Educators are not Woke Enough
Legitimizing Child Labor to Perpetuate an Exploitive Society
Education is often assumed to be the main avenue to help shape the behavioral changes needed to head societies away from ecocide and towards a sustainable, peaceful, and equitable civilization. This and the following two posts, taken together, explore the weaknesses of that assumption.
Please note that this analysis has no sympathy for the hostility that Donald Trump and his minions show towards education, the media, religions other than hyper conservative Christianity, and any other institution that can speak truth to power. My views are completely contrary to their benighted perspective. They believe that the people within these institutions are too woke. I will argue that, because we rely on these people to help awaken us, they are not yet awake enough to the environmental and moral imperatives to fulfill their vital responsibilities.
Since schools, colleges, churches, and the media are the transmitters of the cultural message, we naturally look to these educational institutions to help raise people’s awareness. The problem of course is that the people within these institutions, like most everyone doing reasonably well in society, have a vested interest in perpetuating this society, not in raising awareness. Put bluntly, education serves as one of the principle “social reproduction apparatuses.” Its traditional role has been to pass on society’s values, aims, and habits to its citizens and to the succeeding generations. The social propaganda is particularly conspicuous in schools, because, as the early 20th century American educational philosopher John Dewey held, a “society determines its own future in determining that of the young.” According to the economist Jeremy Rifkin, “The public school movement in Europe and America was largely designed to foster the productive potential inherent in each human being and create a productive work force to advance the Industrial Revolution.”
Predictably, then, although there has been a fierce debate in the United States about how to best educate our young, its arguments are stuck in an old paradigm. Like water circling a drain, it still revolves around how to prepare its newest citizens for a human-centric, environmentally destructive economy of production and consumption. A new version of this paradigm has come online in recent decades: namely, this way of life is no longer limited to the few Western players; it is now global. So meanwhile, as we spiral down ever faster, educational reform has been as imaginative as the paradigm allows and about as broad and deep as the American Democratic-Republican spectrum, itself. That is, not very. “Both sides…” according to the environmentalist David Orr, “agree on the basic aims and purposes of education, which are to equip our nation with a “world-class” labor force, first to compete more favorably in the global economy, and second, to provide each individual with the means of maximum upward mobility.” George Bush II affirmed this view in a speech made at a charter school in 2006. The No Child Left Behind reform, according to Bush,
“…is an important way to make sure America remains competitive in the 21st century. We’re living in a global world. See, the education system must compete with education systems in China and India. If we fail to give our students the skills necessary to compete in the world of the 21st century, the jobs will go elsewhere. That’s just a fact of life. It’s the reality of the world we live in. And therefore, now is the time for the United States of America to give our children the skills so that the jobs will stay here.”
And in a 2009 speech announcing the Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” contest, Barack Obama affirmed the same worn-out view:
“America will not succeed in the 21st century unless we do a far better job of educating our sons and daughters… In an economy where knowledge is the most valuable commodity a person and country can have to offer… The best jobs will go to the best educated… In a world where countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow…” and so forth.
Every form of media blasts a similar message. Our nation-state is in competition with all the others. And America, we are told, is losing in this battle of the minds, especially in those critical disciplines of math and science. Worse for Americans (and Europeans and the other few wealthy nations), the global and digital economy has flattened the world’s playing field. Poor, industrious Asians are as talented and skilled as we are, but hungrier to work. These dark hordes, according to this view, will take over our jobs on their way to global domination.
To prevent the demolition of our way of life, we must work harder, study more, innovate better, become better skilled, and learn new and novel skills. As Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in October of 2012, “The only high-wage jobs, whether in manufacturing or services, will be high-skilled ones, requiring more and better education, and Obama’s two races to the top aim to produce both more high-skill jobs and more high-skilled workers.”
In this view, our children should be bent over their books for hours every day and night. To sit at the top of the heap, they should give up their childhoods and their adolescences to become fleshy desk-sitting computertrons, taking in information whose mastery they will demonstrate in large, standardized exams. Their performance in these few and massive exams will place them somewhere in the pecking order of competitive colleges. Once there they will continue preparing themselves for a specialty to which they will devote themselves to their dying days.