The Current Crisis in US Education

 

Leading articles in the Atlantic and New York magazine have laid it out in stark and unsettling detail:  student reading and math scores on the standardized NAEP tests issued to US students portray US students’ math and reading scores at their lowest point since 2015, after consistently falling since then.  A direct contrast to the situation prior to 2015, when math and reading scores were consistently rising, indicating that US students were reading better and were doing math better consistently.  Now they are doing much, much worse.  Not the top Tenth Percentile students, who are well achieving, and are consistently staying that way.  No, the worst affected are those in the lower percentiles, who are getting worse, less able to do math, less able to read at grade level, much less at adult level.  Which means, they will be more and more likely to be shut out of the job market for lack or requisite scores.  Since they are now among the most marginalized, the most subject to class and racial disparities, the most likely to live in resource-starved neighborhoods, the American problem with equity and its achievement will only get worse.

 

Many reasons are given for this decline, of course, but they tend to be presented as sole causes, rather than what they really are, a series of interlinked causes.  Among them are:  isolation and reliance on inadequate virtual learning during COVID, the rise of smartphone use, antipathy by teachers and parents alike to the standardized tests of the No Child Left Behind Act, which were often seen as punitive, with low scores on such tests leading to punishments.  Also, the clout of teachers’ unions, who want standardized pay and benefits for all teachers against merit-based pay for good teachers.  (It’s still the case that the poorest qualified college enrollees are the ones who go into education, and many a college professor has complained that his/her worst students are the Education majors.)  To which I would add, schools, especially public schools, becoming the dumping ground for all kinds of societal problems and neglect, and are thus unrealistically expect to address long-festering social problems and issues of equity, equality, and equality of opportunity while also teaching to an acceptable level needed pedagogical skills, especially in science, math, literature, and reading.  But such are impossible demands to meet, and unsurprisingly, in the name of equity merit and emphasis on developing talented individuals are allowed to ignominiously fall by the wayside.  But as economist Noah Smith recently pointed out in his Substack column, “Noahpinion,” allow merit and talent to be shortchanged in the name of equity, demanding equal results, no matter how specious, rather than equality of opportunity, shortchanges all students, https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/bad-education-is-a-terrible-way-to?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.  

As Karl Marx himself pointed out in the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” not all individuals are equal to the same quality and quantity of work, which was his justification for the pay method of the first stage of communism, “socialism,”:  “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work,” in contradistinction to “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  But Marx here was only concerned with physical capacity for work, even though he should’ve added, mental and intellectual capacity as well, for not all are equally intellectually gifted.  Gifts are widespread across the human race, but they are most unevenly distributed.  So, the bottom line is, when we truncate the especially gifted in the name of an “equity” that only ensures the triumph of mediocrity, we only shortchange ourselves as a human race and as a human society.  Noir can we sanguinely expect AI to fill in for what we have lost in basic cognitive math and reading skills.  AI is no substitute for human ability and knowledge, and is itself frequently wrong.  If we humans lack the cognitive skills to recognize AI error, we only perpetuate it.  There was a famous experiment several years ago, involving students given a math test where they were allowed to use calculators, but the calculators were set to be 20% off.  Yet, for many of the students, face with the cognitive dissonance engendered between what their own cognition told them was the correct answer, and what the calculator said was the correct answer, chose the calculator’s answer instead!  Not at all auspicious.  That is why teaching critical reading and math skills is vitally important not only to the US educational system, but to any educational system.  It is time to get back to the “basics” on teaching and learning, and perhaps, not allow or insist that our public schools address all social problems, a task they are not prepared to undertake.  (Private schools, and charter schools, have the leeway to address which social problems they will address, and which they will blithely ignore.)  Equity is a worthy goal, but it is not the only goal.  And it will not happen overnight, but will take some time.  For a start, we’d be better off emphasizing equality of opportunity rather than equal results.  As a good psychotherapist I had once put it, “If it weren’t slow, it wouldn’t be real.”  Real, sustainable change takes time.  That which is easily and facilely achieved can be easily and facilely undone, also.  Lest we forget.

 

I’m a socialist, and while I believe in equality and equity, I also believe in utilizing talent, ability, merit, and skills, and enabling as many as possible to attain them.  If this means unequal results in an equality of opportunity, so be it.  It’s like the Superbowl:  no matter how evenly matched the two teams are, at the end of the game there is a winner, and a loser.  They can’t both win.  Yes, we do need a socialist meritocracy, a Jeffersonian “Aristocracy of talent in a democracy of opportunity.”  We d need to encourage our best and our brightest, and we can by providing readily-available access to excellence, which is what the New York City magnet schools and CUNY system of higher education have done so well over the decades—enabling marginalized, working-class, and Jewish students access to achievement and excellence, giving them the chance to excel.  No, they didn’t all become real-estate moguls, but so many of them became distinguished scholars, professors and teachers, and even Nobel Prize winners.  This is what we should be aiming at as socialists, a meritocracy based on equality of opportunity, not penalizing the meritorious and talented because it doesn’t elevate mediocrity and inability to achieve in a false and spurious sense of “equity.”    

