What Higher Education Wants from Business
Dorothy D. Wills
Dept. of Geography and Anthropology
Cal Poly Pomona
Introduction: Commodification of Knowledge and Blaming the Academy
Forty years ago, even perhaps thirty, there was no discussion of ‘accountability’,
‘assessment’, ‘re-engineering the university’, ‘educational
effectiveness’, or any of the other buzz words in educational administration.
Public universities were still mostly supported by the public. Private universities
were not inter-penetrated with corporations. In order for the private sector
to colonize them, and for corporate thinking to penetrate and control all education,
they had to find fault with the system as it was. In order to dispel the mystique
of Socrates, the prestige of “ivory tower” expertise, and the “real-world”
bankable value of scientific knowledge, they had to interrogate the system in
terms of the ‘rational’ (cf. Weber) model of production and its
values. Valuing quantity over quality, measurables over ponderables, product
over process, non-human over human technology, the leaders of educational administration
have reduced students to customers, teachers to content providers and assessors
and learning-environment designers, and knowledge to a commodity (cf. Ritzer
1993). On the face of it, the proposition that a university is the same kind
of thing as a restaurant or a factory is absurd.
In 1998, the American Council on Education published a monograph by Diana Oblinger
and Anne-Lee Verville titled, "What Business Wants from Higher Education".
It presented a case for the transformation of the university into a training
service for corporate managers, through which the values and skills business
owners deem necessary can be expeditiously inculcated in near-future professional
personnel. It also indicts higher education for its inefficiency, wastefulness,
and confusing lack of unified direction (compared to corporations), not pointing
out that it is impossible to compare the behavior of a (mostly) democratic institution
(a university) with that of a totalitarian organization (a corporation). Following
is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response to Oblinger and Verville's work; my principal
point is that business dominates life in the United States and hence has the
lion's share of responsibility in preparing children to study and learn - and
that it is failing miserably in this role.
The clientele of the university (students) emerge from 18 or more years of immersion
in a community life whose single most powerful design force is business. Not
the family, not local, national or international government, not the church
or school, nor any other organization has as much influence over students as
business. The media, commerce (transactions by which all goods and most services
are obtained), and relentless social pressure to participate in consumption
and production are the formative routines for most people today. Business has
the power, the resources, and the tools to ready students for higher (and all)
learning. Yet schools are being held accountable for all manner of social ills,
academic failures, and cultural degeneracy, which are actually beyond their
ability to affect, measure, or control, due to the hegemonic ethos established
by the commercialization of society.
The creed of business is money. The operating principle is caveat emptor. The
communicative form is advertising. Since (higher) education is founded upon
rather different values and functions by different processes, students are unprepared
for learning. It is to the business-controlled community setting that our products
(students) are returned upon graduation. Most of them find the idealism and
humanism they have acquired at the university irrelevant to this environment,
and experience difficulties in adjusting. Therefore, we think it will be useful
to identify the requirements of higher education so that business can improve
its performance in (1) providing pre-university students with adequate preparation
to meet the rigors of learning, and (2) fostering a healthy pre- and post-graduation
environment for them to work and live in, so that the situation of learning-ineptitude
will not recur. We assume that citizens, legislators, and business leaders are
sincere when they bemoan the diminishing standard of intellectual performance
on the part of the population in general, and our youth in particular. Our fundamental
finding is that the students (adults) we see at the university are by and large
very poorly equipped to learn anything, despite the constant refrain that lifelong
learning and mastery of new technologies and ideas are essentials of modern
life and should be integrated into the opportunity structure of a free (market)
society. We attribute this poverty of the mind not to any specific deficiency
in human nature, nor to a failure of the schools, but to an impoverishment of
learning skills that has spread through society along with the business model
of conduct and culture. The most important of these skills and the sources of
their degeneration are discussed in the following paragraphs.
1. Basic Learning Competencies
It is important for undergraduates to be able to read, write, calculate, and
analyze data in a logical manner. These are the abilities most often pointed
to as missing in undergraduates. They are the abilities test-takers are asked
to demonstrate. While the use of language, numbers, and thought is occasionally
spoken well of by members of the business world, there is actually no support
for it outside the classroom. Television viewing, shopping, consumption, commuting,
and participation in mass culture do not require literacy, numeracy, or thinking
beyond a rudimentary level. In fact, excellence in any of these skills, especially
critical thinking, is actively discouraged, because it may lead people to question
the status quo or the claims of ads and takes time away from commuting and shopping.
