Why becoming educated should be a core civic duty of a free population (and why that’s not currently possible)
In 2023, Singapore and the United States displayed the largest skills inequalities in literacy and numeracy.
[Literacy and numeracy] skills are closely related to both individual well-being (e.g. self-reported health and life satisfaction) and civic engagement (e.g. political efficacy, trust and volunteering). Many low-skilled adults feel disconnected from political processes and lack the skills to engage with complex digital information, which is a growing concern for modern democracies.
-The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Yeah, and Booker T. Washington said Black Americans should forget about liberal education because freedom is just making money (laughter). It’s just economic freedom. And Du Bois said, no, everyone needs a liberal education. Everybody needs a free liberal education because that’s what democratic citizenship requires. The attack on the humanities is part of the worldwide authoritarian move. Like, you cannot speak freely in authoritarian countries. I can’t go to China and give a rousing talk about the evils of a one-party state. That’s not allowed. The humanities allows you to talk about anything, and that’s a threat – the idea that you can talk about anything. Particularly, you can challenge the dominant ideologies. You can challenge the nation’s greatness.
One of the most worrying trends I’ve seen as a college professor is that so many of my students do not have good reading comprehension, don’t like articles to be too long, and often don’t want to read, preferring videos instead. Anything that is not specifically tailored to their exact interests and beliefs is dismissed as boring or irrelevant, and I suspect that their social media algorithms are largely to blame for this.
Many students have no understanding of nuance or subtext and struggle to recognize patterns or to extrapolate from one context and apply it to another. They don’t absorb information well enough to take it from class to class. They struggle to follow step by step instructions. Worse — some don’t even attempt to do the assignment, choosing to plagiarize or use AI to do it for them. Oftentimes, students who do this don’t even bother to proofread the paper that AI wrote for them. They view education as a means to an end rather than valuable in and of itself.
As an educator, as a voracious reader my whole life, as a writer, as a person who deeply believes in the power that a good education can provide humans, I am appalled and deeply heartsick over the state of education in our country and the attitude that seems to be increasingly common that the only purpose of education is a kind of job training that must first and foremost provide a good “return on investment”. And yet, I do not blame my students (mostly, but I’ll come back to that) for this.
I blame politicians who have promoted an anti-intellectual agenda for decades in order to justify spending cuts for education at all levels; who have convinced scores of Americans that a college education only benefits the person getting the education and not the community at large, leading to the creation of the student loan system which plagues us now; who do their utmost to convince parents and students that teachers are the enemy whilst slashing money to schools to such a degree that teachers are forced purchase supplies for their classroom on their own dime and take on roles that are not part of their job description; who have allowed schools to become a place of trauma and violence; who expand SRO programs rather than providing mental health services or other necessary services for students; who have made institutions of learning an unsafe place for BIPOC, undocumented, immigrant, and international students or even those just wishing to use their first amendment rights to express outrage over the government’s continuing support of genocide; who have vilified trans students; and who have passed bills censoring what teachers can teach and what books can appear in classrooms.
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” Madison explained, “and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Freeman and Reagan and their compatriots agreed with Madison’s perspective but wanted to prevent Americans from gaining this power. If we want to take another path, the U.S. will have to recover a vision of a well-educated populace not as a terrible threat, but as a positive force that makes the nation better for everyone — and so should largely be paid for by all of us.
-Jon Schwarz “The Origin of Student Debt: Reagan adviser warned free college would create a dangerous ‘educated proletariat’”
I blame corporations who have taken advantage of an underfunded education system by “sponsoring” schools (this was even satirized in an episode of Daria titled “Fizz Ed” which aired in 2001); who have lobbied for policies which are “paving the way for powerful corporations and technology companies to influence school curriculum design”; billionaires, most notably (for a long time) Bill Gates, who have been allowed to “experiment” with our public school systems as though their money gives them more knowledge than educators about education; billionaires, most notably (in the last decade) Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Betsy DeVos, and Linda McMahon who are dismantling the Department of Education, promoting the use of AI, cutting funding for students who depend on it, attacking institutions of higher learning, pushing “school choice”, making student loans an even bigger risk than they already were, and threatening a “foreign student ban”, etc.
