Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  At times, the failure of decent, intelligent, reliably humane voices like Staples’s to see the political forest for the economic trees is breathtaking. In a generally well-intentioned editorial, one of Staples’s colleagues at the Times, Nicholas Kristof, argues that we can’t “address poverty or grow the economy” unless we do something about the failure of our schools. So far, so good, though one might quibble that addressing poverty and growing the economy are not the same thing.

  But never mind, because the real significance of the failure of our schools is soon made manifest. “Where will the workers come from,” Kristof worries, “unless students reliably learn science and math?” If our students “only did as well as those in several Asian countries in math and science, our economy would grow 20 percent faster.” The problem, though, is that while our school system was once the envy of all (a “first-rate education,” we understand by this point, is one that grows the economy), now only our white suburban schools are “comparable to those in Singapore, which may have the best education system in the world.”

  Ah, Singapore. You’ll hear a good deal about Singapore if you listen to the chorus of concern over American education. If only we could be more like Singapore. If only our education system could be as efficient as Singapore’s. You say that Singapore might not be the best model to aspire to, that in certain respects it more closely resembles Winston Smith’s world in 1984 than Thomas Jefferson’s? What does that have to do with education?

  And the beat goes on. Still another Times editorialist, Thomas Friedman, begins a piece on the desperate state of American education by quoting Bill Gates. Gates, Friedman informs us, gave a “remarkable speech” in which he declared that “American high schools are obsolete.” This is bad, Friedman says. Bill Gates is telling us that our high schools, “even when they are working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.”

  What do our kids need to know today? As far as Friedman is concerned, the answer is obvious: whatever will get them hired by Bill Gates. “Let me translate Mr. Gates’s words,” he writes. What Mr. Gates is saying is: “If we don’t fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids.” Really worried now, Friedman goes to talk to former Harvard president and head of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, who explains that “for the first time in our history,” we’re facing “competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China, and Asia.” The race is on. “In order to thrive,” Summers says, we will “have to make sure that many more Americans can get as far ahead as their potential will take them,” and quickly, because India and China are coming up on the inside. It’s “not just about current capabilities,” Friedman concludes, by this point quoting the authors of The Only Sustainable Edge, “it’s about the relative pace and trajectories of capability-building.”

  Sustainable edges. Returns on capital investment. Trajectories of capability-building. What’s interesting here is that everyone speaks the same language, everyone agrees on the meaning of the terms. There’s a certain country club quality to it. We’re all members. We understand one another. We understand that the capabilities we should be developing are the capabilities that will “get us ahead.” We understand that Bill Gates is a logical person to talk to about education because billionaire capitalists generally know something about running a successful business, and American education is a business whose products (like General Motors’, say), are substandard, while Singapore’s are kicking ass. We understand that getting ahead of low-wage, high-human-capital communities will allow us “to thrive.”

  Unlike most country clubs, alas, this one is anything but exclusive; getting far enough beyond its gates to ask whether that last verb might have another meaning can be difficult. Success means success. To thrive means to thrive. The definitions of investment, accountability, value, utility are fixed and immutable; they are what they are. Once you’ve got that down, everything is easy: according to David Brooks (bringing up the back of my Times parade), all we need to do is make a modest investment in “delayed gratification skills.” Young people who can delay gratification “can master the sort of self-control that leads to success”; they “can sit through sometimes boring classes” and “perform rote tasks.” As a result, they tend to “get higher SAT scores,” to gain acceptance to better colleges, and to have, “on average, better adult outcomes.”2

  A little of this can go a long way, and there’s a lot of it to be had. When it comes to education in America, with very few exceptions, this is the conversation and these are its terms. From the local PTA meeting to the latest Presidential Commission on Education, the only subject under discussion, the only real criterion for investment—in short, the alpha and omega of educational policy—is jobs. Is it any wonder, then, that our educational priorities should be determined by business leaders, or that the relationship between industry and education should increasingly resemble the relationship between a company and its suppliers, or that the “suppliers” across the land, in order to make payroll, should seek to please management in any way possible, to demonstrate the viability of their product?

  Consider the ritual of addressing our periodic “crises in education.” The call to arms comes from the business community. We’re losing our competitive edge, sounds the cry. Singapore is pulling ahead. The president swings into action. He orders up a blue chip commission made up of high-ranking business executives (the 2006 Commission on the Future of Higher Education led by business executive Charles Miller, for example) to study the problem and come up with “real world” solutions.