Many students who enter the university are illiterate, innumerate, and unable
to think. It is no wonder they do not perform very well in their course work.
Very recently the public has become alarmed by the poor test scores of the majority
of our students. These scores are just the tip of the iceberg. Standardized
tests bear only a tangential relationship to actual aptitude and achievement,
for many reasons well known to behavioral science. The real indicators of student
competence, their day-to-day communications and performance as assessed by their
teachers, tell an even scarier story. Basic competencies for higher learning
are at a primitive level because they are not reinforced anywhere in the pre-university
environment. The business-oriented community in which prospective students have
grown up and been socialized can and should do a much better job of instilling
respect for learning competencies and offering occasions for their practice.
Students enter the university ill-equipped to apply the social use of language
to learning, which is to say, the inquiring, analyzing function of language
as a tool is less developed than the expressive, reportorial, or transactional
functions. While much has been made of the modern impoverishment of language,
most of the self-anointed critics seem merely to be referring to changing grammatical
rules, borrowings from non-standard dialects or other languages, and new or
different vocabulary. A transition back to oral culture need not necessitate
a dumbing down of language; in fact, oral culture involves extensive memorization
of text, elaborate discursive forms, allegory, metaphor, and many didactic usages.
However, we are witnessing such a simplification today. The commercial world
and media which are its voice do not exemplify descriptive, critical, poetic,
metalinguistic, multi-lingual, catalogic, or other scholarly uses of language,
whereas all of these are embedded in the higher learning process. Some pundits
bemoan the incivility of the speech patterns of modern youth. The mimetic capability
of humans has been well-documented; young people are merely aping the incivility,
the formulaic impoliteness, cynicism, and self-centeredness of the marketplace
and media.
Schools do an excellent job of introducing children to the learning competencies
and are responsible for whatever acquisition does take place, but children spend
far more time in an environment that negates learning and celebrates money-intensive
uses of time. By the time they get to the university, children have done an
accurate analysis of the social system and the opportunity structure. They see
that such behaviors as active reading, recitation, mental calculation, creative
composition, and discussion are not practiced outside school and bring no monetary
compensation. The business ethos also dominates students' progress and choices
after they are at the university, so that they have to focus on problems of
marketability and earning power rather than the interest of subject matter,
refinement of the mind, or general value to the species. Serious acquisition
of competencies is vitiated by these circumstances.
2. Task Completion
Students today appear to experience a fragmented consciousness rather than the
continuous stream of awareness typical of our ancestors. The evolutionary forces
that applied to human behavior, enabling us to concentrate on a detailed, multi-sensorial,
cross-modal task for long periods of time, are no longer in effect. Television
watching requires no skill other than very basic English comprehension. Active
listening, sustained focus, responsive and interactive language use, verbal
memory, and continuous attention are all necessary for participation in ordinary
course work such as classroom exercises, research papers, homework assignments,
and presentations. Students are unable to follow and segment an unbroken oral
delivery of information, let alone a written one. Perhaps a laugh track and
commercial breaks at 15-minute intervals would secure their attention, but it
is impossible to construct a complex argument under such constraints. Critical
discourse and allusive speech do not tend to be packaged as one-liners.
Students cannot bring to fruition projects that demand long-range planning and
elaborate organization. They are unable to induce a notion of connectedness
between items not placed physically or temporally proximal to each other. They
cannot retain textual data. Computer use has been lauded for its potential as
a replacement for the Occidental obsession with linear thought. We have hoped
that the kind of complex embeddedness and linkages among content made possible
by the world-wide web, for instance, would lead to deeper and more diverse organizational
skills. We find among computer users and video-gamers, however, the same lack
of vision of any kind of patterned relations among pieces of information that
we find among students in general. They cannot see, and do not seek, big pictures.
Their world is presented in fragments; their attention span is limited to the
time it takes to want something, go to where they can get it, and obtain or
purchase it (in either geographic or virtual space); and their concentration
is focused on changes in the visual horizon (like that of a herd species) rather
than on the sweep, color, and details in a stationary or moving field (like
that of primates in general). It is not surprising that students cannot complete
educational tasks.
Most of people's experiences outside the classroom put their brains to sleep.
