How Americans Learned to Despise Learning
According to a diversity training program in Seattle this month, “objectivity,” “individualism,” “perfectionism,” and “intellectualism” are all vestiges of white supremacy.
Aside from the incredibly patronizing tone this idea embodies — the reverse assumption being simply that black people are not naturally capable of being objective, individualistic, perfectionist or intellectual — this is a direct rebuke to the very idea of the values of education.
In 1993, while I was a seventh and eighth grade music teacher in Chicago’s West Side, I came to a realization that one of the many uphill battles being fought in the public school classroom was that of several generations of families finding little to no value in learning to read or write or understand math and science.
These were families on the ass-end of a school system that rewarded funds to areas with higher property values, robust small business economies, and lots of white children whose parents were financially able to advocate for those funds. While racial lines were drawn, especially in 1990s Chicago, nationwide, the system left rural whites behind as well in staggering numbers.
For three generations, the benefits of completing a high school education became less obvious. The best and most well-paying jobs required a college diploma and the halcyon days of graduating with solid grades in high school decayed year after year.
My late nephew had very little interest in education. My sister is a high school history teacher (a damn fine one at that) and his older brother and sister were both college kids. Ryan wasn’t. He discovered drug culture and along with it, the ability to make cash in the underground economy. He didn’t need to study or follow rules for an endgame that left him with nothing much more than the sad bragging rights that he had made it through the slog of high school so he dropped out.
The perception is that those who blow off the diploma are slackers in some way but it’s more insidious than that simple reduction. What reward would he get if he fell in line and got those grades up? At the end, he could get a job that paid minimum wage, no worker protection, taxes, and the beginning of the struggle of a wage slave.
Instead, he could sell a few bags of weed, some Xanax, some Percocet, pocket the cash, play video games with his friends. When the reward for learning algebra and reading poetry is so slight, the value of the act is so wholly diminished, a smart man would say to go for the easy money.
Ryan and I mostly communicated through his choice of social media. Generally he would tweet something horribly misogynist in rap-speak and I would challenge his point of view. Then it would grow to asking about his life and what he was up to. He was careful not to divulge his drug life although I always suspected. His views on school were dark and, in some ways, hopeless. “What’s the point?” was the gist of his perspective and, beyond the platitudes of “Reading and math and science are essential for living in the world,” I had little to offer.
It reminds me of the arts funding debates in Chicago in the early 2000s. Every arts group needed money but to get grants and foundation support, organizations needed to demonstrate economic viability. The best argument in favor of art is that its very existence is a societal good. That the arts provide everyone with opportunity to grow in empathy, to see the world through other eyes, to edify our humanity. But that argument doesn’t speak in dollars and cents.
The result was a growth of arts education initiatives—sub-par children’s theater, arts and crafts for under-privileged kids, free improv programs—all in order to demonstrate some sort of altruistic angle to get those grants.
Public education relied heavily on the idea that a high school education followed by a college education equaled jobs. But it no longer can make that argument with a straight face when the jobs involve flipping burgers for pennies or a free internship at a corporate office.
Add to that the back-breaking amount of money required to attend college and the tendency of so many to see college as a social experience more than a vocational experience and education becomes a failed experiment in how to waste money on a theater arts degree that can only be used to proliferate more theater arts degrees because the only job it suits one for is to recycle back into teaching theater arts.
What are we left with some forty years of this trend? Citizens who would rather pretend to be amateur epistemological experts rather than heed actual science, COVID-19 deniers and anti-maskholes, activists so bereft of historical knowledge that tearing down every statue regardless of accomplishment or not is fair game, a reliance upon subjective lived experience as somehow indicative of larger reality, and a nearly permanent underclass of uneducated bozos who get to vote in elections.
The greatest threat to democracy is an uneducated population.
Solutions to this are both short-term and long-range.
Short Term
Reduce the financial footprint of college
Don’t make it free for everyone because people treat free as low value and education’s value is already at an all-time low. Reduce tuition in proportion to the kind of degree and vocation a student declares. Is the degree in something considered societally essential? Medicine, education, city planning, engineering, journalism? Low cost. Is the declared degree in a field of study more suited fringe occupations with a high potential of financial payout? Marketing, communications, theater, film making, legal counsel? Higher cost but reasonable. Personal journey sort of field? Philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science? Charge ‘em a solid fee.
Dramatically increase funding to public schools, especially in historically underfunded areas
Most of this cash should go to teachers who have become defacto parents saddled with responsibilities on top of educating students. A good portion should go to social workers to take some of that burden off of teachers. The rest should go to equipment and the very stuff of hands on education.
Expand the school year to 365 days
Break it up. Intensives of reading, writing, and social studies for three months. Science and math for three months. Music and art for thee months. Vocational training for three months. Fucking four years later you’ll have rolled back the perpetual adolescence and create a class of twenty-year-olds less stupid, more engaged, and more fully prepared to survive out of their parents’ homes.
Long Range
Create two classes of minimum wage—one for those without a high school diploma and a significantly higher wage for those who graduate. Hell, pitch in bonuses for a higher GPA.
Subsidize vocational training for recent graduates in fields we need like infrastructure, healthcare, and education.
Hire Robin DiAngelo to write a book about the psychic benefits of learning. Christ, she’s sold her bigoted “all whites are racist forever” bullshit, she can certainly take her snake-oil sales pitch and convince Americans that being educated is simply better for you and the country.
