Everywhere we see extravagant public handwringing about education. Something is not working. The economy seems to be the symptom that garners the most attention, and there are people across the political spectrum who want to fix it directly; but most seem to agree that education is at least an important piece of the solution. We must produce competitive workers for the twenty-first century, proclaim the banners and headlines; if we do not, the United States will become a third-world nation. We need to get education on the fast track \u2014 education that is edgy, aggressive, and technologically savvy. Whatever else it is, it must be up to date, it must be fast, and it must be modern. It must not be what we have been doing.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a Latin teacher. If I were a standup comedian, that would be considered a punch line. In addition to Latin, I teach literature \u2014 much of it hundreds of years old. I ask students, improbably, to see it for what it itself is, not just for what they can use it for themselves. What\u2019s the point of that? one might ask. Things need to be made relevant to them<\/i>, not the other way around, don\u2019t they?<\/p>\n
Being a Latin teacher, however (among other things), I have gone for a number of years now to the Summer Institute of the American Classical League, made up largely of Latin teachers across the country. One might expect them to be stubbornly resistant to these concerns \u2014 or perhaps blandly oblivious. That\u2019s far from the case. Every year, in between the discussions of Latin and Greek literature and history, there are far more devoted to pedagogy: how to make Latin relevant to the needs of the twenty-first century, how to advance the goals of STEM education using classical languages, and how to utilize the available technology in the latest and greatest ways. What that technology does or does not do is of some interest, but the most important thing for many there is that it be new and catchy and up to date. Only that way can we hope to engage our ever-so-modern students.<\/p>\n
The accrediting body that reviewed our curricular offerings at Scholars Online supplies a torrent of exortation about preparing our students for twenty-first century jobs by providing them with the latest skills. It\u2019s obvious enough that the ones they have now aren\u2019t doing the trick, since so many people are out of work, and so many of those who are employed seem to be in dead-end positions. The way out of our social and cultural morass lies, we are told, in a focus on the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Providing students with job skills<\/i> is the main business of education. They need to be made employable<\/i>. They need to be able to become wealthy, because that\u2019s how our society understands, recognizes, and rewards worth. We pay lip service, but little else, to other standards of value.<\/p>\n
The Sarah D. Barder Fellowship organization to which I also belong is a branch of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. It\u2019s devoted to gifted and highly gifted education. At their annual conference they continue to push for skills, chiefly in the scientific and technical areas, to make our students competitive in the emergent job market. The highly gifted ought to be highly employable and hence earn high incomes. That\u2019s what it means, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
The politicians of both parties have contrived to disagree about almost everything, but they seem to agree about this. In January of 2014, President Barack Obama commented, \u201c…I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree \u2014 I love art history. So I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the other side of the aisle, Florida Governor Rick Scott said, \u201cIf I\u2019m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I\u2019m going to take that money to create jobs. So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state. Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n
They\u2019re both, of course, right. The problem isn\u2019t that they have come up with the wrong answer. It isn\u2019t even that they\u2019re asking the wrong question. It\u2019s that they\u2019re asking only one of several relevant questions. They have drawn entirely correct conclusions from their premises. A well-trained plumber with a twelfth-grade education (or less) can make more money than I ever will as a Ph.D. That has been obvious for some time now. If I needed any reminding, the last time we required a plumber\u2019s service, the point was amply reinforced: the two of them walked away in a day with about what I make in a month. It\u2019s true, too, that a supply of anthropologists is not, on the face of things, serving the \u201ccompelling interests\u201d of the state of Florida (or any other state, probably). In all fairness, President Obama said that he wasn\u2019t talking about the value of art history as such<\/i>, but merely its value in the job market. All the same, that he was dealing with the job market as the chief index of an education\u2019s value is symptomatic of our culture\u2019s expectations about education and its understanding of what it\u2019s for.<\/p>\n
The politicians haven\u2019t created the problem; but they have bought, and are now helping to articulate further, the prevalent assessment of what ends are worth pursuing, and, by sheer repetition and emphasis, crowding the others out. I\u2019m not at all against STEM subjects, nor am I against technologically competent workers. I use and enjoy technology. I am not intimidated by it. I teach online. I\u2019ve been using the Internet for twenty-odd years. I buy a fantastic range of products online. I programmed the chat software I use to teach Latin and Greek, using PHP, JavaScript, and mySQL. I\u2019m a registered Apple Developer. I think every literate person should know not only some Latin and Greek, but also some algebra and geometry. I even think, when going through Thucydides\u2019 description of how the Plataeans determined the height of the wall the Thebans had built around their city, \u201cThis would be so much easier if they just applied a little trigonometry.\u201d Everyone should know how to program a computer. Those are all good things, and help us understand the world we\u2019re living in, whether we use them for work or not.<\/p>\n