Nowhere do they see modeled the kind of active engagement, sustained attention,
and layered patterning of activity necessary for learning to take place. On
the contrary, long-term project planning and extensive organization are anathema
to consumer culture, which is most profitable in an environment of single-factor
decision-making ("I want"), short-range planning ("I want it
now"), and uncomplicated explanatory frameworks ("I saw it on TV").
The punctuated attention span is complemented by an attitude of cynical denial
of value to anything that does not deliver instant satisfaction and results.
When the only motivation is pecuniary reward, and only earning (not learning)
is rewarded, we have a population who are actually counter-prepared for college.
If we wanted students to take schooling seriously in the terms of our culture,
we would be paying them to go.
3. Knowledge Base
Words such as 'knowledge', 'fact', and 'truth' are somewhat controversial in
academic circles today. This is because there has been a legitimate critique
directed to the manner in which 'facts', 'truth', and 'knowledge' have often
been conveyed, i.e., that they are permanent, that only a few people or societies
can know them, or that they have reality only in an empirical, quantifiable
sense. We now acknowledge that today's myth is tomorrow's fact (and the reverse),
that Western truths are not the only truths, and that immeasurable, subjective,
or spiritual knowledge is also real. This debate has unfortunately given the
public the impression that academicians do not believe that anything is true
and that, therefore, we are not searching for knowledge any more.
Knowledge also seems to be in short supply because none of it is required by
the business culture we live in. You do not have to know anything to watch TV,
even the "news". The world began yesterday, so far as most programs
are concerned, and it takes place entirely in The Same Town, USA. Comprehension
of the jokes and dialogue of most programs is dependent only on a working knowledge
of English and mass culture. Quiz shows ask people about TV, popular music,
celebrities, and films, rarely about science, history, art, or literature. Knowledge
and critical thinking are discouraged in the marketplace, for they render the
crucial decision to buy more problematical. Only knowledge of products, gossip,
and events on shows has much social currency.
Thus, students come to learning with no frame of reference. To most of them,
all facts have the same status. Complexities of explanation bore and confuse
them, because they have no judgement of historical, scientific, or linguistic
factors. The war in Iraq is the same kind of thing as Bill O'Reilly's alleged
sexual harassment. To our students, the two events require an equal understanding.
A car chase on the freeway is the same as a discussion of bovine growth hormone,
more interesting perhaps, but just another fact of life. Students cannot weigh
the relative merit of different communications; if it is something they have
heard on TV, heard from a friend, seen on the internet, or seen in print (a
rarity), they think it is true. Sports, weather, public affairs, sexual innuendo,
all are of equal importance. Nothing has any deeper significance than what it
is on the surface. It is impossible to compare things, because comparisons demand
analysis and analysis requires some marshalling of 'factual' data, some knowledge
of something beyond the here-and-now. Most television is self-referential, suggesting
there is no reality beyond the screen. Pretty soon we will be able to "experience"
everything from national parks to driving real fast virtually, so we won't have
to bother with the real thing. The economic system has had a flattening effect
on mental and sensory activity: facts, opinions, statistics, observations, feelings,
experiences, everything is just a commodity, information. One person's opinion
is as good as another's (except the persons with money and power can make theirs
stick). Emotion and sensation have priority over cognition. Too much knowledge
is an impediment to consumption, anyway. It leads to questions.
It is ironic that in our heterogeneous society, all of the constituent cultural
traditions originally revered wisdom and inculcated the value of learning in
their offspring, yet we have now attained a homogeneous disregard for knowledge
and education. Material possessions alone claim our interest and respect, religious
posturing to the contrary. Indeed, all our religious and philosophical traditions
agree that materialism is contrary to the growth of the spirit, yet these traditions
have universally ceded to the marketplace as god. Christians and others have
been strangely silent as the landscape has filled with shopping malls, the screen
with insults and commercials, and the politicians' coffers with corporate donations.
4. Tools, Art, and Problem-Solving
Specialization has a privileged place in the profit-generating activity of business.
A specialist can produce an art work, comestible, machine, or other product
that is far superior to what the ordinary person with a little incentive and
education can do for themselves, and which can then be marketed en masse to
the ordinary people at a high price. To be specialized entails acquisition of
specialized skills usually centered on use of tools and creative performance.