Indiana’s Brain Drain—the problem that won’t go away

This is a reposting of the very first article I wrote for Examiner.com back in September 2009, and my direct honesty in writing about Indiana's still-continuing Brain Drain raised a slight maelstrom of concern, lest I be seen as tarnishing "images."  But I write it as I see it, no ifs, ands, or buts, the way an honest reporter should.  Slightly edited to bring it up-to-date--GF

According to the Indianapolis Star, the leading newspaper for the State of Indiana, 46.6% of Indiana’s recent college graduates leave the state annually, while the largest influx of in-migration to Indiana consists of those with less than a 10^th grade education.  Already, in a state with an economy that is still nearly 17% dominated by manufacturing, where layoffs are a major occurrence, only a third of Indiana’s workers have a high school diploma of the equivalent, and only 28% of Indiana’s workers in the prime age work group of 25-34 have college degrees.  This compares to 39% nationally.  Yet by 2025 60% of Indiana’s workforce will have to hold college degrees for the Indiana economy to stay productive. (Again from the Indianapolis Star.)

 

But right now a college graduate in Indiana is more likely to be told that she or he is “overqualified and underexperienced” and not hired, rather than hired.

 

I know that personally—for I am one of those “overqualified and underexperienced” college grads, are many of my friends and associates.  And like many of them, I work at CTB/McGraw-Hill in Indianapolis through the temp agencies Kelly Services or Dployit working the regular but strictly seasonal job of scoring the state school system standardized tests that have become de rigueur for the schools since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.  During the peak of the season, over 1,000 college grads are so employed—at a job which, while it requires a college degree, only pays as much as a security guard, with no benefits, and is essentially a niche job with few transferable skills.  (What we do is most akin to what is only part of a teacher’s job—grading tests and papers.)  Yet, for many of us, this is the most substantial employment we have all year round.

 

Jim Weddle, then General Manager for Kelly Services at CTB/McGraw-Hill, keenly aware of this pool of intellectual talent he had out there, has tried to shop around the list of Kelly employees scoring tests to other employers—to no avail.  Just not interested.

 

The recession has made things even worse, of course.  For example, during the 2009 test-scoring season at CTB/McGraw-Hill, from mid-March to mid-June, I saw returning to work many colleagues I hadn’t seen out there for the couple of years.  Their reason for coming back was all the same: laid off from the jobs they’d held previously, often with little prospect of being called back.

 

One such person in this situation is Jerry Hall, a lawyer eligible in Indiana to practice law, but unable to financially afford to do so.  For the last two years he’d had a steady but low-paying warehouse job that enabled him to get by, but he was laid off from that.  He was grateful that there was at least the test scoring to come back to, but had no idea of what he’d do for work when the season ended.  “I hope I can find a warehouse job that will pay me $8.00 an hour,” he said.  Right now he’s diligently looking for warehouse and other unskilled and semi-skilled work to tide him through—but Indiana had 10.7% unemployment in June 2009, considerably higher than the national average of 9.5%, so he was not optimistic.  More pointedly, even if he did have a client who would pay him for legal representation, he couldn’t afford to spend the time it takes to be an effective attorney, for his days have to be spent looking for work, and the regular 2010 test-scoring season won’t resume until mid-March, with little hope for windfall projects being available before then.

 

Ironically, Indiana employers have been importing college graduates from elsewhere to fill the few high-tech jobs available, while Indiana’s college graduates go underemployed and unemployed for “not having the right degree.”  Which defeats the very purpose of the stated official goal of educationally upgrading Indiana’s work force.  Because, for one thing, a college education goes far beyond vocational training, no matter how specialized and technical the profession one’s trained for; a real college education enhances one’s ability to think, to assess critically, to research, to expand one’s intellectual outlook, and to appreciate the arts and culture.  So, while Indianapolis, typical of other Hoosier cities in this regard, has a plethora of shopping malls and upscale restaurants, its dearth of artistic and cultural amenities is not something the truly educated person is going to find attractive.  He or she simply wants more than just shopping malls.