  Thus empowered, the commission crunches the numbers, notes the depths to which we’ve sunk, and emerges into the light to underscore the need for more accountability. To whom? Well, to business, naturally. To whom else would you account? And that’s it, more or less. Cue the curtain. The commission’s president answers all reasonable questions. Everyone goes home and gets with the program.

  It can be touching to watch supporters of the arts contorting themselves to fit. In a brochure produced by the Education Commission of the States, titled “The Arts, Education and the Creative Economy,” we learn that supporting the arts in our schools is a good idea because “state and local leaders are realizing that the arts and culture are vital to economic development.” In fact, everyone is realizing it. Several states “have developed initiatives that address the connections between economic growth and the arts and culture.” The New England states have formed “the Creative Economy Council… a partnership among business, government and cultural leaders.”3 It seems that “a new economy has emerged… driven by ideas, information technology and globalization” (by this point, the role of painting, say, is getting a bit murky), and that “for companies and organizations to remain competitive and cutting edge, they must attract and retain individuals who can think creatively.”

  You can almost see the air creeping back into the balloon: We can do this! We can make the case to management! We can explain, as Mike Huckabee does, that trimming back funding for the arts would be shortsighted because “experts and futurists warn that the future economy will be driven by the ‘creative class.’” We can cite “numerous studies” that “affirm that a student schooled in music improves his or her SAT and ACT scores in math,” and that “creative students are better problem solvers… a trait the business world begs for in its work force.” They’ll see we have some value after all. They’ll let us stay.

  To show that they, too, get it, that like Cool Hand Luke they’ve “got their mind right,” our colleges and universities smile and sway with the rest. In “A Statement by Public Higher Education Leaders Convened by the Carnegie Corporation of New York”—to pick just one grain of sand from a sandbox of evidence—we learn that our institutions of higher learning are valuable because they can “help revitalize our nation’s economy and educate and train the next generations to meet the challenges of global competition.” Both the tune and the lyrics
should be familiar by now. “The present economic crisis requires an investment in human capital.” And where better to invest than in our colleges and universities, whose innovative researchers have “invented the technologies that have fueled economic progress and enhanced America’s economic competitiveness”? The statement’s undersigned, representing colleges and universities from California to New Hampshire, conclude with a declaration of faith: “Leaders of the country’s public higher education sector are committed to create a long-term plan to serve the nation by enhancing public universities’ critical role in creating jobs, increasing graduates, enhancing the quality and skills of the workforce, and assisting in national technology and energy initiatives through research.”

  Think of my italics above as a hand going up in the back of the audience. Could there exist, buried under our assumptions, another system of value, an alternate set of definitions? Could our colleges and universities—indeed, our entire education system—have another, truly “critical role,” which they ignore at our peril? A role that might “serve the nation” as well?

  The Case for the Humanities

  Only the educated are free.

  —EPICTETUS

  Rain does not follow the plow. Political freedom, whatever the market evangelists may tell us, is not an automatic by-product of a growing economy; democratic institutions do not spring up, like flowers at the feet of the magi, in the tire tracks of commerce. They just don’t. They’re a different species. They require a different kind of tending.

  The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult—to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization—not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion.

  They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

  This, I would submit, is value—and cheap at the price. This is utility of a higher order. Considering where the rising arcs of our ignorance and our deference lead, what could represent a better investment? Given our fondness for slogans, our childlike susceptibility to bullying and rant, our impatience with both evidence and ambiguity, what could earn us, over time, a better rate of return?

  Like a single species taking over an ecosystem, like an elephant on a seesaw, the problem today is disequilibrium. Why is every Crisis in American Education cast as an economic threat and never a civic one? In part, because we don’t have the language for it. Our focus is on the GDP. On growth. On the usual economic indicators. There are no corresponding “civic indicators,” no generally agreed upon warning signs of political vulnerability, even though the inability of more than two-thirds of our college graduates to read a text and draw rational inferences could be seen as the political equivalent of runaway inflation or soaring unemployment.

  If we lack the language, and therefore the awareness, to right the imbalance between the vocational and the civic, if education in America—despite the heroic efforts of individual teachers—is no longer in the business of producing the kinds of citizens necessary to the survival of a democratic society, it’s in large part because the time-honored civic function of our educational system has been ground up by the ideological mills of both the right and the left into a radioactive paste called values education and declared off limits. Consider the irony. Worried about indoctrination, we’ve short-circuited argument. Fearful of propaganda, we’ve taken away the only tools that could detect and counter it. “Values” are now the province of the home. And the church. How convenient for the man.

