It's not what you think.
I'm a proud graduate of the University of Wisconsin (and two graduate schools). I loved college. And it's undeniable that the United States boasts some of the best universities in the world.
I'm also someone who flunked out my freshman year with a 0.6 GPA. In fact, I'd say it wasn't until I flunked out that I had a chance of being successful. I simply wasn't ready for what college was designed to give me (aside from the unsupervised social time).
Although my freshman-year GPA was surprisingly low, my freshman-year experience is unsurprisingly common. Too many young people simply aren't ready for college, for a variety of reasons -- meaning they either coast through four or five years and waste a ton of money along the way, or, if they're lucky, they crash and burn so badly that they discover, for the first time, what it is they actually want to do with their lives -- as opposed to what the adults in their lives have told them they should do.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently since reading Matthew Crawford's bestselling book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford, as you may know, got his doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago -- and then left a cushy job at a DC think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia.
In this regard, Crawford is uniquely suited to comment on three inextricably linked aspects of modern society -- our public education system, our modern economy, and our shared values. And, as Crawford puts it, the news ain't good.
In some respects, the story starts in the 1990s, when shop class started to become a thing of the past, and educators started exclusively preparing students to be "knowledge workers" -- and stopped valuing the ancient notion that our hands are what make us the most intelligent of animals. Yet the clearest starting point stretches back much farther, to the early 20th century, the rise of Industrialism, and the concerted effort to separate thinking from doing -- and, in the process, to begin the degradation of "work" as we have come to know it.
Any historian is already familiar, for example, with Frederick Winslow Taylor and his 1911 book, Principles of Scientific Management. It was Taylor who wrote: "All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning department." It was Taylor who suggested that the modern workplace "will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system." And it was Taylor whose ideas led people like Ellwood Cubberly, a former head of Stanford University's Department of Education, to recommend in 1920 "giv[ing] up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are created equal.... Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life."
What has this legacy begotten? According to Crawford, it has given us a society where the production of credentials (e.g., knowing how to graduate) matters more than the cultivation of anything real (e.g., knowing how to think). It has led us to devalue the specific skills of the craftsman, and overvalue the general knowledge of the office worker. And it has engendered the gradual WALL-E-fication of our culture, in which the larger goal becomes the creation of passive consumers whose assembly-line work environments -- be they the actual assembly line or the assembly-esque world of modern office work -- can only be cured by the illusory freedom we exercise when we choose different products to purchase.
The bigger concern, and the one that relates to my own skepticism about whether everyone should go to college, has to do with the changing nature of the workforce. As Princeton economist Alan Blinder has written: "The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that do not."
In other words, it's easier to imagine outsourcing your need for legal advice than your need for an electrician. But the point is not that no one should go to law school and everyone should become an electrician -- just that the goal of our schools, our economy, and our society should be to help people find work that engages their human capacities as fully as possible. And that's not happening. And that's a really big problem -- and one that will never be solved if our knee-jerk reaction is to urge every young person to go to college.
"The best sort of democratic education," says Crawford, "is neither snobbish nor egalitarian. Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best [for each individual]." Amen, I say. So let's stop pretending that college by itself is a cure-all for every person. Let's start recalibrating our schools in ways that will help children discover their worth -- and acquire the skills they'll need to unleash their full potential on the world. And let's keep searching for ways to help people understand, in the deepest, fullest sense, what it means to be free.
Follow Sam Chaltain on Twitter: www.twitter.com/samchaltain
We shouldn't be looking to add more, but rather, to do more with less. That's what we said in the corporate world. Perhaps we need to do the same in education. Let's make K-12 full-functioning so that when graduates come out at 18 years of age, they actually know something useful. And trigonometry doesn't do it for all...
Lumina Foundation for Education. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The US Department of Education. They all are pushing the higher education envelope. We need more. And regardless of Tony Carnevale's (Georgetown U) study saying we need more, I just don't but it. We need better. Not more. We need more opportunity, not necessarily more degrees. And those degrees need to mean something in this society, this economy, and this world.
I will be applying these concepts in my work with a group of 50 educators this very evening.
Given what you've accomplished once given your second chance, it's clear you had every tooI and every skill, and every bit of experience to excel in college; you simply chose not to do it. In fact, I believe that you knew all along that all you had to do was decide to care and you'd do well. You weren't at all someone who "wasn't ready for college", and you aren't an example of the kind of person we refer to when we say s/he isn't the type who is suited for college, but rather trade school or something otherwise alternative.
Bottom line: there's a difference between young adults who have trouble adjusting to college life while maintaining some level of commitment to their studies and their purposes, and those who don't, like you. I hope that you're thankful each and every day that you got a second chance. In Finland, for example, today you'd be nothing but a very smart janitor.
It's the private sector.
It's the money. It's all about the money.
This country judges your worth not by what you make but how much you make. (That is why teachers aren't respected as professionals, because they aren't compensated like a lawyer, doctor, architect or a cpa.)
A mechanic doesn't make as much as an investment banker. Who gets more respect?
Who provides more service to the community? A fireman .....or an NBA player? A fireman provides more value in their service to the community. But the NBA player makes millions of dollars. That's why our young people want to grow up to be music, sports, TV and movies stars. They don't want to grow up to be a fireman, policeman, nurses or teachers. (Not unless you're 3 years old.) Even kids learn it's all about the money.
If all sports ceased, I don't think it would bring this country to a stand still. But if every teacher, policeman, nurse and fireman quit and there was no one willing to provide those services it would have a negative impact.
Same with shoe repairmen, mechanics, cashiers, mailmen. All jobs that are compensated poorly are not respected. It has nothing to do with education. It's a cultural bias of this country. Money equals worth/respect. The more money you have, etc.
Jobs that pay well require college. Even sports figures are recruited from college.
It's the money.
a) that's the next most important thing to teach after ensuring our youth can get to college.
b) you hope they expound on what you have been able to impart on critical thinking in college or hope they actually learn it there.
Finally whats wrong if your electrician has some college education?
"Let me say my comment doesn't mean i completely devalue critical thinking but:"
I too went to college and flunked out first semester with a similar grade. I eventually went back and finished and then got my masters. To say the least i no longer have to worry about where my next meal will come from and neither will my parents. That would likely be the case even if i stayed flunked out of college simply because some college opens more doors than just high school.
It may suck but thats the reality of our society. Until there is a better and more achievable way to break the cycle of poverty i will do all i can to help get our youth into college.
The real issue here is what kind of jobs are out there for people who believe college isn't for them? With the loss of manufacturing in this country, the only work available for high school grads (outside of the military, police, firefighters, and the trades) is retail and waiting tables, neither of which are options if you actually wish to earn a living. So I think our education system is only a reflection of the employment opportunities available.
We have to fix our economy and bring back well-paying manufacturing jobs to this country first before we can even think about changing our school curriculum.