Thus, universities are being encouraged to tailor their educational programs
to the production of highly skilled individuals specialized in technology, sciences,
and some artistic fields. They are being discouraged from providing more general
education, except what is needed for consumption. After all, if the ordinary
person can satisfy a lot of their own needs, they are freed from their dependency
on the marketplace. People who are self-sufficient and resourceful like our
generalist ancestors are great learners but lousy spenders. Furthermore, the
prestige attached to being able to buy something produced industrially or by
a specialist has all but erased the primordial motive for acquisition of an
artistic or mechanical technique - "I want to do it myself!"
Many students today have no direct exposure to a wide variety of tools, games,
and art forms that have historically been important to the development of human
culture and skill. They cannot create anything, perform anything, repair anything,
or even use many items in the inventory of material culture without the intervention
of a specialist. Learning is a creative, active, tool-intensive endeavor in
which students must be able to work both independently and interdependently.
Many students today fare poorly in negotiating such resources as libraries,
laboratories, classrooms, even the internet, and have not achieved self-sufficiency
in the use of the wide array of instruments at their disposal, from rulers to
pianos to microscopes. The term 'technology' has been semantically restricted
to refer mainly to information and automation technology, which thence have
high status in relation to the traditional technology of humankind, including
all sorts of implements, constructions, made objects, and the procedures for
their use. This restriction presents a serious handicap for the acquisition
of skilled procedures in many fields. At the same time, the notion of expertise
in a field has lost its mystique. The self-proclaimed experts people usually
are exposed to are mainly those who have opinions on a given subject, not the
same thing as mastery of it. For our students, expertise is equivalent to access
to a data base.
Learning techniques for the use of tools, then using these tools to create something
new or to solve problems, requires discipline. The usual denotation of 'discipline'
today has to do with orderly behavior and how to compel people to engage in
it. Discipline of the mind is even more endangered than good behavior. The idea
of an academic discipline is derived from the notion that to achieve mastery
entails systematic application of physical, intellectual, and practical procedures
and resources over time, in short, discipline. The new phrase "information
competency" alludes in part to this old concept. Tracking down, sifting
through, weighing, comparing, translating data, whether its source is the internet,
print, verbal, observational, or other modality of input, is the quintessential
scholarly activity, and this requires the abilities to use instruments in an
organized way, to evaluate information and ideas in a purposive manner, and
to coordinate this learning activity with other people in a (multi-)cultural
context. This complex behavior is often undeveloped in students. Although they
can drive cars, use computers, and turn on and off DVD players and other sophisticated
machinery, students have very little practice in the rudimentary use of tools
in research and learning.
5. Social Interest
Adler and others have identified two components in the psychological well-being
of persons, the self-interest and the social interest. Persons considered to
be of a balanced nature maintain both kinds of interest in equal parts. Different
activities call on one or the other to different degrees. There is a sizable
element of self-interest in university level education, having to do with the
individual's achievement motivation, competitiveness, ambition, and simple desire
to be edified. Learning is also rewarding and entertaining in and of itself,
as can be readily seen in the smallest children who, fascinated by fish or paint
or rocks, pursue such domains on their own until exposure to the tedium of television
or the regimentation of bureaucratically managed classrooms dulls their wits.
Being wise or at least well-informed has long conferred status, popularity,
and sometimes privileges on people in the social arena, so education can serve
as a kind of social wealth, whose possession and exchange most people would
consider to be in their self-interest. The prestige of knowledge is sadly reduced
in our time. We might say the self-interest of education has been restricted
to its utilitarian, commercial, and status symbolic values.
There is also a significant element of social interest in higher learning. This
is even more noticeably missing in the qualifications presented by students
entering the university. The social interest of learning resides primarily in
its relationship to the collective wisdom and traditions of humankind. Knowledge
is accumulative, derivative, and cross-modal (kin to creativity and cultural
behavior). Musical training, mathematical ability, language development, all
grow hand in hand. Science, art, philosophy, medicine, literature, are built
on the work of others, constructed from bits of culture and tradition. Culture
itself is a cooperative effort, because none of it is genetically encoded. All
is transmitted from generation to generation, from peer to peer, from objects
and models and texts and experience to the community of learners.
Learning is not a solitary activity, even in the case of the researcher observing
animals on a hillside or the scholar reading in the archive. They are using
language, the gift of the generations, and are preparing their learning to share
with others. Education in the formal sense was traditionally directed to cadres
of individuals, not individuals, because it was considered identical to the
renewal, re-formation, and continuity of the community. Sharing, collective
activity, and the furtherance of group over individual goals are not part of
the business mode, which ranks the satisfaction of individual desires supreme.
