``So, the larger goals of education, training, and so forth are all utterly corrupted into vocational training, as if a shit job is the end all be all of life. In fact I tried to argue once, that much of the technical training done in city or community colleges was actually engineering ignorance.
In any event, such programs have become something like a smiling police-state extension of the corporate panopticon devoted to disciplining and punishing the marginally employed, that is the work-slacking working class. The new wave might call these productivity enhancements. Of course these programs, as noted above, are usually nothing but a front for pumping money into the privatized or quasi-privatized public edu-tainment of so called institutions of higher education industry.''
I don't quite follow you here. Junior college/vocational training is just about the only way "up" for unskilled workers in this country: it's affordable and it's flexible. I'm not arguing against humanistic education; but, if I'm flipping burgers at MacDonald's, I need some kind of way out...eventually. I mean, an unskilled worker is a completely helpless worker: the army starts to look good!
Joanna
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This issue, is difficult to see unless you've seen it up close, by following a person who is trying to get both a general education and some kind of vocational training through the community college system. And of course it depends on the school and the person.
The best example I can think of to illustrate what I am loosely referring to as engineering ignorance, comes from computers and office suite software---standard desktop applications used everyday, everywhere.
Many people take community college classes in `computers' so they can get jobs, mainly office jobs. Nobody seems to notice that most of these classes are devoted to learning to use some specific program application like a word processor, a database, or a spreadsheet.
The process of learning the commands, what they do, how to use them, and coordinate them into a work system---is what I consider complete garbage, a useless form of knowledge and skill that is so task specific that it amounts to engineering ignorance.
I know you completely understand this process. But consider that it is absolutely ubiquitous. The same idea of keeping the code proprietary and giving you just the I/O parameters for a module is a technique used to keep the actual engineering concepts and constructs absolutely opaque. This is the black box theory. You don't need to know how it works, you just need to know what goes in and what to expect coming out, period.
This same method of the black box, is used throughout most computer classes at the community college level. But it isn't just restricted to computer application classes. The same mentality pervades the entire education system, especially as this system is applied to, and seen through the eyes of the working class---even more especially as seen through the minority working class.
In fact, I suspect the entire construction of the US working class is a product of this education system---particularly for men and boys.
What is going on, is essentially the promulgation of a hierarchy of knowledge and skill that pre-assigns levels in that hierarchy to the perceived socio-economic hierarchy of the students. This effectively engineers the reproduction of class, where all merit and reward go to the top, and no merit or reward nor much skill or knowledge either, for that matter, goes to the bottom. Everyone is exposed to the black box system, but these are not all the same black boxes. The ones at the bottom take almost as much organized thought to open, but the result is the boobie prize---you get to be master of a lesser universe.
I don't know how to break out of this system, except at the one to one level. I tutored one of the guys at work through his high school algebra requirement last year and so I got a very close look at how effective education is as a class reproduction system. Much of my effort was devoted to trying to convince Joe M. that he wasn't stupid. About three times a week we had to go through layer after layer of insecurity, self-loathing, failure, defeat, humiliation, and on and on. It seemed to me his sensibility had been programmed to fail. I came to see Joe as the boy he had once been, in some long ago Oakland public school classroom, combating humiliation with a kind of hysterical rejection of the whole process of learning. Of course I ignored all that as much as possible, just to get back to something like factoring.
This semester we are confronting the difficulty of writing---a whole other world of issues. So it goes.
In addition to all this there is a kind of teaching that seems to be particularly well suited to re-enforcing ignorance, humiliation, and defeat---and is also quite widely practiced. I am not sure how to characterize it. What it amounts to is an attitude and style. I the teacher am here to tell you what you should know to pass this class. Your job as a student is to learn it, period. I am not here to explain it. That's your job. I tell you what it is, and you figure it out. That's what learning is. All objections to this method are answered usually by saying that students were supposed to have learned something prior to taking the class. For example you are supposed to have learned what factoring was and how to do it, prior to taking algebra. Therefore all pleas for explanation are dismissed.
A related method or attitude is used in English composition where you are supposed have learned how to write prior to taking composition.
Well, you get the idea. So the total impact of both the curriculum and the classroom experience re-enforces the class system and makes most attempts to educate your way out of the working class a humiliating failure.
Chuck Grimes