Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [56]
This technocratic/meritocratic view strikes us today as common sense, but it is predicated on a certain view of what education is for, one that arose in the last century. In the years after World War II, many observers were struck with how complex society was becoming. The rational and scientific administration of this complexity seemed imperative; mere common sense seemed a paltry thing, totally inadequate to the challenges of a modern economy. Many business executives who were doing the hiring in the postwar years lacked degrees themselves, and assumed that college graduates would make superior employees because they possessed super-duper skills and knowledge. They were eager to hire college graduates to do jobs that had long been done by people with only high school diplomas. Yet there was little evidence to show they were better at their jobs, and in many cases they were less so. In a famous study of air traffic controllers, a job requiring complex decision making, for example, the sociologist Ivar Berg found an inverse correlation between educational achievement and job performance.18
Further, the technocratic/meritocratic view of education treats it as instrumental—it is good for society, and for getting ahead—and this has a corrupting effect on genuine education. As Labaree writes, “Formal characteristics of schooling—such as grades, credits, and degrees—come to assume greater weight than substantive characteristics, as pursuing these badges of merit becomes more important than actually learning anything along the way. . . . Teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses.”19
Pedagogically, you might want to impress on a student the miserable state of his mind. You might want to improve the student by first crushing him, as then you can recruit his pride to the love of learning. You might want to reveal to him the chasm separating his level of understanding from the thinkers of the ages. You do this not out of malice, but because you sense rare possibilities in him, and take your task to be that of cultivating in the young man (or woman) a taste for the most difficult studies. Such studies are likely to embolden him against timid conventionality, and humble him against the self-satisfaction of the age, which he wears on his face. These are the pedagogical uses of the “D.” But give someone a low grade, and he is likely to press upon you the fact that his admission to law school hangs in the balance. The Sort is on.
With this attitude, students are merely adapting themselves to the marketlike ethic of the institutions that school them. “Educational institutions find themselves located in a hierarchy of their own, forced to compete with other institutions for position in order to enhance the marketability of their credentials to socially mobile consumers.”20 The result is “a growing emphasis on producing selective symbolic distinctions rather than shared substantive accomplishments.”21 That is, what matters is your rank among your peers; it matters not if the whole lot of you are ignorant. When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Students become intellectually disengaged.
Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reason given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality.