"If the corporate CEOs had a clue about the way economy works, about how the states' excellent educational system attracted talented people from around the world who then contributed to the state's economy, they would move quickly to protect what is left of the fast disintegrating system of higher education."
CEO's have been educated to believe that content doesn't matter. And, if content doesn't matter, expertise doesn't matter. And, in the rare cases when it does, you can always hire it from abroad.
The only thing more depressing than the loss of support for public education is the popular reaction. I was reading one of the mainstream papers about the strike at the various UC campuses, and then read the comments on the story. There is no way to know how representative the comments are, but the vast majority of responders (80, 90%) wrote stuff like this:
1. The govt doesn't owe you an education. 2. Stop whining and get a job and work your way through school or get a loan. 3. You want socialism, go somewhere else. 4. You're just preventing the people who want an education from getting one. 5. Wake up, the state is broke; it can't afford to send you to college.
Now, if you think about it, there is no reason for the public to think of education as a common good. Over the last forty years, at least in CA, it has been turned into a scarce good, and common "wisdom" has it that the reason the inner city schools are bad is because minorities don't care about education. If they did, like the Asians, they'd do whatever it takes to get an education and succeed. The notion of school as a leveler; the notion that school will give kids the chance that their parents cannot or will not is gone.
Moreover, the whole hysteria about getting into school, getting into a good school, getting into a top school is based on the 'fact' that if you don't go to college you're a loser and deserve all the hardship and screwing over coming your way. And if you are screwed over as planned, why should you fight for the right of people who are aiming for the right to screw you over...to go to college?
The whole idea that people get an education to work together to make a better world is gone. It's dead. People go to college to escape the abyss. That's reality right now.
To fight for the right of some people to be graduated into the world of infinite entitlement, while others are (justly) doomed, isn't going to work.
You see what I'm saying. All the terms are heavily loaded and used mostly to set the working class at each other's throats.
As for the bureaucrats who have seized the California educational system. Over the long term, they will destroy it, they will destroy our ability to educate people, and they will destroy any possibility of progress. And fewer and fewer people will go, and it will be less and less important to have a degree to get a job, and perhaps a lot of "educating" will be done informally, on the fringes, by the left in some ways and by the right in others. And that might not be a bad thing.
I mean, the scholastic order fell apart and the world survived.
Joanna