[lbo-talk] seems 99% sure

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Sep 2 05:50:15 PDT 2011


Alan has just written the best thing on public education in the U.S. that I have ever read. The criticism of run of the mill university faculty onthis list has been rvolting for years. There is no fucking reason that more than about one out of 10 faculty should meet the implicit standards that this list seems to hold. It is not the university's job to educate its students; it's the university's job to provide a space in which some students can educate themselves and other young workers can have a breathing spell before they go on to wage-slavery for the ret of their lives. I object even to criticism of real pricks on university faculty. Every instistution has to have pricks among its members. Why should universities be any different? The myth of the over-riding importance of education in the u.s. is related to racism, sexism, and contempt for workers in general. By fantasizing an unreal institution which turns all geese into swans, one can both blame the remaining geese for being unworthy and blame the workers in the institution for not being saints. Public education in the United States has never been less than better than one would expect from any insntitution within u.s. society. It is amazing, truly amazing, how good u.s. schools form kindergarten through professional schools have been for almost two centuries. That is, if you judge them in them in the context of what in material fact can be expected of them rather than by some idiotic daydream of perfection that exists in the heads of too many intellectuals,left and right.

Carrol

On 9/2/2011 7:06 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:28 AM, Chris Brooke<cb632 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 02/09/2011 02:22, "Jim Farmelant"<farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>>
>>> We know that from statements that Smith had made concerning his own
>>> university experiences, that he claimed that he got far more out of his
>>> undergraduate studies at Glasgow University than he did from his graduate
>> studies
>>> at Oxford...
>>
>> Yes, indeed. In a letter from Oxford, Smith wrote that, "It will be his own
>> fault if anyone should endanger his health at Oxford by excessive study,
>> our
>> only business here being to go to prayers twice a day and to lecture twice
>> a
>> week". And when preparing one of the later editions of the Wealth of
>> Nations
>> for publication, Smith added this entry to the index: "Oxford, the
>> professorships there, sinecures".
>>
>> C.
>>
>
>
> Without picking out anyone in particular, I think the same-as-it-ever-was
> tone of a lot of the discussion here verges on ridiculous… particularly in
> the context of contemporary struggles over education.
>
> Yes, since long before Smith there's been great ambivalence about
> institutions of higher education… or whatever you want to call them. The
> material conditions associated with such institutions and the class status
> of the intended enrollees, much less the social meaning of a degree, has
> changed just a tad since 1750. On the one hand, a great deal of the
> difference between English and Scottish universities lies in the clearly
> subordinate status of the latter to the former due in no small part to the
> effective colonization of the latter by the former… along these lines, I
> wonder what Smith and so many others thought of William and Mary or Harvard?
>
> Despite all this, however, it was much more the German model of education
> that informed the development of public/land grant universities in the US.
> Of course, the relationship between various strata of the citizenry,
> business, science, technology and the canon was deeply contested, but to
> treat Edinburgh, Oxford, Harvard, UVA, UofM, MSU and the many many Normal
> colleges, much less Swarthmore, Skidmore, Earlham, Knox, Grinnell, Mills,
> Pomona, or Howard, Tuskegee and the 1890s public universities as having more
> in common in 1900 w/r/t their entrepreneurial and/or disembedded and
> disembodied character is materially unsustainable.
>
> You don't have to have an uncritical stance on the ideological role of
> colleges and universities to be less than blase about the deskilling and
> deprofessionalization of education workers, much less the
> intended-yet-always-implicit denigration of students and the meaning of
> education. Sure, much about the Cold War explosion of the
> university-science-industrial complex sucked. Sure, a great deal of
> disabling crap was, has been and is taught to the last three or four
> generations of first-persons-in-family-to-attend-college. Sure, there are
> intelligent, educated, cosmopolitan and political people who got that way
> without college - public or private. But the glib dismissal ("Yeah, well,
> whatever, higher ed's always sucked… just look what Adam Smith said.") of
> the real consequences for real people of the neoliberal and neoconservative
> attack on education - primary, secondary or higher - is pretty irritating.
> It not professor's salaries or benefits either that's at issue, it is the
> way the attack on higher education is an attack on public space, public
> discourse, the ever-so-slight democratization of the state, and the mere
> idea that the reification of markets, militarism, and individualism might
> could just be fetishized horseshit.
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