Valhalla
By the end of 1999, 75.5 million people out of
a total population of 275 million were
involved directly in providing and receiving what has come to be called
education. And an unknown number of
millions indirectly. About 67 million
were enrolled in schools and colleges (38 million in K-8, 14 million in
secondary schools, 15 million in colleges,) 4
million employed as teachers or college faculty (2 million elementary; 2
million secondary and
college combined), and 4.5 million in some other school capacity. In other words, the primary organizing discipline of
about 29 percent of the entire U.S. population
consists of obedience to the routines and requests of an abstract social
machine called School. And that's only
so far. According to the U.S. Department of Education, these figures are expected to grow substantially
through the first decade of the new century.
Could Hegel himself have foreseen such an end to history, the planet as
a universal schoolhouse where nothing
much is learned?
At the top of this feeding chain are
so-called public colleges. As Valhalla was the reward where Vikings killed in battle got to drink,
fight, and fornicate in an endlessly
regenerating loop, so public colleges are a lifetime of comfort and
security for those systems people who
play ball skillfully or belong to some political family with a record of playing ball.
If public colleges functioned in
meritocractic ways as their supporters allege and as I suspect the general public believes they do,
we would expect the economy of public
schooling at this level to reflect with reasonable sensitivity what was
happening in the total public economy.
Spending on public colleges should be a litmus test of how much respect is being accorded the democratic will
at any given time. With that in mind try this
garment on for size: Tuition at public colleges over the last fourteen
years has increased three times as fast
as household income, and more than three times faster than the rate of inflation, according to the General
Accounting Office. What pressure could possibly
squeeze ordinary people to pay such outlandish costs, incurring debt
burdens which enslave them and their
children for many years to come?
How, you might ask, at the very instant
the inherent value of these degrees is being
challenged, at the very instant business magazines are predicting
permanent radical downsizing of the
middle-management force in private and public employment — the very slots public colleges license graduates to
occupy, and at the very instant in time when the purchasing power of middle-class American
incomes is worth less than it was thirty years
ago and appears to be in a long-term continuing downtrend, how in light
of these things have public college
teachers been able to double their incomes (in real dollars) in the past fourteen years and public college
administrators raise their own share of the take 131 percent?
I'm asking how, not why. Greed is too
common a characteristic of human nature to be
very interesting. How was this done? Who allowed it? Not any "free
market," I can tell you. We're
talking about several million individuals who've managed to make their leisured and secure lives even more so at the
same time their product is questioned and
the work their attention supposedly qualifies students for is shipped
overseas for labor cost advantages. It
seems obvious to me that the whole lot of these collegiate time-servers lacks sufficient clout to treat themselves so
well. Their favored treatment is, then, a gift.
But from where, and why? Only from an investigation of the politics of
schooling might come an adequate answer.
So let's begin to look under a few rocks together.
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