I blame universities and colleges who chose to run their institutions of higher learning as a business first, making decisions not based on their students best interest but on what would bring in the most money; for partnering with corporations in ethically questionable ways; for the elitist attitudes of certain professors and students who believe that their education is a substitute for basic human empathy or that their theory is more important than their practice (a secular version of faith without works); for the PWIs with DEI policies that do little to curb the racism and sexism on campus; who believe a rapist’s education is more important than the education of the person he violated; and who make education the domain of the wealthy via exclusivity, nepotism, absurdly high tuition costs, unpaid internships, underpaid graduate students, the move to rely on adjunct labor as a cheap alternative to paying professors a living wage and benefits, etc.
I blame instructors and teachers at all levels who belittle their students via bullying, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, class, intelligence, ability, or any other aspect of their personhood; who don’t look at their students as people first; and who turn the educational environment into one of fear and frustration or tell their students that they are stupid or bad at a particular skill set.
Finally, I want to blame students who give up at the first sign of struggle; for cheating, plagiarism, using AI to do their thinking for them; for a lack of curiosity about the world around them; for believing that everything should be entertaining and refusing to sit in discomfort, boredom, or uncertainty for any length of time; for spending more time on social media than reading books or creating art or participating in a hobby; and for looking at education as a series of hoops to jump through or boxes to check off before getting a degree that will lead to a job, thus taking no interest in their education beyond their grade. I want to. But how can I, after writing the paragraphs that precede this? Is it any wonder that students have these attitudes towards education, when the institution seems almost built with the intention of failing them (what other meaning can we take from the fact that the “school-to-prison pipeline” is an accepted reality in our country?).
In 1980 Jean Anyon conducted a qualitative study called “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, in which she found that there existed a “hidden curriculum” in the classroom in which a student’s experience of education and the relationships between students and teachers varied drastically between students who attended working class, middle-class, affluent-professional, or executive elite schools (in other words, students of different economic classes received vastly different educations). One can assume that this type of study could be repeated today with race or gender as the “hidden curriculum” with similar results.
Anyon concludes the article by saying, “These differences may not only contribute to the development in the children in each social class of certain types of economically significant relationships and not others but would thereby help to reproduce this system of relations in society” (16); essentially, our educational system is one that mirrors the class (and ostensibly gender, race, etc.) systems that exist in the “real world” that students’ parents occupy. The child of a C.E.O. attains an education that develops their “analytical intellectual powers”, where teachers view their opinions as “important”, and where they are taught to have agency and self-control (13-15). Meanwhile, the child of a working class parent receives a very different kind of education, one focused on “following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice” (4). Their teacher does not expect much from them, saying things like “Simple punctuation is all they’ll ever use” (5). In other words, education does more than teach students skills, it socializes them into the kind of life they’re expected to have by the adults around them and those expectations are based largely on the circumstances of their parents.
Perhaps this explains the frequency with which I encounter papers where I’ve asked students to give me their educated opinion on a topic, but they only know how to give me an unfounded rant, or a glowing review without substance, or to paraphrase what they’ve heard others say, or what I’ve told them to read, without any idea how to analyze, extrapolate, or respond with their own ideas. If a student’s foundational experience of education in K-12 was low-agency and the expectation of their teachers was simply to memorize rote facts and regurgitate information, how can they prepare for the high-agency (independent) experience of college where students are expected to engage with topics with curiosity, to question, to research, to think critically about topics, and to form educated opinions rather than be told what to think?
Many of my students are non-traditional and/or first-generation students, meaning I don’t exclusively teach 18-22 year olds and many of my students are the first person in their families to attend college. Beyond the generational shifts in education, social media, technology use, etc., I think that students are simply burnt out. I have students who work full-time, who take care of children or parents, who are still in high-school, who are living in abusive households, who are houseless, who haven’t been to school in a decade . . . In other words, most of my students are just trying to live their lives as best they can and survive capitalism. And while part of my job is to train them to have skills that will help them to do that, I want more for them; I want to train them to have the skills that will help us all to escape it.
The Tower is Falling 
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