The Big Lie (Thoughts on Why School Is Not Only About Workforce Development)

[This post is finally finding its voice after kicking around in my brain for most of the summer because of the amazing work of Umair Haque and his post A Deeper Kind of Joblessness.]

I knew a lot of very smart, very academically successful kids when I was growing up. I went to CTY which was a rather humbling experience, and then I went to pretty high-powered college. And I knew a lot of kids who worked hard, got good grades, and got to the job market and realized that no one really cared. In the workplace, they were just the next 22 year old, and there was intro-level work to be done, and little of it really required that BA in Eastern European literature. My generation came of age with Douglas Coupland's Generation X, and Coupland's refrain of "You Are Not Your Job" made a lot of sense to me then... and I find myself reflecting on it a great deal lately.

A frequent refrain of mine is that the purpose of public education is not the creation of the 21st Century workforce, but rather, the co-creation - in conjunction with our students - of 21st Century citizens. I really believe that "work" is a subset of "citizen," and that if we aim for citizenship, we'll get the workforce we need, but aiming for creating workers won't get our society the citizens it needs.

A public education that centers first around workforce development will put a high premium on following directions and doing what you're told. A public education that centers first around citizenship development will still teach rules, but it will teach students to question the underlying ideas behind the rules. Workforce development will reinforce the hierarchies that we see in most corporate culture, while a citizenship-focus will teach students that their voice matters, regardless of station.

It's not just about what society needs, it's also about what students need. We completely change the lens of "Why do we need to study this" when the answer deals with being an informed and active citizen as opposed to what we do with our work life, because let's be honest with ourselves, most people don't need calculus, the Periodic Table of Elements or the date of the signing of the Magna Carta to be a good worker. But you do need to understand statistical analysis to read fivethirtyeight.com and make sense of the political conversations there, you do need to understand basic chemistry to understand how the oil in the Gulf disaster affects the region, and understanding how England evolved from a pure aristocracy to a constitutional monarchy which did sow the seeds of the American democracy might help to make sense of our own country's history. The goal of a citizenship-driven education exposes students to ideas that will challenge them, push them, and help them to make sense of a confusing world.

And more to the point - we don't lie to kids when we say that's what high school is for.

Our society is changing, and there are some serious warning signs that our economy be fundamentally shifting in ways that will make it harder and harder for education to be "the great equalizer." Children across the socio-economic spectrum are realizing that the economic "sell" of public education isn't ringing true. As college costs creep over $200,000 for private colleges and over $100,000 for public colleges (Penn State's costs, with room and board, this year was $27,000 / yr in-state) and as more jobs move to labor markets that do not have the high wages of the United States (seriously, read Haque's post... it reminds me of a shorter, more digestible version of Joseph Stiglitz's work,) the idea that all kids who work hard in high school will have economic success in life is more and more of a lie.

I think - I fear - that the next twenty or thirty years of American life are going to be difficult. I think we're going to have some really challenging problems to solve, and I think that we're going to be faced with hard choices about our lives, and I want our schools to help students be ready to solve those problems, to weigh-in on those problems, to vote on those problems. It's why History and Science are so important. It's why kids have to learn how to create and present their ideas in powerful ways. It's why kids have to become critical consumers and producers of information. And hopefully, along the way, they find the careers that will help them build sustainable, enjoyable, productive lives.

I want to be honest about why we teach what we teach. I'm tired of schools and politicians implicitly promising that the result of successful schooling is high wages. And I'm tired of us forgetting everything else that goes into helping people realize their potential in the process.

Teaching kids that hard work in school will mean more money is a shortcut and an example of the shoddy logic that doesn't ring true to many kids. Teaching kids that hard work in school will help them develop skills that will help them be a more fully realized citizen and person is a harder argument to make, but it stands a much better chance of being true.