Note that the business schools, which got us into this mess, need not justify their existence. They offer a popular product, so they have every right to be. The article went on to say that M.B.A. programs were chock full of cheaters. M.B.A. students cheat more than students in any other discipline; one study showed that the majority, 56 per cent, cheated on their assignments. Why did they cheat? Because everyone else was cheating, so whatevs. Cheating was the only way to get ahead, and getting ahead is the only thing that matters.

  The popular opinion that the economic world is the only real one, and that economic freedom is the only substantive freedom, is ignorant and destructive. Hannah Arendt calls this confusion of free enterprise and human freedom a “monstrous falsehood.” She writes:

  Free enterprise, in other words, has been an unmixed blessing only in America, and it is a minor blessing, compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions. Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.11

  The more-money-than-brains mindset confuses two things. It treats money as an end in itself and knowledge as a mere means to an end. When we treat money this way, we sanction the kind of excesses that crashed the stock markets and damaged the economy. We encourage students to mistake low cunning and greed for intellect and skill. When we treat knowledge as a mere means to an end, we create contraptions without regard for the consequences. A mob of yobs can burn your town down, but it takes brains – dangerous brains – to build technical triumphs such as nuclear bombs, electronic surveillance systems, derivatives, and the communications strategies that sell them to the public and the powers-that-be. When reason becomes instrumental, a tool, we also end up dismissing all kinds of knowledge that cannot be swiftly monetized for the benefit of the few.

  Money is a means to various ends, a tool, and should be treated as such instead of serving as our ultimate good. Knowledge is a good, and when we give it the respect it deserves, it produces amazing things, including things with practical value. The market loves to hog the credit for inventions such as the computer, insisting that money did that, but this is just another way market fundamentalists advance their monopoly on the real. Most new inventions are the fruit of protracted nerdiness, of intellectual curiosity, that the market then popularizes and profits from.

  The money-minded are building a future that has no use for the past or the public sector, one that tells kids they are free to choose to be engineers or entrepreneurs, a world made of bridges, banks, and barbarians. Philosophy, theology, history, and the sciences have all tried to crown themselves the Queen of Knowledge, the discipline that comprehends and transcends all the others. But economics and its younger brother, the business school, insist that the market is the Boss of Knowledge. Their fiscal daemons decide which knowledge is important and which is merely imaginary.

  This is hubris. For the ancient Greeks, hubris was overweening pride and insolence, an arrogance that led people to tempt fate or flout the law and destroy themselves in the process. Free marketeers who believe that they know how things really work, who insult and dismiss other ways of understanding the world, mistake their technical savvy for total mastery. Any student of history or the great books knows that this is a serious mistake, the kind of careless thinking that courts disaster.

  The humanities discourage hubris and counsel humility. The humanities teach us that those new new things that our friends in the market and the media chase are not very new at all. Stockbrokers and free marketeers are just alchemists with shinier, more expensive tools, money magicians trying to find the stock market version of the Philosopher’s Stone that turns lead into gold.

  The humanities are the best vaccine against intellectual infections such as hubris, dogmatism, and demagoguery. The humanities teach us to think in the long term, to consider the consequences of our actions instead of acting in the interest of expediency and convenience. The humanities teach us to be skeptical, to be critical and deliberative instead of reacting emotively, which leads us into frightened condemnation and frenzied cheerleading. Studying the humanities is a corrective insofar as it pulls us out of our presentism and forces us to confront something other than the narrow and the now.

  The more-money-than-brains mindset tells us we should aspire to be useful. But who wants to be used? I’d rather be useless than used. Hardly any of the things that people use – their buildings and their bowls – survive the civilizations that create them. Our ancestors’ most enduring and valuable legacy lives in their books, their ideas, their art, their music. Stains on paper, puffs of sonorous air, and unruly brainchildren may not seem as real as your bank balance or the latest GDP figures, but they are.

  When we claim that the humanities are insignificant, imaginary, or obsolete, the fiscal alchemists win. But their triumphs are short-lived. Wealth, like life, is brief. The liberal arts are long. A humanities ed
ucation has incalculable value, because its worth is beyond calculation, not beneath it. The humanities are despised because they are dangerous. They arm us with the intellectual weapons we need to fight the forces of ignorance and idiocracy, and to free ourselves from freedumb.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE: DON’T NEED NO EDJUMACATION

  1. Carlin Romano, “Obama, Philosopher in Chief,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2009. Available online at http://beta.chronicle.com/article/Obama-Philosopher-in-Chief/44524/.

  2. See http://ignatieff.me/?p=ignatieff#economy.

  3. Richard Hofstader, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).

  4. Real Time with Bill Maher, HBO, June 19, 2009.

  5. Perino made the admission on the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me on December 8, 2007.

  6. See http://www.thesecret.tv/behind-the-secret.html.

  7. The op ed ran in the New York Times on September 24, 2008, p. A27. A longer version is available on her blog at http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/2008/09/how-positive-thinking-wrecked-the-economy.html. An even longer version of this argument is available in her most recent book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).

  8. The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, September 17, 2008.

  CHAPTER TWO: AT THE ARSE END OF THE LATE, GREAT ENLIGHTENMENT

  1. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Philosophical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (London: Continuum Press, 1993).

  2. Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out of Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine (New York: Threshold Press, 2009).