 

Perhaps no where is this better seen than is the latest boosterist fad being promoted to solve Indiana’s economic dilemma: replacing declining manufacturing jobs with new, highly-skilled jobs in biotech.  But Guidant, a biotech pioneer formerly in Indianapolis, left the state when it was bought by pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, and the state has not been able to attract significant biotech investment and venture capital since that departure.  Yet, what’s increasingly become a will o’ the wisp for the quintessentially Rust Belt Indiana economy is still touted widely by Indiana’s politicians and business leaders.  This despite that biotech is fast becoming just another economic development illusion that joins those other economic development illusions promoted in the past—such as Indianapolis becoming the amateur sports capital of the nation, or a major convention and tourism site. 

 

Recently, the Indianapolis Star touted the job-creating possibilities of biotech by pointing to the alleged job opportunities created by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co., and prosthetics manufacturer Cook Instruments, both of which had been in Indiana for quite some time—they had provided 7,200 jobs.  This in a state that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had lost 156,000 jobs from May 2008 to May 2009!  Showing that Indiana’s weak economy hurts its workforce across the board, more than just the college-educated.

 

 

Indiana’s educational limitations, thus, are not constraints that confine just the college-educated, although that they certainly do that—Indiana’s lack of jobs and the substantial lack of education among its workers and potential workers cut everywhere.  Consider that Indianapolis Public Schools, IPS, the public school corporation for much of metropolitan Indianapolis, including its inner city, has an overall high school graduation rate of only 47%, as stated in the Indianapolis Star.  In some of the inner-city schools the rate is only 30%.  And of those who do graduate, half or more do not go on to higher education.  “We’re stuck,” said Philip Powell, Associate Professor of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington, in the Indianapolis Star.   “We’re stuck because we don’t have the knowledge base we need in the labor force.  A lot of that is because of our really mediocre primary and secondary educational system.”

 

 

              

                  

Mediocrity in the State of Indiana, 2014: an update

This article was also originally posted on Examiner.com.  I'm re-posting many of my old Examiner.com articles here on this blog, because they are still highly relevant and informative--GF

 

I’ve been writing regularly on Indiana’s overweening mediocrity ever since my associate David Fey and I did a workshop on Hoosier Mediocrity at an event in Indianapolis in May 2009 and wrote our presentation up in an article, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier affliction,” that was published in the alternative newspaper Bloomington Alternative on July 12, 2009, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039.  (The presently on-hold Bloomington Alternative was published/posted online in Bloomington Indiana, which is home to the main campus of Indiana University, from which both Fey and I graduated.)  And much of this later writing was posted on examiner.com since then, notably August 3, 2009’s “Indiana’s Brain Drain: The problem that won’t go away;”; April 24, 2012’s “Indianapolis: Super Bowl city not so super;” the highly-regarded, extensively-praised article of March 12, 2013, “Indiana’s FSSA and the shredded Hoosier safety net;”  its follow-up, April 20, 2013’s “Indiana mediocrity extends to government services;”  July 25, 2013’s nationally re-posted “Work in Indiana and make less than in 1967;” and another article on the ill-functioning FSSA, the Family and Social Services Administration, umbrella agency for all welfare, child protective, vocational rehabilitation and mental health/addiction services,  and its horribly malfeasant provision of vital social safety net provisions to the poor, nastily (but deservedly) titled, “The real ‘welfare scum.’”  That title was chosen for two telling reasons:  first of all, it is how most Hoosiers actually view the recipients of welfare; and also, because the FSSA’s delivery of welfare, vocational rehabilitation and mental health/addiction services themselves to those who really need them is as poverty-stricken as its recipients.

 

In this I often wrote first-hand, about what I as a Hoosier worker, welfare recipient, and taxpayer had actually experienced.  Indiana, unfortunately, is a bastion of mediocrity, and few Hoosiers care—which is the pity stemming from both its aggressively hidebound, active right-wing organized by the Republican, Tea and Libertarian Parties, and its soft, queasy, frequently well-meaning but milquetoast “progressives,” who are content to act in ways that symbolically (in their eyes) “Speak truth to power,” but actually only “Beg ‘Pretty please’ from power.”

 

A good part of this mediocrity arises from the low educational attainment of the Hoosier State.  Indiana ranks only 31^st among the 50 states plus the District of Columbia in percentage of its population with at least a high school diploma; and those states with lower high school graduation rates are mostly confined to the traditionally poor, low-wage and low-education Old Confederacy, plus those states (California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona) which have had a large influx of Mexican and other Latin American immigrants without a high school education.

 

And among the 12 states comprising the Midwest—Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Ohio, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota—Indiana ranks 11^th  out of the 12, with only Illinois, with 86.4% of its population graduated from high school compared to Indiana’s 86.6%, ranking lower.

