In 1998, the American Council on Education published a monograph by Diana Oblinger and Anne-Lee Verville titled, "What Business Wants from Higher Education" (American Council on Education/Oryx Press Series on Higher Education 1998). 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, 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 VCRs 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, and shopping 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.