  3. Debora Mackenzie, “End of the Enlightenment,” New Scientist, October 8, 2005, p. 39.

  4. George Monbiot, “The End of the Enlightenment,” The Guardian, December 18, 2001. Available on his blog at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2001/12/18/the-end-of-the-enlightenment/. Garry Wills, “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,” New York Times, November 4, 2004, p. A25. Available online at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2DA173CF937A35752C1A9629C8B63.

  5. Victor Davis Hanson, “Losing the Enlightenment,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2006. Available online at http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009312.

  6. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

  7. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway (Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 2004).

  8. Southern Baptist Convention, “Baptist Faith and Message,” adopted at the 2000 convention and available online at http://www.sbc.net/BFM/bfm2000.asp.

  9. See http://www.creationmuseum.org/about.

  10. “Alberta Passes Law Allowing Parents to Pull Students Out of Class,” CBC, June 2, 2009. Available online at http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/06/02/alberta-human-rights-school-gay-education-law.html.

  11. Quoted by Associated Free Press reporting from Dover, Pennsylvania, March 27, 2005.

  12. John Locke, “The Second Treatise of Civil Government,” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1995).

  13. Thomas Paine, “Common Sense,” ibid.

  14. Voltaire, “On Commerce” (Letter Ten), in Letters on England, trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).

  15. Voltaire,”On the Presbyterians” (Letter Six), ibid.

  16. David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Selected Writings, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  17. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: This may be true in theory but it does not apply in practice,” in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  18. Jerry W. Knudson, Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).

  19. Denis Diderot, The Encyclopedia: Selections, ed. Stephen J. Gendizer (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

  20. Patton Oswalt, Werewolves and Lollipops (SubPop Records, 2007).

  21. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Wythe, August 16, 1789, in The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

  22. Bernard Weinraub, “Bush and Governors Set Education Goals,” New York Times, September 29, 1989, p. A10.

  CHAPTER THREE: IS OUR SCHOOLS SUCKING?

  1. John Adams, “A Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law,” in The Portable John Adams, ed. John Patrick Diggins (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).

  2. Lowell M. Rose and Alec Gallup, “39th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Towards Public Schools,” in Phi Delta Kappan, September 2007, p. 33.

  3. Canadian Education Association, Public Education in Canada: Facts, Trends and Attitudes 2007. Available online at www.cea-ace.ca.

  4. The CBC survey results are available at http://www.cbc.ca/news/passorfail/.

  5. The Center for Educational Reform tracks charter school numbers at http://www.edreform.com/Fast_Facts/K12_Facts/.

  6. Results of Stanford’s study on charter schools are available online at http://credo.stanford.edu/.

  7. John Fitzgerald for Minnesota 2020, “Checking in on Charter Schools: An Examination of Charter School Finances.” Available online at http://www.mn2020.org/index.asp.

  8. Alvin P. Sanoff, “What Professors and Teachers Think: A Perception Gap over Students’ Preparation,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2006, p. B9.

  9. See http://www.fairtest.org/testing-explosion-0.

  10. Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg, “The Administrative Costs of No Child Left Behind,” Heritage Foundation, April 7, 2007. Available online at http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed040907b.cfm.

  11. Kevin Carey, “The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act,” Education Sector, November 13, 2007. Available online at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=582446.

  12. Claudia Wallis, “No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?” Time, June 8, 2008. Available online at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1812758,00.html.

  13. “President Bush Discusses No Child Left Behind, Woodbridge Elementary and Middle School, Washington, D.C., October 5, 2006.” Transcript available online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061005-6.html.

  14. Will Woodward, “Teachers’ Union Threatens Boycott of SATS,” The Guardian, April 2, 2002. Available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/apr/01/politics.schools.

  15. PISA data for 2000, 2003, and 2006 are available online at http://www.pisa.oecd.org/pages/0,2987,en_32252351_32235731_1_1_1_1_1,00.html.

  16. The National Center for Education Statistics analysis of the PIRLS for 2001 and 2006 is available at their website, http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2008017. For more information on the PIRLS, see its website at http://timss.bc.edu/.

  17. James J. Heckman and Paul A. Lafontaine, “The Declining American High School Graduation Rate: Evidence, Sources, and Consequences,” National Bureau of Economic Research. Available online at http://www.nber.org/reporter/2008number1/heckman.html.

  18. Mitchell Landsberg and Howard Blume, “1 in 4 California High School Students Drop Out, State Says,” Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2008, p. A2.

  19. Young’s essay is available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment.

  20. You can access the latest stats on economic mobility at www.economicmobility.org, which is a collaborative research project involving the Pew Charitable Trusts and some opposing think tanks – the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the Urban Institute.

  21. One chart, for the GRE, is available at http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended%20Graduate%20Major.htm. Philosophy departments have many of these chart
s, since philosophy majors usually score well on exit tests. There’s another one at http://philosophy.acadiau.ca/why_phil/scores.htm, drawn from Clifford Adelman’s study of standardized test scores of college students from the 1960s to the ‘80s. For more recent numbers, see Michael Nieswiadomy, “LSAT Scores of Economics Majors: The 2003–2004 Class Update,” available at http://economics.gcsu.edu/students/lsat.pdf.

  22. You can still find A Nation at Risk online at http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html.

  23. Greg Toppo, “‘Nation at Risk’: The Best Thing or the Worst Thing for Education?” USA Today, May 22, 2008. Available online at http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-04-22-nation-at-risk_N.htm.

  24. For more of her criticisms of textbooks, see Ravitch’s The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). She has also written a history of U.S. school reforms that looks at the oscillation between vocational, progressive, and traditional notions of education, Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).