  How does one “do” the humanities value-free? How does one teach history, say, without grappling with what that long parade of genius and folly suggests to us? How does one teach literature other than as an invitation, a challenge, a gauntlet—a force fully capable of altering not only what we believe but also how we see? How does one teach rhetoric without awakening students to the manipulations of language and thereby inoculating them against the pap delivered by both the left and the right? The answer is, of course, that one doesn’t. One teaches some toothless, formalized version of these things, careful not to upset anyone, despite the fact that upsetting people is arguably the very purpose of the arts and perhaps of the humanities in general.

  Even a dessicated, values-free version of the humanities has the potential to be dangerous, though, if only because it is so difficult to say where the individual mind might wander off to while reading, what unsettling associations might suggest themselves, what unscripted, unapproved questions might float to the surface. It’s been said before: in the margins of the page, over the course of time, for the simple reason that we shape every book we read and are slightly shaped by it in turn, we become who we are. Which is to say, individuals just distinct enough from one another in our orientation toward “the truth” or “the good” to be difficult to control.

  This “deep civic” function of the humanities, not easily reducible to the politics of left or right but politically combustible nonetheless, is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep close tabs on them, and to circumscribe them in direct proportion to how stringently they control their own populations. This should neither surprise nor comfort us. Why would a repressive regime support a force superbly designed to resist it? Rein in the humanities effectively enough—whether through active repression, fiscal starvation, or linguistic marginalization—and you create a space, an opportunity. Dogma adores a vacuum.

  Mathandscience

  Nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant.

  —DENNIS OVERBYE

  Nothing speaks more clearly to the relentlessly vocational bent in American education than its long-running affair with math and science. I say “affair” because I am kind; in truth the relationship is obsessive, exclusionary, altogether unhealthy. Whatever the question, math and science (so often are they spoken of in the same breath, they’ve begun to feel singular) are, or is, the answer. They make sense; they compute. They’re everything we want: a solid return on capital investment, a proven route to “success.” Everything else can go fish.

  Do we detect a note of bitterness, a hint of jealousy? No doubt. There’s something indecent about the way math and science gobble up market share. Not content with being heavily subsidized by both government and private industry as well as serving as a revenue-generating gold mine for higher education (which divides up the profits from any patents and passes on research expenses to students through tuition increases—effectively a kind of hidden “science tax”), math and science are now well on the way to becoming the default button of choice for anyone having trouble deciding where to park his (or the taxpayers’) money, anyone trying to burnish his no-nonsense educational bona fides, or, most galling, anyone looking for a way to demonstrate his or her civic pride.

  But let me be clear: I write this not to provide tinder to our inquisitors, ever eager to sacrifice the spirit of scientific inquiry in the name of some latter-day misapprehension. That said, I see no contradiction betw
een my respect for science and my humanist’s discomfort with its ever-greater role in American culture, its ever-burgeoning coffers, its often dramatically antidemocratic ways, its symbiotic relationship with government, with industry, with our increasingly corporate institutions of higher learning. Triply protected from criticism by the firewall of their jargon (which immediately excludes the nonspecialist and assures a jury of motivated and sympathetic peers), their economic efficacy, and the immunity conferred by conveniently associated terms like progress and advancement, the sciences march, largely untouched, under the banner of the inherently good.4 And this troubles me.

  It troubles me because there are many things “math and science” do well, and some they don’t. And one of the things they don’t do well is democracy. They have no aptitude for it, no connection to it, really. Which hasn’t prevented some in the sciences from arguing precisely the opposite, from assuming even this last, most ill-fitting mantle.

  In a giddy and cheerfully self-immolating essay in the New York Times titled “Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy,” for example, Dennis Overbye opens with a paean to science as a “utopian anarchy” (at least, he adds, without a hint of a wink, “as utopian as any community largely dependent on government and corporate financing can be”), then claims, as if declaring the existence of gravity, that science is about democracy. In fact, “if we’re not practicing good science,” he states, “we probably aren’t practicing good democracy.” To cinch his case, he quotes Hu Yaobang, the Chinese Communist Party’s general secretary, who in 1980 declared that science “opposes the beaten path and dares to destroy outmoded conventions and bad customs.”