education without education

Music: Lilac Time: Paradise Circus (1989)

Last night in his State of the Union Address Obama echoed the clarions of those who demand reform in higher education. Obama said:

But today, skyrocketing costs price too many young people out of a higher education or saddle them with unsustainable debt. Through tax credits, grants, and better loans, we've made college more affordable for millions of students and families over the last few years. But taxpayers can't keep on subsidizing higher and higher and higher costs for higher education. Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it's our job to make sure that they do.
(APPLAUSE)
So, tonight, I ask Congress to change the Higher Education Act so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid. (APPLAUSE)
And -- and tomorrow, my Administration will release a new college scorecard that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.

That I will be paying for my own education until my demise certainly gives such a lament the weight of truth, however, in almost the same breath the President gives voice to a misperception and intones a threat: (1) That taxpayers "subsidize" higher education; and (2) the Feds will determine who gets aid and who does not based on the "scorecard" it develops to determine educational outcomes in relationship to cost. The former mistruth, presumably, is based on the number of federal dollars that is used to buoy the federal school loans program, however, such a statement is something of an equivocation, riding atop a popular misperception that the public university is kept afloat by taxpayer dollars (a state enterprise, by the way). Better minds have weighed in on the issues, but the fact remains the school loan program has eroded toward privatization; the call here is to continue that trend, not reverse it.

The threat, of course, is to equivocate the quality of education with the quantitude of its cost, a trick of abstraction Marx observed about capitalism over a century ago (there has to be a short-change in quality via quantified abstraction for profit to happen; we've gotten so used to this mis-matching as "common sense" that anyone who does not succumb---the old public education model---is deemed inefficient and thus evil). It's an approach we are familiar with in Texas, as governor Rick Perry continues to ram educational reform into higher education by calling for $10,000 degrees and valuing a professor on the basis of his or her "return" on the state's ("taxpayers") investment (measured in terms of tuition dollars and grant getting). In response here in Texas and in other parts of the country, too, higher educators have been working on developing measures for "accountability" that actually take into account the hidden labor and invisible resources needed to teach and research well, but let's not pretend these efforts will work: however much we insist on sitting at the Table of Educational Measures, "outcomes" will always be measured by market forces that charge those who actually labor with slacking on the job. Accountability measures are almost always designed to show how those measured come-up short; this is the means by which "reform" is made to happen. And this is why academics oblivious to how power works will celebrate reform as an "opportunity."

My pessimism is only encouraged by the Republican response to the president's address, which tread past Obama's better angels:

And because tuition costs have grown so fast, we need to change the way we pay for higher education. I believe in federal financial aid. I couldn't have gone to college without it. But it's not just about spending more money on these programs; it's also about strengthening and modernizing them. A 21st century workforce should not be forced to accept 20th century education solutions. Today's students aren't only 18 year olds. They're returning veterans. They're single parents who decide to get the education they need to earn a decent wage. And they're workers who have lost jobs that are never coming back and need to be retrained. We need student aid that does not discriminate against programs that non-traditional students rely on – like online courses, or degree programs that give you credit for work experience.

It's the last line that is the signature of the argument that education is credentialing: what you need is a degree, not the education. While the president stopped short of ballyhooing the ways in which "online education" can solve our education "crisis," Rubio parrots the party-line of those for-profit companies that proclaim online education will "revolutionize" higher ed.

Although it is no longer startling, it is still nevertheless troubling that the national rhetoric crafted by our policy makers about higher education is always forged upon a means-ends anvil hoisted on a precipice by the Wile Capitalist: education is a means to the end of a job, and the professor is dumb bird who continues to elude capture . . . for now. What's really important is the degree (so "you [should] get credit for work experience"), not what presumably ends up sticking in your head (or body). In what world is "education without education" a legitimate cry for educational reform? It is Orwell's world. And that world is soon ours, if it is not so already.

Read this for a sober account, not a bird-brain.