 

Indiana’s ranking is even more dismal when it comes to higher education, that percentage of the population holding a Bachelor’s degree or higher.  Its rank here is 44^th out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, with only 22.5% of its population 25 or older having attained at this level; this compares to the national average of 27.9% of the U.S. population 25 or older having attained at least a Bachelor’s degree.  Among the 12 states of the Midwest, Indiana’s ranking is dead last.  It’s a little more mixed among those with advanced degrees, which comprise not only Master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s, but also professional medical and law degrees—here Indiana ranks 38^th among the 50 states plus the District of Columbia at 8.1%, and 9^th out of the 12 states comprising the Midwest.  The national average is considerably higher—10.3%.  And because this category includes holders of professional medical and law degrees, rankings here include doctors and lawyers as well as those who’ve attained advanced academic degrees.  Of course, it is a sobering fact that the vast majority of legislators at both the state and federal levels have law degrees—even as public disgust at legislators is at an all-time low!  (Figures extrapolated from U.S. Census, “Table 233.  Educational Attainment by State: 1990 to 2009,”

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0233.pdf.)

 

Clearly, Indiana has a crisis in educational attainment, a major cause of its overwhelming across-the-board mediocrity.  Yet the Indiana government’s own Commission for Higher Education is oblivious when it comes to the crucial question of “What’s to be done about it?” stating baldly on its “Overview” page on its website, http://www.in.gov/che/3142.htm,

 

According to 2012 Census data, only 34.4 percent of working-age Hoosiers (25-64 years old) hold a two- or four-year college degree; the national average is 39.4 percent. Indiana has made the Big Goal of 60 percent higher education attainment by 2025 a centerpiece of its higher education policy, and data suggest that if Indiana does nothing, only 41 percent of Hoosiers will have a degree by 2025.  It is vital to address this issue, as data from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University suggests that by 2020 over 60 percent of the expected job vacancies in Indiana will require a postsecondary credential. 

 

Yet this goal of 60% by 2025 is palpably unrealistic, given that as of present, 60% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state due to poor employment prospects, (Indiana Institute of Working Families, “Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011” [released April 2012], http://www.incap.org/documents/iiwf/2012/Final%20Draft-Status%20of%20Working%20Families%20in%20Indiana,%202011.pdf, p.20; in 2011, 41.3% of Indiana’s workers with a Bachelor’s degree or higher suffered long-term unemployment, ibid., p. 14.); and with the Indianapolis Star stating in 2009 that 46.6% of Hoosier college graduates leave the state within one year of graduation. (“Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet,” http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf, p.4, contained in Fish and Fey, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier Affliction.”) Furthermore, according to the Institute’s “Status of Working Families, 2012” report, released July 2013, 82% of Indiana’s college enrollees are only attending part-time, due to work and family obligations. (http://www.incap.org/documents/iiwf/2013/Status%202012%20Final.pdf, p.28) 

 

Moreover, according to the same report, “a majority (54 percent) of all jobs are still middle‐skill jobs—requiring more than a high school diploma, but less than a four‐year degree, while only 47 percent of Hoosier workers have the appropriate skills and credentials.” (p. 26) Given all this, how is it even conceivable that Indiana will achieve the Commission for Higher Education’s goal of increasing by nearly ¾ (i.e., raising by 174.2% the percentage of college graduates who must also stay and work in Indiana to meet the Commission’s goal!) the percentage of Hoosier college graduates, especially in light of Indiana’s notorious and still-continuing Brain Drain?

 

This is but one example of how Indiana’s continuing mediocrity feeds upon itself and paves the way for future mediocrity; while the Hoosier agencies supposedly dealing with the problem continue to only dream, setting palpably unrealistic higher education attainment goals that can’t, and surely won’t, be met.   And against the economic backdrop of Indiana’s per capita income continuing to drop due to job loss and replacement of manufacturing jobs with considerably lower-paying retail, warehouse and service jobs.  With all this occurring while Hoosier income inequality vastly increases—very noticeably in Indianapolis, but also in other cities in the state. (Brian Eason, Indianapolis Star, August 11, 2014, “Report: Wage gap growing rapidly in Indy area,” http://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/hamilton-county/2014/08/11/report-wage-gap-growing-rapidly-indy-area/13900371/.)  

