Category: education

The Moral Cost of Capitalism

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 2 Comments

[The following is a talk I gave this afternoon as part of a faculty colloquium on “Radical Futures” at North Central College, part of the Intellectual Community series co-sponsored by the Faculty Development and Recognition Committee (of which I am chair) and the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence and organized by my colleague Sean Kim Butorac.]

Since I teach in the Shimer Great Books program, I will begin with an experience teaching one of the all-time greats, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In my ethics class this semester, we were discussing Book 1 and came to a passage where Aristotle had isolated three possible human goods that seemed to be good candidates for happiness—by which he means the human good that we pursue for its own sake, with no need for further justification or explanation. The first is pleasure, which is presumably self-explanatory. The second is honor, which we could paraphrase as respect or esteem. The third is contemplation, which we could see as a form of knowledge or understanding. In all three cases, Aristotle believes, it wouldn’t make sense to ask why we are pursuing these goals. Why do you want pleasure? Why do you want people to like and respect you? Why do you want to figure things out? The question doesn’t make sense.

The list feels pretty exhaustive, but Aristotle goes on to introduce a fourth possible candidate: money. Initially it seems to fit the bill—all things being equal, no one will turn down more money. But Aristotle points out that money is not truly an end in itself, but rather a pure means. We only want money because of the things we can do with it. And this, I point out, is an area where Aristotle is out of date. He can’t imagine living a life for the sake of stockpiling as much money as possible, much less orienting an entire society around it. We can.

Continue reading “The Moral Cost of Capitalism” →

The real reason the Democrats won’t stand up for teachers against anti-CRT and “groomer” attacks

~ Adam Kotsko

[Note: I wrote this piece at the invitation of a major publication, but they ultimately rejected the submitted draft. After a couple failed attempts to find it a new home, I am publishing it here, mainly out of respect for the time of my interview subjects, but also because I think that — whatever it faults as an op-ed — the basic point I am making is true and important.]

At a time when the pandemic has prompted a new appreciation of the work teachers do, we have also witnessed a sustained conservative attack on teachers and public schools. Beginning with the crusade against so-called “Critical Race Theory” and escalating in the recent attempts to squelch discussion of homosexuality and trans issues, state-level Republicans have increasingly sought to police teacher’s speech and micromanage curriculum.

These measures have been accompanied by a campaign of outright demonization against teachers, accusing them of indoctrinating children, seeking to make white children hate themselves, and even implying that teachers who speak with students about homosexuality or trans issues are pedophiles who are “grooming” our nation’s youth.

These increasingly unhinged and dangerous attacks have been met with virtual silence among Democrats. A recent viral speech by Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who forcefully denounced Republican Senator Lana Theis’s attempt to tar her and other Democrats as “groomers,” has only highlighted most elected Democrats’ failure to push back on a campaign of racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

What is going on here? Certainly part of the problem is Democrats’ habitual cowardice in the face of culture war attacks. But I believe the response in this case goes beyond political tactics. There is a deeper dynamic here, an ideological commitment to the view that teachers are not to be trusted. The recent Republican anti-teacher legislation puts a new, distinctively conservative spin on a decades-old effort to undermine the qualitative work of teaching through relentless quantitative assessment. Again and again, Democrats have joined their Republican colleagues in undermining teachers’ ability to function as the caring professionals they are.

Continue reading “The real reason the Democrats won’t stand up for teachers against anti-CRT and “groomer” attacks” →

Back to normal

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 6 Comments

This summer, a lot has changed in my life. We moved from the apartment and neighborhood where we had lived for seven years, which felt more like home to me even than my hometown did when I was a child. I am in the midst of a job transition as a result of North Central College’s acquisition of Shimer College, and I am also completing a manuscript that marks something of an endpoint of the “devil project” that has been guiding my research since my dissertation. I have taken the opportunity to change a lot of other, more trivial things — switching banks, opting for a Mac for my work computer after years as a hardened PC user, even changing my hairstyle — and decided to spend the last few weeks of summer vacation learning biblical Hebrew, a long-delayed goal that felt right precisely because it is something of a non-sequitur.

