Education: Just what is it good for?

I found this week’s readings particularly salient for college students, raising important questions about the role of education, particularly of higher education, as well as the content of our education. Especially in the current era in which public education is becoming less affordable and less accessible and the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. is wider than at any other time in American history, and still, fewer people are engaged in politics, it seems necessary to merge these realities and think about them as interreleatled phenomena. Debates about just what our education system is doing and for whom are pressing discussions. (I strongly recommend this piece in the American Scholar that sheds some perspective on this gap that is not only economic, but cultural in so many ways that higher education creates in this country, not exactly found in substantive empirical data, but whose arguments are worth considering. Its author explains how "Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.")

But the articles we read for this class provided some empirical grounding for claims that education cultivates a wide range of civic engagement activities, Campbell reaffirming, but adding additional variables to the sorting model and Kam and Palmer further complicating the causality between education and civic engagement. Though the correlation is evidently a complex one and overall the readings suggest that education is perhaps not the absolute universal solvent, I do not believe undermines the importance of quality education. Perhaps what these readings can do is help pinpoint just what policy-makers should look to when thinking about educational reform. Should it be increasing access to college for a greater number of Americans? Improving civic education in public schools? Or perhaps taking a more holistic approach to what primary and secondary education does in low-income communities, such as Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone who focuses on not only students, but their families within the specific community or Harlem, and starts his programs with children at a very young age.

Lipman’s piece was the most provocative and while I’m not convinced there is a direct relationship between U.S.’s power alignment and its education policy (since schools vary across the country and she doesn’t compare this surveillance-era education to past eras), I think she excites the debate about the role of education for citizenship. If it does turn us into better citizens, what does this better citizen look like? Is it someone who votes and volunteers and participates in politics in some capacity? Or, is it someone who (also) supports the U.S.’s neoliberal aim for economic domination. The current push to increase education in the math and sciences is ridden with language about the U.S. competing with other nation’s in a globalized era. Policy makers often seem to cite China’s prowess in math and sciences, as if suggesting we need to turn citizens into an army of competitors on the global market and contribute to the U.S.’s GDP as well as its defense industry. If we talk about education as the universal solvent or great equalizer, certainly it means increasing the participation of citizens in the marketplace, and therefore increasing their
overall well being and quality of life as well as that of their family and descendants. How this helps the U.S. economy overall seems like a secondary function, but not the primary goal. Nonetheless, I agree that our definition of good citizenship, promoted through education in a variety of ways discussed in these articles, should encompass more than economic participation.