 

Yet, it’s clear from the article that Indiana’s own state Economic Development Corporation and Secretary of Commerce are only “whistling in the proverbial dark” and painting overly optimistic pictures of resurgent growth in manufacturing, the mainstay of Indiana’s industrial economy, but a mainstay that has massively hemorrhaged jobs since 1999, leading to the continuing long-term drop in both wages and per capita income in the state.  This traditional mainstay is being rapidly replaced, however, by low-paying warehouse jobs, filled in the great majority by temp workers contracted through temp agencies.  (See on this Gregory Travis, “CIVITAS: Indiana’s warehouse economy—revisited,” Bloomington Alternative, October 19, 2008, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2008/10/19/9782; also, George Fish, examiner.com, “Extreme heat and uncertain employment—realities of Central Indiana’s job market,” November 15, 2012; “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013; “Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again,” May 28, 2014; and “Dispatch from the work shift from hell,” July 27, 2014.)  

 

Mediocrity in education, mediocrity in employment, mediocrity at the top levels of Indiana’s own state government executive—such is the true State of the State, 2014.  But what is to be done about it?  What will my fellow Hoosiers do about it?

 

I addressed this question precisely in an examiner.com article I posted on October 30, 2013, “Why do we take it?” where I wrote:

 

The short answer is, because we’re sheep. Most notably here in Indiana, where sheepishness and passivity are widespread cultural traits that Hoosierdom demands conformance to, along with the demand of not expressing “negativity.” Passivity, provincialism, smugness, complacency, conformity, cliquishness—these common Hoosier cultural traits make acceptance even of the most outrageous and injustice a “way of life” to be responded to with unbridled optimism that “things are bound to get better,” and a direct silencing of the “negative” critic who just won’t shut up—and thus disturbs everyone else!

 

The sentiment I expressed above was also echoed in a quote that came across on Facebook from the late distinguished radical historian Howard Zinn, 1922-2010, who wrote:

Civil disobedience is not our problem.  Our problem is civil obedience.  Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.  Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.  That’s our problem.

 

Which puts strictly Hoosier mediocrity and its sheepish acceptance into a broader context, one that relates the FSSA to war, that relates war on the Hoosier poor to war on poor people worldwide, and that notes the crisis of blind obedience everywhere to such blind obedience here in Indianapolis, in Evansville, Fort Wayne and elsewhere, even in the bucolic college-town islands of Bloomington and West Lafayette.  And Howard Zinn himself, who lived and taught in Boston, has a notable Indiana mediocrity connection:  he was singled out by name by former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels as an “anti-American academic,” writer and thinker whose work should be specifically banned from Indiana’s public secondary schools and universities!  Even as today he is President of Indiana’s Purdue University, and claims to defend academic freedom!  (Fortunately, this received extensive national press coverage.  See, e.g., Gawker, July 17, 2013, “Mitch Daniels, President of Purdue, Tried to Ban Howard Zinn’s Books,” http://gawker.com/mitch-daniels-president-of-purdue-tried-to-ban-howard-813676742; Joseph A. Palermo, Huffington Post,  September 29, 2013, “Mitch Daniels, Howard Zinn, and the Politics of History,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/mitch-daniels-howard-zinn_b_3677477.html, and Mitch Daniels’ speaking in defense of himself also in the Huffington Post: Jon Ward, “Mitch Daniels: I’m ‘More Devoted to Academic Freedom’ Than Critics in Howard Zinn Controversy,” October 30, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/mitch-daniels-howard-zinn_n_4178180.html.) 

Interestingly enough, in the above article, and despite Daniels’ claim that he wanted Zinn’s popular, widely-read (2 million copies sold) A People’s History of the United States to be banned from secondary schools only, not universities, it was the use of the book in an Indiana University humanities class that first drew it to Daniels’ attention—and ire—as Governor!  This class, which could be taken by teachers for professional development credit, drew specific memos for action from Daniels himself as Governor, in direct e-mails to aides:  “This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state” and “Sounds like we need a cleanup of what is credit-worthy in 'professional development' and what is not."       

 

But also in 2014, both the Indiana Pacers NBA basketball team and the Indianapolis Colts NFL football team lost in the playoffs.  Something far more distressing to my fellow Hoosiers than statewide mediocrity, screwing over poor people, horrible lack of educated people in the state, and inability to garner truly skilled, decent-paying employment—that in itself being confirmation of continuing Indiana  mediocrity! 

