Education is Labor, Right?
W.J. Astore
So, the Trump Administration wants to merge the Department of Education with Labor. What a surprise. According to Mick Mulvaney, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, "They're [Education and Labor] doing the same thing. Trying to get people ready for the workforce, sometimes it's education, sometimes it's vocational training – but all doing the same thing, so why not put them in the same place?"
I saw this push for education as workforce development when I was a professor of history in Pennsylvania. Education was largely reduced to vocational training, in partnership with business and industry. My classes in history (including the social history of technology) were essentially "filler" classes, and indeed I had a student tell me he might see me again if he needed another "filler" class. I wasn't angry; I was amused at how perceptive and honest the student was.
Of course, America will always have the Ivy League. Education as training for a job won't really drive the curriculum at Yale or Harvard or Princeton. You can still get a decent liberal arts education in America, assuming you have money. But if you don't, it's off to "workforce training" for you.
When I was still teaching, I used to argue that my history classes were especially valuable to students at the college where I taught since they might be the only college-level course in history that they'd ever experience. I'd argue that plumbers and welders and nurses needed to know history too. Why? Because they're not just aspiring plumbers and welders and nurses -- they're American citizens, and the health of our democracy is based on a well-informed and broadly educated citizenry.
The Trump Administration doesn't want such a citizenry. Their vision of education is not about creative and critical thinking, and it certainly isn't about challenging authority. Rather, it's about job training, workforce development, preparing people for a lifetime of labor -- and supine obedience.
Well, as our "stable genius" president said, "I love the poorly educated." Under this latest proposal, he's putting his "love" into practice.
An Addendum: When you treat education as a business, as administrators have been doing in higher ed, is it any surprise when education is reduced to a feeder and filler for labor, for business and industry, for the workforce? As a professor, I had plenty of experience with administrators who sold education as a commodity, who talked about students as "customers" and professors as "providers" of a product. One high-level administrator insisted that we professors meet our students "at their point of need." Another big push when I was a professor was on retention. Keep those students in college! If only to keep enrollment up and the tuition dollars flowing.
We have reduced education to a business and classes to commodities, so why not combine education with labor? It makes perfect sense ... and supports perfectly authoritarian rule.