[lit-ideas] Re: education
- From: Ursula Stange <ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 08:23:30 -0500
We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another
class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to
forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform
specific difficult manual tasks.”
― Woodrow Wilson
It seemed, when I was growing up in the sixties that this did not need to be
the case. Possibility was alive in the land. This piece by Bill Moyers
explains why and how and by whom that shining moment was killed:
http://www.truth-out.org/how-did-happen/1320278111
Ursula Stange
who still remembers President Kennedy calling the steel executives into his
office...
Sent from my kitchen...
On 2011-11-07, at 12:34 AM, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I think part of the confusion we are experiencing is due to failure to
> distinguish between top-tier MBA programs whose goal is to produce
> executives, for whom cultural polish, as well as strategic thinking and
> analytic skills are assets, and undergraduate business programs further down
> the food chain, whose graduates' historically largely clerical jobs are being
> eliminated by digital technology and/or off-shoring. We are, as
> right-thinking folk of a liberal disposition, inclined to see all students as
> equally likely to benefit from liberal education. We live, however, in a
> world where winner-take-all is the rule. Grooming winners and training losers
> to fill some minimally useful niche require different forms of education. One
> may wish that they didn't but they do.
>
> I do not at all believe that this is the way the world should be. To make
> equal opportunity as close to equal as humanly possible, through high-quality
> education and healthcare provided to all as a matter of right seems to me an
> ideal worth fighting for. Whether the battle is winnable in a world where
> market-fundamentalist economics are grounded in a neo-Calvinist view of
> humanity (a few blessed, mostly damned) is, I fear, open to question. Whether
> it is winnable in a world where, ever since the invention of writing, scribe
> and ruler have worked hand in hand to exploit the rest, whatever the ideology
> said to govern economic affairs, is very much open to question.
>
> John
>
> On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I wrote, in reply to Andy, earlier
>
>
>> You cannot have read any of the links I provided (I provided too many, and
>> apologize) without seeing
>> that my point was not that there are fewer business majors than in former
>> years (I don't know if this is
>> universally true or not), but that 'businesses' themselves are beginning to
>> prefer, and to hire, liberal arts
>> majors over business majors who are increasingly less adaptable to change in
>> a 'corporate environment,'
>> and, that MBA programs—which are themselves becoming less valued—are now
>> urging those considering
>> studying for the MBA, to get a liberal arts education first.
>
> then Andy wrote
>
>
>> I concede the issue. I'm sure you're right.
>
> John McCreery thinks that Andy may have conceded too quickly, and wrote
>
>
>> I would not give up so quickly. Consider the possibility that what
>> businesses want in a workforce depends on the kind of business. Assume for
>> the sake of argument former Clinton administration Secretary of
>> Labor Robert Reich's classification of jobs in The Work of Nations. Reich
>> argues that there are, at the end of the day, only three broad categories of
>> jobs: repetitive physical labor, personal service, and symbolic-analysts
>> (knowledge workers). Repetitive physical labor is, except for the fast food
>> industry, truck drivers and other geographically constrained segments,
>> off-shored to where labor costs are lowest. The predictable result is more
>> people trying to move into personal services, driving down wages in that
>> segment as well. The symbolic-analyst segment is where a few talented people
>> can still make out like bandits.
>
> I'm not sure what 'personal service' means: language (mathematics) tutors;
> copy-writers for hire; hotel clerks/maids; servers in restaurants; interior
> decorators; personal shoppers...? Not all of these things can be done
> offshore, granted, no more than working as a long-haul truck driver or
> railroad engineer can be. I'd have thought that as we were talking about the
> prospects of liberal arts graduates outside of academia, it would have been
> fairly clear that we (originally Andy and I) were talking about whether
> 'businesses' of the symbolic-analyst sort were in search of people trained in
> accounting, promotion, recruiting, 'office management,' and so on, and not in
> search of liberal arts graduates. (I believe Andy also said that more
> employers—of a certain sort—were increasingly looking for people with MBAs.)
>
> I tried to show, with various references, that they were not, and that,
> moreover, that these days, a number of MBA programs recommended that
> potential applicants get a liberal arts degree before applying.
>
> Clinching argument: two of my former thesis students are successful wine
> makers, south of Portland, in the Willamette Valley
> <http://www.winesnw.com/will.html>, and Richard Danzig, '61,
> was Secretary of the Navy, under Clinton.
>
> John concludes
>
>
>> My sense is that the case for businesses looking for liberal arts instead of
>> business majors is largely limited to the symbolic-analyst segment. Liberal
>> arts graduates of places like Reed (of which, by the way, my ever so
>> sagacious spouse is a graduate) do well in this segment. Graduates of
>> community college or second or third-tier state university business programs
>> don't.
>>
>> The tricky bit these days for business majors is that while they fall out of
>> favor with businesses substituting automation for traditional white-collar
>> paper pushing, the alternatives in the repetitive physical labor
>> and personal service segments are largely what they were trying to escape
>> with their degrees. Their better options may include, for example, military
>> service and the acquisition of the specialized skills required for health
>> care, complex equipment maintenance, or bodyguard personal service careers.
>
> I've paid my manual labor dues with over four years of servitude at the big
> Weyerhaeuser integrated (Kraft paper, finished lumber, plywood, etc.) complex
> outside Springfield, Oregon. This mill closed in 1989, because it was built
> for old-growth timber—gigantic logs—and not for those attenuated sticks one
> sees nowadays.
>
> Robert Paul,
> signing off this topic
>
>
>
> --
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.wordworks.jp/
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