 

A bad forum advocating a really horrible idea

This article also originally appeared in Examiner.com.  While I stand behind what I wrote below, and believe that what I wrote is essentially accurate, I may have overstated the anti-college opposition of the KI EcoCenter participants; but that was because the presentation was so incoherent, so definitely below the usual high standards of KI forums, that I may have given more coherence to what was actually said than it deserved.  I may have read coherence into what was just confusion, and thus the participants' stated objection to me, that they "didn't completely say that," may be somewhat true due to this incoherence and confusion--GF

 

Last Tuesday, October 28,2014, a group that I’ve usually admired, the KI EcoCenter (KI) of Indianapolis, Indiana, http://www.kiecocenter.org, held a public forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” in which the various panelists advocated directly for—let’s face it—ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and giving money to black people as “reparations” for slavery instead of intellectual improvement of the black communities of Indianapolis and the U.S., by coming out squarely against college education.  But that’s putting it generously, as my thumbnail description of the forum gives the “discussion” that ensued by the panelists and the approving audience participants a far greater coherence and understanding of the issues than actually ensued.  In reality, what transpired was incoherence, intellectual confusion of the worst sort, constant comparing of the proverbial apples to oranges, massive tendentious omissions, lack of a truly serious approach, and significant omission of data and evidence.  Instead what was proffered—in all seriousness!—was a pseudo-populist “left black nationalist”  exercise in derision and self-abnegation, a rather hypocritical posturing by black college graduates themselves on how they were supposedly duped by becoming college-educated; a masochistic display of anti-intellectualism by the panelists made all the more pathetic by the basic fact that, without their supposedly worthless college educations, they would’ve lacked even the basic erudition and coherency to present their own presentations against college!

 

Yes, their very articulateness (such as it was—really not at all at the high level KI panel participants have presented in the past) in arguing against college, and thus de facto for ignorance, would not have been possible even at this disappointing level had it not been for the panelists’ own college educations!  Their position, as presented by these three college-educated African Americans, became simply a whining complaint of “Don’t go to college! We’ve been there, it’s not worth it.  Savor your mere high school-educated ignorance instead, despite our token lip-service to the general notion of education.  Do as we say, not what we ourselves did!”    

 

This display of articulate self-abnegation by the three black panelists was of course echoed by the one token white panelist (himself hand-picked by KI and given a voice, I take it, in name of “diversity”), who himself was also another self-abnegating college graduate.  This panelist offered to entertain us by deliberately tearing up his college diploma that evening; but that was a “promise” left unfulfilled (undoubtedly for the better).

 

These four panelists—the three African Americans Paulette, Imhotep (usually referred to simply as M.) and Khalil, along with the token white panelist, John—are all people I’m acquainted with as an active supporter of KI in the past, and it is no pleasure for me to trash them.  But I feel obligated simply because I am a lower-rungs-of-the-socio-economic-ladder college graduate myself, a working-class white man who worked hard to achieve my degree; a college degree and educational immersion I myself find invaluable in enabling me to do my avocation of writing prose and poetry for publication, something that would not have been possible without it.  And so, while my degree has not paid off for me economically in terms of a good job, it has contributed immensely in granting me a sense of self-worth, in giving me a fulfilling life, and making me a positive contributor in the cause of social and economic justice for all, African American, Hispanic, other ethnicities, as well as my own white working class—all those excluded from the American Dream by the 1%, whose domination of our lives the Occupy movement made us so rightfully aware of.  Getting that degree (Bachelor’s in economics from Indiana University, supplemented by later paralegal training) gave me an education in the broadest and most proper sense, it opened for me the vast realm of knowledge, enabled me to commune with the greatest minds of humanity past and present—something that would not have come about had I remained a mere high school graduate, or even as someone with only some college.

 

This, and more, I tried to articulate in the technically open and extensive, but actually perfunctory and limited, audience discussion of the panelists’ remarks.  Needless to say, my remarks in favor of education were completely ignored by the panelists themselves, who were too absorbed in promoting their own anti-intellectual shtick to “bother” with me.  But I was “answered” with vociferous objection by audience members who had only high school educations themselves, or who were disgruntled college dropouts, themselves inadvertent advocates of the value of higher education through their own angry denunciations of that which they didn’t have themselves, but which they disdained because they lacked it. Confirmation of a positive good by denunciation of it as worthless by those who had never possessed it in the first place!  Or else, trashing at the hands of those who failed to realize the value of what they themselves did possess, resentful discarders of the gold at their feet in favor of the tawdry glittering tinsel of ignorance their pseudo-populism inclined them to embrace in its stead.