Naturally, students emphasize the competitive, achievement- and goal-oriented
aspect of university education, but are not interested in the content for its
own sake part and even less in the contribution to the community part. In many
cases, cooperative work (team projects, study groups, tutoring, social research)
is actually hampered by students' lack of orientation toward social interest.
This point may be of interest to those inquiring into the causes of so many
students' rather poor psychological health, their high rates of depression,
suicidal behavior, substance abuse, and violence towards others: they have lost
the balancing influence of social interest.
Learning is a peaceful and cooperative activity, dependent upon mutual trust
and respect between teachers and learners, learners and other learners, scholars
and other scholars. Although pleasurable in itself and always gratifying in
the long run, the learning activity does not provide the instant sensual gratification
advertised everywhere as the purpose of existence. The violent, sexualized,
highly stimulating content of most media messages does not prepare students
for the cerebral rather than sensual impact of much education, and the isolating,
self-aggrandizing experience of absorption of media and consumption of products
does not prefigure the consensual social task of education. As the threshold
for stimulation is raised higher and higher by the graphic arts of film and
television, showing more and more explosions and car chases and sex acts, people
will become all but unreachable by ordinary communicative means. Already, many
students are bored by conversation, by nature, by reading, writing, math. How
can they be expected to learn anything? The products they buy are not educational,
the programs they watch are not, the consumption-oriented activities they engage
in are not, and their educational development is not really of interest to their
communities. Serious education cannot hope to stimulate them unless it turns
into Terminator IV, but what would be the point if it is indistinguishable from
mindless entertainment?
6. Health
One of the other pre-requisites for learning is physical and mental health.
While many students arrive at the university in peak condition, some do not,
and others experience a decline in health during their undergraduate years owing
to circumstances outside the purview of their studies. They may be newly independent
of their parents and directly encountering the vicissitudes of capitalist society
for the first time. This may be their first exposure to the array of temptations
available at commercial establishments. The pursuit of self-satisfaction deemed
the only legitimate pursuit by business can end in self-destruction.
The principal observation we have made is that students are stressed by their
lifestyles, even at young ages. They are commuters, domestic workers, sometimes
parents, wage earners, consumers, as well as students. It is no wonder they
say they are just in college to get the diploma; they don't have time or energy
to put into real learning (and they know that's not what's valued in society,
anyway). Traditional education usually reserved both a place and a period of
time in which initiates were freed of the demands of normal life, because it
was recognized that learning was so intense and rigorous that they needed the
seclusion. With the economic system growing at an ever-inflationary rate, it
is impossible to free people from the cycle of production and consumption. Attending
class meetings is referred to as "seat time" even by administrators
of higher educational institutions, and students don't have time for it anyway
due to their productive and consumptive activities, so they have become hostages
in the classroom. Not only is that a terrible learning situation, it is unhealthy
for young people, or any people, to experience a pace of life so manic that
they resent spending an hour on anything that is not defined as remunerative,
consumptive, or sensually rewarding.
Self-interest, discussed above as an abundant motivator of people in our society,
is not the same thing as self-esteem, which is low in many categories of youth.
When people are in competition for scarce resources, when they are continuously
invited to compare what they have to what celebrities or people in ads have,
and when only a tiny range of achievements of which they are capable are actually
rewarded or held in high regard, their ability to accept and like themselves
is eroded. It is common knowledge that this is an unhealthy attitude in general
and is specifically not conducive to learning.
Physical health is also important to learning. Corporatization of medical care
has put that care outside the range of many families and individuals who are
not employed full-time. The age of some students means that they are not covered
by their parents' policies. Student health centers at universities work strenuously
to fill the gap in care, but cannot always do so. In addition, the omnipresence
of fast food in the student diet makes students under-nourished. Its only values
are that it is cheap, convenient, and familiar. Students have grown up with
poor nutrition, in many cases, either because of poverty or simply because of
the focus of the economic system on profit rather than people.
7. Family and Community
While much has been made of 'family values' of late, the particular values that
support students' performance in educational settings are often neglected. Focused
interaction between adults and children, whether they are parents and their
children, or grandparents, other relatives, step-parents, visitors, or significant
others of parents, is known to be the single most important medium for the growth
of skills, self-esteem, and social interest, the main pre-requisites for learning.