But they are not all that we need to know. So before you quietly determine that what I\u2019m offering is just irrelevant, allow me to bring some news from the past. If that sounds contradictory, bear in mind that it\u2019s really the only kind of news there is. All we know about anything at all, we know from the past, whether recent or distant. Everything in the paper or on the radio news is already in the past. Every idea we have has been formulated based on already-accumulated evidence and already-completed ratiocination. We may think we are looking at the future, but we aren\u2019t: we\u2019re at most observing the trends of the recent past and hypothesizing about what the future will be like. What I have to say is news, not because it\u2019s about late-breaking happenings, but because it seems not to be widely known. The unsettling truth is that if we understood the past better and more deeply, we might be less sanguine about trusting the apparent trends of a year or even a decade as predictors of the future. They do not define our course into the infinite future, or even necessarily the short term \u2014 be they about job creation, technical developments, or weather patterns. We are no more able to envision the global culture and economy of 2050 than the independent bookseller in 1980 could have predicted that a company named Amazon would put him out of business by 2015.<\/p>\n
So here\u2019s my news: if the United States becomes a third-world nation (a distinct possibility), it will not be because of a failure in our technology, or even in our technological education. It will be because, in our headlong pursuit of what glitters, we have forgotten how to differentiate value from price: we have forgotten how to be a free people. Citizenship \u2014 not merely in terms of law and government, but the whole spectrum of activities involved in evaluating and making decisions about what kind of people to be, collectively and individually \u2014 is not a STEM subject. Our ability to articulate and grasp values, and to make reasoned and well-informed decisions at the polls, in the workplace, and in our families, cannot be transmitted by a simple, repeatable process. Nor can achievement in citizenship be assessed simply, or, in the short term, accurately at all. The successes and failures of the polity as a whole, and of the citizens individually, will remain for the next generation to identify and evaluate \u2014 if we have left them tools equal to the task. Our human achievement cannot be measured by lines of code, by units of product off the assembly line, or by GNP. Our competence in the business of being human cannot be certified like competence in Java or Oracle (or, for that matter, plumbing). Even a success does not necessarily hold out much prospect of employment or material advantage, because that was never what it was about in the first place. It offers only the elusive hope that we will have spent our stock of days with meaning \u2014\u00a0measured not by our net worth when we die, but by what we have contributed when we\u2019re alive. The questions we encounter in this arena are not new ones, but rather old ones. If we lose sight of them, however, we will have left every<\/i> child behind, for technocracy can offer nothing to redirect our attention to what matters.<\/p>\n
Is learning this material of compelling interest to the state? That depends on what you think the state is. The state as a bureaucratic organism is capable of getting along just fine with drones that don\u2019t ask any inconvenient questions. We\u2019re already well on the way to achieving that kind of state. Noam Chomsky, ever a firebrand and not a man with whom I invariably agree, trenchantly pointed out, \u201cThe smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum \u2014 even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there\u2019s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.\u201d He\u2019s right. If we are to become unfree people, it will be because we gave our freedom away in exchange for material security or some other ephemeral reward \u2014 an illusion of safety and welfare, and those same jobs that President Obama and Governor Scott have tacitly accepted as the chief \u2014 or perhaps the only \u2014 real objects of our educational system. Whatever lies outside that narrow band of approved material is an object of ridicule.<\/p>\n
If the state is the people who make it up, the question is subtly but massively different. Real education may not be in the compelling interest of the state qua<\/i> state, but it is in the compelling interest of the people. It\u2019s the unique and unfathomably complex amalgam that each person forges out of personal reflection, of coming to understand one\u2019s place in the family, in the nation, and in the world. It is not primarily practical, and we should eschew it altogether, if our highest goal were merely to get along materially. The only reason to value it is the belief that there is some meaning to life beyond one\u2019s bank balance and material comfort. I cannot prove that there is, and the vocabulary of the market has done its best to be rid of the idea. But I will cling to it while I live, because I think it\u2019s what makes that life worthwhile.<\/p>\n
Technical skills \u2014 job skills of any sort \u2014 are means, among others, to the well-lived life. They are even useful means in their place, and everyone should become as competent as possible. But as they are means, they are definitionally not ends in themselves. They can be mistakenly viewed as ends in themselves, and sold to the credulous as such, but the traffic is fraudulent, and it corrupts the good that is being conveyed. Wherever that sale is going on, it\u2019s because the real ends are being quietly bought up by those with the power to keep them out of our view in their own interest.<\/p>\n
Approximately 1900 years ago, Tacitus wrote of a sea change in another civilization that had happened not by cataclysm but through inattention to what really mattered. Describing the state of Rome at the end of the reign of Augustus, he wrote: \u201cAt home all was calm. The officials carried the old names; the younger men had been born after the victory of Actium; most even of the elder generation, during the civil wars; few indeed were left who had seen the Republic. It was thus an altered world, and of the old, unspoilt Roman character not a trace lingered.\u201d It takes but a single generation to forget the work of ages.<\/p>\n
But perhaps that\u2019s an old story, and terribly out of date. I teach Latin, Greek, literature, and history, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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