The Failure of Higher Education: A Tale of Two Diplomas

I am struck by the variety of ways in which the actual spiritual state of Americans is denied by people who have every reason to know what that state is: our educators, artists, and politicians.  It is hard for me to believe, for example, that educators do not know the sorry truth behind the lack of real education here.  It seems very clear to me that until the educators themselves believe in what they teach, there is no hope for their students.  But the educators cannot accept this, because in order to do so they would have to overhaul every aspect of their private lives, which effort would hurl them forever beyond the bounds of the academic life.

James Baldwin, 1961

The catastrophe which is education in this country is not new.  For the majority of students in the United States, black students in particular, education has never meant anything more than a training to stay in one’s place.  Over the past several decades, however, with the American Empire in an accelerating free-fall, American education, ever the handmaiden of society’s rich and powerful, has in tandem spiraled downward: our schools endlessly drill our children with boring and meaningless “worksheets”; we subsidize and celebrate the digital economy by “teaching” children with computers and computer programs; we script our teachers to guarantee a minimum of human interaction in the classroom; we strip our schools of art and music, making sure that our students never see beauty or truth in the world; and, of course, we drill our students for weeks and months on end with testing, and more testing, and still more testing, lest our students find any joy whatsoever in learning.  In short, our schools dull the intelligence and curiosity of our young people such that they will never question the meaningless and unpleasant lives they will be forced to lead in a society that is everywhere falling apart around them.

In higher education, too, we see this dramatic narrowing of the already slim chances that any of our students will achieve a real education.  Our state legislatures, in the most telling example, cut state support for higher education requiring that university administrations jack up tuition, tuition that rises far more rapidly than does inflation.  Higher tuition yields both higher student debt and more students working twenty, thirty, or forty hours a week in paying jobs while they attend school.  Our indebted students then must hew as closely as they possibly can to career paths which enable them to minimize and pay back their debts; and the long hours of minimum wage work taken on by our students all but guarantee that they cannot be serious students, cannot devote the hours they need to study and reflection, cannot, in short, do the work most necessary for them to become educated, mature, human beings.  But then educated, mature human beings do not fit well into our global economy.

In the face of this disaster, our university faculty refuse to take any stand against the strangling of education in this country.  We mouth words in our classrooms about truth, and the search for truth, and the value and necessity of honesty and ethics, and democracy, and responsible citizenship.  Privately, we condemn the various assessment schemes we’re compelled to carry out; privately, we denounce the rapid multiplication of educationally meaningless administrative and compliance positions on our campuses.  And privately, we bemoan the ignorance of our students, their lack of curiosity and their lack of academic preparation. But when it comes to denouncing all the various assaults upon education occurring across the entire spectrum of our educational landscape, when we are compelled to speak to the reasons why our students enter our universities uneducated, and still more seriously, why they leaveour universities uneducated, we lose our voice.  As more than one of my colleagues has said to me in explanation of his silence: “I don’t want to stick my neck out.”