Engaging in mutual tasks other than TV watching, driving, playing video games,
and shopping (all still essentially solitary activities) has become less common
than it used to be in households. This is partly because the economy requires
all adults to be working and consuming more or less constantly, so they are
either gone or tired. Families as coherent, interdependent domestic structures
have been de-stabilized by the atomizing force of the economic system. Families
are collections of individuals defined as wage-earners or dependents, nothing
more. The distribution of power in the family is relative to material inputs,
and this itself alone defines the role structure, not some complex inter-weaving
of kin rights and obligations of a complementary or reciprocal nature. The instability
of the family does not come from the gay rights movement, from replacement of
pious virtue by modern sexual obsession, or from any specific moral degeneracy.
It comes from the separation of the generations by economics, from high rates
of geographic mobility in the quest for work, from competition for scarce resources,
and from the triumph of materialism.
Not only is there less constructive and instructive interaction among family
members, there is less emphasis on the intrinsic interest of discourse, reading,
reading aloud, writing, musical or artistic performance, building, games, and
so on, as family activities (that also happen to be learning promoters). These
activities are not primarily commercial, so are not supported by the business
world. The homogenizing effect of the global economic apparatus has also meant
that culture itself has become an inventory of commodities to be bought and
sold. What little remains of human tradition does not always translate well
into the language of the marketplace. This means that students are missing out
on the enriching and broadening background of their indigenous cultures, which
would also have given them a greater sense of place in history and geography,
and incidentally a fuller spiritual life.
The loss of community has been bemoaned by many observers of our society. The
term itself is more commonly used nowadays to refer to special interest groups
or groups having a particular factor in common, such as the "disability
community", the "Arab-American community", or the "environmentalist
community". When 'community' indicates a residential entity such as a town
or city, it no longer connotes a sense of belongingness and solidarity. Although
one of the purposes of education is for individuals to transcend the limitations
of their parochial, original, and particular backgrounds, it is far easier to
do this from the solid base of a stable family and community identity than to
seek transcendence from an insubstantial, though racialized, acultural base.
In fact, most students today feel a greater sense of membership in TV families
than they do in their own, a deeper participation in mass culture than in their
own local or root cultures, and this is not because of the women's movement,
queer politics, multiculturalism, or deconstruction theory in scholarship. It
is because the need to get and spend money has conquered all other needs, and
in the conquest it has fragmented families and communities.
The removal of humans from nature by 'development' has led to a tendency for
people to see themselves as outside the complex web of inter-relations that
constitutes the eco-system. This has had disastrous consequences for the human
community as well as for its environment. When students are asked to function
as a community, they are sometimes shocked, as if they have never conceived
of themselves in this way before. Perhaps they have not. This de-contextualization,
this abstraction of the person from the world, coupled with what Galbraith has
termed our "competitive individualism", results in persons who are
not corporate actors, in the old-fashioned sense, not really social animals
any more, yet more dependent than ever on an abstract economic system to supply
their needs.
8. Standardization and Homogenization
Economic globalization has been accompanied in our time by the concentration
of power and wealth in relatively few hands (those of persons and companies)
and by the rapid spread of North American tastes, products, ways of doing things,
attitudes - culture. Very soon all towns will look pretty much the same, not
only in the U.S. but everywhere. All shelves will be stocked with the same items.
Radio programs will play the same music and talk the same talk. People will
spend their time doing the same things in the same way. The monopolization of
economic life by one form of economic system (what we have) and the domination
of the market by a few giant business concerns amount essentially to the usurpation
of culture. Standardization is presented as an unalloyed good; because you are
buying it from a multinational chain, that hamburger will be the same if you
buy it in Hong Kong or New York. This is considered desirable, even though the
hamburger has obliterated the former delightful variety of local edibles, may
be of lower nutritional value than any of them, is offered in packaged form
that pollutes the environment, and requires no skill in its immediate production.
Further, the manner of its manufacture and distribution aggrandize the wage
gap and the power accretion into few hands.
The association of standardization to learning to which we are accustomed has
to do with testing. We want our youth, our heirs and successors, to achieve
a high standard of performance in whatever they do … or so we say. That
is why we subject them to a regimen of aptitude, diagnosis, and achievement
tests, beginning even with kindergarten-readiness pre-school tests and track
placement in elementary grades. Such testing has the consequence of stratifying
the population according to their performance on these instruments; this stratification
tends to ratify the pre-existing socioeconomic stratigraphy and debatably puts
people into the professions, institutions, or earning categories for which they
are most qualified. Test results tell us how well individuals perform on the
tests, and secondarily whether they can read, write, and calculate at the level
required by the test. The relationship of these standardized tests to real learning,
which proceeds according to a punctuated equilibrium of its own, is obscure
to say the least. Test-driven teaching may in fact abolish learning.