 

As I stated above, I’ve long been a supporter and enthusiast of the KI EcoCEnter, which I first encountered at a community jobs forum it held in October 2012, and on which I published a very extensive-praising post in my “Politically Incorrect Leftist” BlogSpot blog, http://politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=7. But lately, KI has allowed its ideology of “black cultural nationalism” as articulated by Maulana Karenga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maulana_Karenga), to weaken the quality and multiracial appeal of its earlier work and public forums; most recently it has focused less on its organizational philosophy of “social entrepeneurship” and “bootstrapping” as positive aids to the empowerment of the primarily working-class African American residents of Indianapolis’ Near North Side neighborhood where it exists, and more on being an angry, and at times highly incoherent, megaphone of black grievances against what it claims is an all-encompassing structure of “white privilege;” something this decidedly unprivileged member or the white working class finds very much at variance with actual reality, and who objects strongly to Paulette’s and M.’s insistence that I, struggling just to get by, also partake of.  This vague, generalized, all-encompassing “white privilege” so “politically correct” to assert, but which is so factually compromised, truncated and rebutted by so much of white working-class reality.  This “privilege” I allegedly have despite only my receiving Social Security standing between me and homelessness—something I’d hardly call a “privilege”! 

 

Sadly, I find KI moving from being “pro-black,” which it should be, to being more openly “anti-white,” except toward those whites who uncritically subordinate themselves to KI’s “cultural nationalism.”  To me this is a disservice to what was so positive in KI’s earlier activity, and which garnered my strongly admiring allegiance and support in the first place.  I feel uncomfortably on the receiving end of “reverse racism.”  Not that whites, and especially my own white working class, haven’t done a lot to harm African Americans; they certainly have.  But they themselves are also Bob Dylan’s “pawns in their game” who ride only “the caboose of the train;” they themselves are also the inarticulate and dispossessed victims of whole hierarchies of economic, social and institutional power held by the overwhelmingly (but not entirely) white ruling 1%, which oppresses and subordinates both white and non-white in very similar ways, and increasingly, to very similar, if not exactly identical, degrees.  While white people can be said to have a relative “advantage” in many (but not all) cases vis-à-vis African Americans, this is far from an absolute “privilege” that ensures whites always come out on top, are always psychologically satisfied, materially sated, and economically secure, no matter what their socio-economic status.

 

And yes, while whites too often can be openly racist, and even virulently so, this is far from being a “benefit” to them, is far from a “psychological bonus” they not only receive but profit from; rather it is a liability, a delusional sense of superiority, a pernicious illusion that blinds them not only to the commonalities of oppression they share with their brethren of color, but makes them dupes of Occupy’s 1% (really 0.01%).  The 1% (or rather, 0.01%) who comprise those corporate and financial elites and their satraps who manipulate far too many ordinary white people as puppets, who set them against people of color as (often eager) attack dogs,  but who are still tightly leashed by the 1%.  “White privilege” is thus an often-unacknowledged liability that undermines the white working class every bit as much as it oppresses African Americans.

But back to the “College Isn’t the Answer” forum.  The forum based its anti-college position on two very bad articles which appeared in the Washington Post (a dead giveaway in itself of how the anti-intellectual initiators of the forum themselves profited from their own college degrees—knowing about these articles, knowing about the Washington Post as a primarily college graduate-appealing elite source of information and opinion in the first place):  “sociologist and writer” (nothing more)  Tressie McMillan Cottom’s  “No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/no-college-isnt-the-answer-reparations-are/?mc_cid=a19a9ef833&mc_eid=[UNIQID]&mc_cid=9f4ac1282f&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) and Valerie Strauss’s blog, “No, algebra isn’t necessary — and yes, STEM is overrated,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/no-algebra-isnt-necessary--and-yes-stem-is-overrated/2012/08/26/edc47552-ed2d-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_blog.html) which reprints a New York Times Op-ed by one Roger C. Schank, described as “a cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence theorist, and education reformer.”  These two articles are at best but half-truths zealously overstated. 

 

Cottom tries to make a case that only reparations are the solution to the problem of glaring economic inequality (as though it were only a problem for the black community, which is blatantly false), and counterpoises reparations for the past enslavement of African Americans to African Americans today getting a college education, which she sees as just another way of perpetuating black inequality through substantial black college-graduate unemployment. Which is an undoubted fact of our economy still not overcoming the Recession of 2008 (Cottom is correct here), but which has also meant high rates of unemployment and underemployment for college graduates as a whole, not just for African Americans (and which is really a problem that goes back to the 1970s and has continued since, only exacerbated, but not created, by the ongoing recession). 

