The Commodification of Education
In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
I read a fascinating article that was published several years ago. Quite frankly, I heard it from a podcast that I usually listen to while commuting, and they were discussing the contents of that very article. I couldn't help but be so enlightened by the discussions brought up in that podcast, that I searched the link for the article and read it myself.
It was entitled,The Neoliberal Arts, by William Deresiewicz. The main idea presented in that article was that colleges in America are endangered by its emphasis on education and having the most market value. He calls it neoliberalism:
The worth of a thing is the price of the thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of the person. Neoliberalism tells you that you are valuable exclusively in terms of your activity in the marketplace — in Wordsworth’s phrase, your getting and spending.
The purpose of education in a neoliberal age is to produce producers. I published a book last year that said that, by and large, elite American universities no longer provide their students with a real education, one that addresses them as complete human beings rather than as future specialists — that enables them, as I put it, to build a self or (following Keats) to become a soul.
Now a few weeks prior to reading that article, I had just finished reading a book by Ivan Illich, entitled Deschooling Society. I would be lying if I said I didn't pick up that book mainly because of how interesting the title was. As someone who had only read books centered on education and its direct impact on children, this was the first time I have read a book that views education on a more sociological perspective.
The main idea of the book is immediately presented in its first few paragraphs:
...The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
To put it simply, our education is defined in terms of employability and market value. Diplomas and such proof of credibility are valued far more than learning. The academe becomes a factory that produces valuable skillsets.
Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification.
And as such, we are taught to become more and more dependent on these institutions to survive in this society. It becomes ever rampant in our society until we come to the point that we cannot think for ourselves and make decisions for ourselves. Instead, we rely on these institutions for supplying us with even the most basic needs of life.
School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education.
But what should we do with regards to this predicament? Surely we couldn't just abolish all institutionalized schooling at once?
Certainly not. In fact, I believe that the solution to this crisis requires our role in it. As Deresiewicz says at the end of his article:
Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right. Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of intellectual and moral purposes. That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar American society: high-quality, low- or no-cost mass public higher education. An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources. An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it.
I am currently a college student living in Southeast Asia. I'm not even a philosophy, sociology, or an education major. But I am experiencing the consequences of this commodification placed on education.
The education system here differs greatly from Western education, but the contents of this book and this article resonate with the issues that my country currently faces in the way that it institutionalizes education. Many children are confined to the idea that education and schooling are the same, not knowing that one can learn outside of an academic context and that it is imperative to learn this distinction. Furthermore, many of us are still trapped with the mentality that earning a college degree equates to a successful life.
We are experiencing progress in economic and technological advancements, but we shouldn't leave behind the aspect of society that brought us here in the first place.
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich (book)
The Neoliberal Arts by William Deresiewicz (article)
Classical Stuff You Should Know (episode)