Yet in my unguarded moments, I realize that I still expect things to go “back to normal.” When I shared this with The Girlfriend and tried to articulate what that “normal” was, it turned out to be a relatively short window — perhaps my second or third year at Shimer, when the dog was still with us and in good health, before The Girlfriend went to grad school and changed careers. Things felt more open-ended then, like it could stay that way forever. I knew Shimer was fragile, but had no way of anticipating the obstacles we would face, nor of course any glimmer of the possibility that we would join a larger institution. I was not involved in any major projects other than translation and the occasional invited article or talk.

The fact that this situation was actually very unusual and short-lived is not lost on me. Continue reading “Back to normal” →

The inertia of the suburbs

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 7 Comments

The Girlfriend and I have been watching The Wonder Years lately, and it’s striking how generic the setting is — if not for references to news events in the late 1960s, it could be any time period from 1965 to the late 1990s (and I only posit that cut-off point because of the advent of the internet). The suburban model that was built out starting in the immediate postwar era has proven to be remarkably resilient, and even now it has a kind of self-evidence as the “mainstream” American approach to family and community life.

In the immediate postwar years, it seems as though there was a level of “buy-in” across the population, as the prospect of one’s own house, a car, etc., seemed like wonderful luxuries. By now, however, the suburban model has shown itself to be costly, environmentally destructive, and in many cases isolating and community-destroying. Further, the concentration of good schools in the suburbs perpetuates an ongoing vicious cycle of “white flight” that reinforces the systemic racism of our society. And as the financial crisis revealed, the aspiration to suburban middle class status increasingly carries the risk of financial ruin.

More and more people are realizing all of this and don’t want to buy into the suburban model — yet except for the very wealthy, there seems to be no real choice for middle class people if you want to have children. And the reason for this surprising persistence of a model that no one really wants anymore is the power of state planning. Even if the population could be initially convinced to want suburban-style development, the decisive factor was a concentrated effort on all levels of government to create all the necessary conditions for that lifestyle, through physical and legal infrastructure and often through explicit subsidies (such as the mortgage interest tax deducation, which seems to be invulnerable). All of the stuff they created in that heroic era of American urban planning is still in place. The roads and schools have been built, and the legal structures for expanding suburban development if needed are already in place and ready to go. All the incentives for middle-class families still point outward into the suburbs.

While reading about the ongoing disaster of education “reform,” I once thought: “What if cities stopped trying to attract tourists and started trying to gain permanent residents by creating awesome schools?” As I thought about what that would entail, however, it became clear that no one city has the resources to fully reverse the trend — to really work, it would have to entail a complete reshaping of the school funding structures, a build-out of public transportation infrastructure to support the expanded population, etc., etc. In other words, it would take forceful state planning on the model of what created the suburbs in the first place.

Unfortunately, it appears that the U.S. only had one relatively brief window for such forceful state planning, extending from FDR to Nixon (only 40 years out of the 200+ of the Republic’s existence) — and it wasted it on the suburbs. Barring a new FDR, we’re probably stuck with it. The bright side, I guess, is that The Wonder Years will remain legible and relatable for generations to come.

It’s the economy, stupid!

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 11 Comments

The New York Times editorial on education from this morning’s paper is better than one might expect, insofar as it compares the US system to other more successful countries rather than postulating that completely untried systems such as vouchers and charter schools will automatically fix things, but there’s still a persistent blindspot, as illustrated in this paragraph:

Teachers in leading nations’ schools also teach much less than ours do. High school teachers provide 1,080 hours per year of instruction in America, compared with fewer than 600 in South Korea and Japan, where the balance of teachers’ time is spent collaboratively on developing and refining lesson plans. These countries also have much stronger welfare states; by providing more support for students’ social, psychological and physical needs, they make it easier for teachers to focus on their academic needs. These elements create a virtuous cycle: strong academic performance leads to schools with greater autonomy and more public financing, which in turn makes education an attractive profession for talented people.

Emphasis added. Of course, there is literally no follow-up on the highlighted sentence. Continue reading “It’s the economy, stupid!” →

MOOCs and “The Great Books”

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 4 Comments

Shimer’s president, Susan Henking, linked this morning to an interesting, if cranky article on the Great Books. The author makes the obvious, if oft-overlooked, point that the Great Books approach is hardly the bulwark against relativism that conservatives make it out to be — rather, in presenting all the Great Books of the Western tradition as equally valid options, it directly inculcates the relativism that conservatives decry. This is actually what I was partly trying to get at, albeit from the opposite direction, in my essay on the Shimer pedagogy, where I basically argue that the reason Great Books are so Great is that they are endlessly discussable.

What really interested me in the article, though, is this historical point: Continue reading “MOOCs and “The Great Books”” →

What is education actually for?

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 22 Comments

Among readers of this blog, I’m confident that there is a consensus on what education is not for: namely, it is not exclusively for job preparation. While working is part of life and education has to contribute to that, I doubt that anyone here is willing to say that education should be geared solely toward work.

That said, then, what is it actually for? Continue reading “What is education actually for?” →

What is the business model for online education?

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 45 Comments

I should be clear: I believe that online education has only a very narrow ideal application (i.e., for literal shut-ins or for people stuck in Antarctica). There are more than enough classrooms and instructors to go around nearly everywhere in the US — indeed, colleges are constantly building new satellite campuses to compete with each other. The only benefit is an economic one, namely to create economies of scale. Yet every single credible piece of evidence in higher education research strongly supports the (completely intuitive) idea that high-quality education simply cannot be “scaled up.” Education is something that’s best carried out with some balance between small groups and one-on-one contact with an instructor.

Now it’s not as though most universities are following the ideal practice in any case. Large lecture classes are already essentially “distance learning.” So just from a totally cynical standpoint, one could begin to discuss whether the economic gains are likely to be enough to make up for the loss in quality of an already low-quality model (i.e., the large lecture class that remains a staple of mainstream higher ed despite the overwhelming evidence against its efficacy).

Let’s begin by bracketing the question of whether the money saved is likely to be well-spent — that’s pretty much a lost cause. But even if we start from the proposition that increasing revenue is an unalloyed good in itself, it’s still unclear how online education is supposed to do that. Continue reading “What is the business model for online education?” →

The reverse invisible hand

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 27 Comments

As we all know, capitalist accumulation is guided by the “invisible hand,” which ensures that the selfish and short-sighted choices of individual capitalists fit together into a beneficial whole that promotes long-term wealth-creation for all. What’s less well known is that for workers, the situation is reversed: their self-interested decisions add up to create a situation that is more and more disadvantageous for workers as a whole. Examples abound. On the individual level, taking an unpaid internship can give one a leg up on the competition — on the whole, it creates a situation where more and more work is being done on an unpaid basis, so that there are fewer slots available for paid workers. On the individual level, increased social mobility through education can help one to escape from a poverty and deprivation — on the whole, it waters down the competitive advantage of education while creating ever-greater competition for the handful of positions near the top of the heap. On the individual level, prudential advice about self-presentation and interviewing technique can increase one’s odds of getting a job — on the whole, such advice only increases the legibility of the applicant pool, while doing nothing about the underlying ratio of applicants to jobs. Etc., etc., etc.

Globally, workers are caught up in a perpetual arms race. They must work harder and harder, they must come pre-trained, they must be flexible and ready to nimbly switch careers as market forces dictate — and never ask why, never ask who’s actually benefiting from this regime of work that is making everyone anxious and miserable. Similarly, these habits of thought allow us to build social policy on an individualistic basis, as though the real crime in social inequality is that the most talented members of the underclass might go to waste. No one asks, meanwhile, why less prestigious jobs, which are presumably just as socially necessary, should “naturally” carry with them a lower quality of life, nor why the social ladder upon which we must all be allowed the “equal opportunity” to climb should be structured in just the way it is.