 

Schank states baldly, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” “You can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about macroeconomics or trigonometry…,”  and that our supposed societal obsession with math and STEM all goes back to a claim made in 1892 by the president of Harvard University of what should be taught in high school.  As with Cottom, Shank is half-right (but remember, half-right is also half-wrong!).  Yes, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” but that’s really a problem more than a superfluity, a problem well-articulated by 1920s iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” The same with “You can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about macroeconomics[.]”  All we have to do is look at the level of public political discourse and electoral appeals in this 2014 election to give the lie to the beneficence of these statements of fact.   The simple fact of the low level of political discourse, open demagoguery, and statement both of half-truths and outright lies in the 2014 electoral appeals, plus the facile (but fallacious) appeal of free market-fundamentalist economics making supposed experts out of people such as Paul Ryan and even Ayn Rand, shockingly exposes how We, the People are directly harmed by voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics.”  Voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics” frequently determine through their ignorance just who our political leaders are—and through them, what social and economic policies are put into practice!  Proof positive that ignorance is far from bliss, though ignorance may be popular, deliberately promulgated and disseminated, and even celebrated (the Tea Party being a stellar example of the last).

 

As one who studied mathematics extensively, I myself can attest that its value lies not so much in the mathematical formulas taught but in its overwhelming value as a heuristic, i.e., as a means to understand and practice the daily art and science of problem-solving, something that confronts each of us every day.  Through mastery of math we come to mastery of logic, of logical inference and deduction, how to employ reason correctly, and what is valid and invalid, relevant and irrelevant, evidence on which to base our solutions, our daily decisions.  That is math’s overwhelming strength in “practical” affairs, and is precisely why algebra, plane geometry and trigonometry are taught in our high schools, or should be; and why, given our reliance on statistical information today, statistics and probability should also be.  If that’s “elitist” or not narrowly “practical,” so be it!  As a person of the left who considers the Jeffersonian ideal of “An aristocracy of talent in a democracy of opportunity” to be one of the hallmarks of a good, just and equitable society, I say the teaching of “abstract reasoning,” math, and yes, even “macroeconomics,” is necessary to move us forward in the “democracy of opportunity,” made more of a reality by the Civil Rights and labor struggles of ordinary people than it was before, to become more of what we need to be—a society where those in charge truly represent an “aristocracy of talent” as opposed to the “oligarchy of mediocrity” our political and societal leaders represent today.

 

And as a college graduate who found specific value in that college education, I openly state that all that comes about easier when the masses of ordinary people have access to broad means of education, both formal education and self-education as a lifetime project, through greatly improved primary, secondary, and yes, higher education.  Yes, there are many things wrong with higher education as it exists today—its frequent detached elitism, its cost, its increasingly strictly vocational orientation, its often chilling effect on imagination, creativity and independent scholarship which it should foster instead—but the correction of these major faults depends on deepening the educational experience, not simply throwing it out as an unneeded irrelevancy the way the panelists did at the KI forum.  Because, for all the faults of higher education today, it certainly beats ignorance!  Which is precisely where the panelists of “College Isn’t the Answer” would lead us—inadvertently to be sure, but also inexorably.

 

Furthermore, if we wish to see an example of a society where college is disdained, and where ignorance is enshrined, we need only look at our own Indiana, which ranks 42^nd in the nation in the percentage of its people with at least a Bachelor’s degree, and which ranks last in the Midwest as such.  The Hoosier State is a bastion today of poor job opportunities, abysmal social services, and extreme right-wing politics, and these are all interconnected with our fellow Hoosiers’ lack of education; our notorious Brain Drain, where college graduates leave the state in droves because of lack of suitable jobs for them; and our poor primary and secondary schools, which directly impact on employment opportunities, the lack of which, along with the state’s hemorrhaging of previously unskilled but high-pay manufacturing jobs, has consistently caused Indiana’s per capita income to drop.  Drop so significantly that, today, Indiana ranks 39th in the nation in per capita income when in the 1950s it ranked in the 20s.  As Philip Powell, Associate Professor of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington told the Indianapolis Star as far back as 2009 and which has remained unchanged since, “We’re stuck. We’re stuck because we don’t have the knowledge base we need in the labor force. A lot of that is because of our really mediocre primary and secondary educational system.”

 

(For documentation of the above, see George Fish and Dave Fey, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier affliction,” Bloomington Alternative, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039, and the accompanying “Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet,” http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf; Though some of the statistics cited there are old, sadly, the trends referenced by them are not.  For the overweening right-wing character of Indiana politics, see, Bryan K. Bullock, Truth-out, June 27, 2014, “The Ultra-Right-Wing State Nobody Mentions,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24552-the-ultra-right-wing-state-nobody-mentions.)

 

Sadly, the KI EcoCenter’s forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” represents just a “left-wing” pseudo-populist variant of that virulent anti-intellectualism so continually prevalent in U.S. society that’s so eloquently scored by noted science popularizer and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (himself a Ph.D. in biochemistry): “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”  It is unfortunate that an organization, KI, which I have thought of so highly, decided to perpetuate that.