Corporate monopolistic economy extinguishes multiplicity of production modes,
varieties of markets, non-consumerist culture, and local or indigenous commodities.
In the same way, standardization of educational testing eradicates the inherently
diverse, creative, anarchic behavior of learners. It is clear that it is not
a high standard we seek for our children when we have school boards telling
teachers not to teach evolutionary theory or human sexuality. The standards
so often referred to have more to do with mass production of people who fit
certain molds than they do with a quality of intellectual performance.
Cultural homogenization is anathema to learning. Newness and difference are
the most potent stimuli for growth. Though people are surrounded by 'new' products
in unprecedented plenty, they are bored. The native uniqueness of every personality
is gradually eroded by the standardization of behavior and attitudes in mass
culture, regardless of color, language, or other difference. The debate about
whether everyone should have the same rights conveniently obscures the question
of why everyone has to have the same economic system everywhere. Everyone should
have the same opportunity to experience education, and that education should
be as rich, as diverse, and as profound as people themselves are.
Business and Higher Education - Can We Be Real Partners?
We have noted that the requirements for higher learning are manifestly deficient
in the majority of modern university entrants. Some of the factors we have discussed
are not well known to the public. These include (to review):
1. the fundamental competencies for learning,
2. the attentional and attitudinal structure enabling extended task completion,
3. the knowledge base,
4. independent tool use and problem-solving,
5. social interest,
6. physical and mental health,
7. stable family and community life,
8. diverse characteristics of learners,
and, of course, a value for learning.
We have argued that the depletion of these qualifications in the population is associated with the commercialization of life in general and with the extension of the characteristics of the economic system to the sociocultural system. Since we are adaptive beings, it is to be expected that the quality of the mind and of specific academic performance will deteriorate when they do not enhance the success of the individual. One wonders how long the group writ large will be successful if its individual members learn poorly. Our children are not doing well in school or on tests not because they are being badly taught but because they find nowhere in the rest of their experience or environment any convincing reason to do so, beyond "you have to". The adults around them for the most part could not do well on these tests, either, and would see no reason why they should. They don't need to know anything for what they do or how they live.
On the other hand, many people seem to think this is not a desirable state of
affairs. Business and political leaders, (which are the same class), talk frequently
of the need to make us "global citizens" and "leaders of tomorrow"
and "members of civil society". Do they only really mean people who
can sell more stuff around the world? who can come up with new generations of
technological wonders to purvey? who can maintain a kind of schizoid worldview
in which greed is good, but be obedient to authority? who are willing to do
lots of volunteer work? Or do they really mean that they think education should
enhance people's ability to think creatively, to get along in a variety of cultural
and linguistic settings, to act in a principled manner for the betterment of
their group, to analyze critically new information, to use tools innovatively,
to contribute to the collective store of knowledge in general and/or in specific,
to spread justice and peace, to transmit values to the next generation? If they
really mean these things, and not the former, then we have some work to do together.
We don't have to make education more expensive for students. We do have to place
less emphasis on amassing personal wealth as the supreme objective of life.
The solution some people have envisioned is to make the educational system even
more like business, which seems to others to remove the educational part from
it altogether. The solution we propose is to make the business-dominated community
more harmonious with educational values. This should not be difficult for such
a dynamic society. Many options suggest themselves, such as
(1) restructuring the reward system,
2) application of our sophisticated public relations techniques to ability and
talent as well as product and service, and
(3) recognition that accountability for student incompetence is not the schools'
alone. Within the schools, we already know that measures such as reduction of
class size produce almost immediate improvement in learning.
We have demonstrated that, unless we wish the cerebral cortex to become a vestigial
organ, it is imperative to restore a learning-positive environment to people's
experience. This will involve diminution of the stupefying influence of television
and other media, slowing down rather than speeding up the profit cycle, and
careful evaluation of the long-term effects on the functioning of the human
organism of each of the major features of the economic system.
Re-Humanizing Knowledge and De-Commodification of Society
Works Cited
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Pine Forge Press, 1993.