A brave English professor exposes the tragic mish-mash of administrative profit-seeking, cultural expectations, and individual failure that goes on at many of America's colleges and universities. Going by the (not so brave) moniker of "Professor X," the unnamed man of letters at his unnamed institution argues that perhaps not everyone is meant to go to college.
Professor X chronicles his efforts to train non-traditional students in the basic skills of collegiate level study. Unfortunately, for many students the expectations placed upon them--by employers and by standardized requirements in certain industries--are simply unreachable. Torn between the desire to see his students succeed despite these unrealistic goals and the desire to maintain the integrity of university level study, Professor X stands at the precise point where the American educational ideal crumbles before an impervious reality.
There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy� Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.
America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
Good article. Not everyone needs a formal education. Though I'm getting a good education, I would prefer to skip my own college education and learn more relevant things on my own. But in our current society, that piece of paper is worth far more than it should be.
Isn't our belief, cultivated by parents and teachers who are sensitive to self-esteem issues but woefully out of touch with reality, that "if you work hard enough, you can do anything" the essence of the American Dream? We acknowledge no horizons to our ability to succeed, except those limitations we place on ourselves.
"I am the man who has to lower the hammer."
Professor X is performing the unenviable and valuable task, then, of forcing Americans to experience limitation, not limitation of the will to succeed (Mrs. L was full of it) but of the capacity. Whether Mrs. L ever admitted and came to terms with her limited capacity is another question, but at least she had the opportunity to accept her limited condition once she "failed".
Perhaps the educational system should have more "hammer men" earlier on to prevent so many from making the expensive mistake of attempting higher education despite their lack of capacity; then again, if any of these learn that they are limited and come to accept their finite capacities through the experience, I'd venture to say that it was not a bad investment.
This article describes a reality I've been struggling with for most of my life. Neither my parents or any of my grandparents completed more than a few semesters of college at most. I'm the first kid in the family who grew up with the goal of writing the college papers that Professor X writes about.
Still, living in a family to which the idea of a college education, much less a classical liberal arts education, is a foreign concept has helped keep me from falling too far into ivory tower snobbery. Every day I'm reminded of the profound wisdom of humans with souls and experiences and mammoth struggles; wisdom that has nothing to do with their amount of post-graduate credit hours.
Even so, I like the idea that everyone can have access to an education. I love education--so doesn't everyone else? I think there has to be some sort of balance that recognizes the legitimacy of loving great books or of adhering to high grading standards as well as the legitimacy of productive lives led by people who can't necessarily navigate the internet.
Like you rmblum, I know and esteem a number of people without college degrees. Interestingly, Charles Murray just offered a carefully measured lecture here at ISI that introduced his soon-to-be-released work on education. It could be seen as a riff on the Atlantic piece. Among other things, he observed that today's increasingly meaningless B.A. serves no one well, especially those who are not cut out for a college education. Maintaining a college degree as the indispensable and universal standard of education and employability diminishes the value of the skills and contributions of those whose abilities lie outside the scope of a college education. It also sets them up to fail--the only remedy for which is to diminish the rigor and richness of the degree and the conditions for achieving it.
