Against Schooling

For an Education That Matters

Stanley Aronowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317264118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Against Schooling, Stanley Aronowitz passionately raises an alarm about the current state of education in our country. Discipline and control over students, Aronowitz argues, are now the primary criteria of success, and genuine learning is sacrificed to a new educational militarism. In an age where school districts have imposed testing, teachers must teach to test, and both teacher and student are robbed of their autonomy and creativity. The crisis extends to higher education, where all but a few elite institutions are becoming increasingly narrowly focused and vocational in their teaching. With education lacking opportunity for self-reflection on broad social and historical dynamics, Against Schooling asks "How will society be able to solve its most pressing problems?" Aronowitz proposes innovative approaches to get schools back on track..

PART I

EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CLASS

1

How Class Works
in Education: A Memoir

I never knew my maternal grandmother. She died when my mother was twelve years old, an event that was to materially as well as psychologically shape my mother’s life. When my grandfather remarried two years later, his new wife did not want my mother around, so she was sent to live with her father’s sister, her husband, and her child. My mother’s family—women as well as men—were garment workers. They came to the United States to escape the brutal czarist regime in Russia and Poland. Most of them were revolutionary socialists who were subject to imprisonment and exile. They were skilled workers who moved up the American class ladder—but without the benefit of school credentials. My grandfather was a highly skilled tailor who worked as a cutter in the men’s clothing trade and eventually elevated himself to manage other workers. His sister Lily was a sewer of the whole garment in the high-end section of the dress industry. She sewed very expensive dresses by hand, a craft that has virtually disappeared except in the tiny custom dress market. Her husband, Zelig, began as a machine operator but became a writer and labor reporter for the Jewish Daily Forward, which, under the leadership of Abraham Cahan, its editor until World War II, was a real power among immigrant Jews. My grandmother’s brother, a founder of a Cloak and Suit local of the international Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, was also a machine operator of ladies’ coats and suits who, at the end of his life, became a small landlord with properties in the mostly black communities of the Bronx.

These were educated people who read and spoke several languages, who revered “classical” music but acquired their knowledge mostly in the course of their lives rather than in schools. Probably the one exception was that some of them attended union-sponsored citizenship classes in which they acquired knowledge of some U.S. history. And the union also ran English-language courses, using labor and socialist texts, novels, and daily newspapers. My great-uncle Zelig had a fairly large library of English-and Yiddish-language books in his home. I couldn’t read the Yiddish, but the English-language books included contemporary works of American and European history, political commentary, and the novels of Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Kafka, among others. My mother attended high school in the Bronx until she was fourteen years old, but shortly after her mother died she was forced to drop out and go to work. She spent the next twenty-five years selling boys’ clothing in several department stores and eventually became an assistant buyer at Klein’s, one of the premier discount department stores in New York. For the more than twenty-five years before her retirement at age sixty-seven, she worked in union wholesale textile shops as an assistant bookkeeper. It was only after retirement that she fulfilled a lifelong aspiration to return to school, first earning her general equivalency diploma. She then started at a community college but left to attend the Center for Worker education, a bachelor’s degree program for union members and other working adults at City College of New York, where she graduated cum laude in 1987 at age seventy-four.

What my mother gained from schooling was no career but a bibliography and the chance to participate in discussions with fellow students about literature and politics, her two favorite subjects. She had been a voracious reader, musician, and painter throughout her life but, except for the arts, had never had the chance to share her literary insights with others. That, rather than career preparation, was the main value of school. Like her aunt and uncle, she was mostly self-taught except, perhaps, for her exquisite command of the English language, which, since Yiddish was the lingua franca of her parental and adopted households, probably required the drills that took place in PS 57 and Junior High School 45 in the Bronx.

I come from a family of unschooled but highly educated members of the “labor aristocracy.” That is, most were highly skilled craftspersons who worked in factories or, in the case of my parents, as salaried employees. This advantage enabled them to live in neighborhoods that afforded more amenities than the communities dominated by semiskilled workers in mass production or service industries. And they were people who played musical instruments—my maternal grandfather played cello and violin, for example—read books, and were active in their respective unions. Their example, probably emulated unconsciously, prompted me to leave school in my freshman year of college, an event that upset both of my parents. But like them (my father did graduate from high school but left college after his first year), I felt that further schooling was superfluous to my intellectual development. Certainly after more than twelve years of schooling, I had come to the end of my tolerance for boredom and did not return to get a degree for fifteen years. It was only after I entertained the idea of leaving full-time union work—a job that required no advanced degrees—that I reentered undergraduate school on the condition that I would not be required to attend classes. My goal was to enter the life of writing and teaching, a vocation for which advanced degrees were necessary prerequisites. My sponsor, a professor at the new School, believed I could circumvent undergraduate schooling and move directly to graduate school. Placed in the charge of a mentor with whom I met once or twice during the academic year, I wrote a long paper and was duly certified as a bachelor of arts by the new School. In order to make this arrangement I agreed to attend the school’s PhD program in sociology. After a stunning first semester sitting in classes taught by the likes of Jürgen Habermas, Iring Fetscher, and Adolph Lowe, I ran out of Germans and, faced with the prospect of studying with American sociologists schooled in the postwar shadow of Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, the leading figures of a noncritical, positivist social science, I left school once more in the middle of the second semester and found a way to earn my PhD by other means, again without the obligation to take classes. Beginning with some observations in my first book, False Promises, for more than thirty years I have written about and commented on schooling, almost always in the context of considering the system from the vantage point of working-class students.

The Rocky Road to Educational Reform

My general disenchantment with schooling as we know it led me to participate in the founding of various types of alternative schools. The first, New York’s Free University, was a non-degree-granting institution that was started by a group of radicals who believed that traditional schools had mostly ruined the passion for learning among young people who deserved another shot at a critical education. Founded in New York City in 1965, the school was one of a kind. In contrast to “socialist” schools of earlier and later vintage that were linked to specific political organizations and Marxist ideology, the Free University sought teachers with diverse knowledges and intellectual orientations who shared only a disdain for bureaucratic state institutions. The anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin taught, as did the market libertarian and economist Murray Rothbard. The Marxian leftist James Weinstein, a historian and radical entrepreneur, was also a founder, and Alan Krebs, a defector from college teaching and later an ardent Maoist, whose inspiration it was to gather the original faculty and organizers, offered classes, as did the poet Susan Sherman. I taught there as well. Among my “students” were Robert Christgau and Ellen Willis, both in the process of inventing rock criticism, and Tuli Kupferberg, a member of the satirical singing group the Fugs. The school flourished in an environment of cultural revolution and political dissent that attracted people from literally all walks of life: workers, students, lawyers, physicians, artists, and, of course, Lower east Siders intent on reinventing the lost art of bohemianism. When the conditions that had produced the possibility of the school died—the protest movements of the 1960s, cheap rent, and relatively carefree youth—so did the Free University and all but a handful of its emulators.

Five years later I accepted a chance offered by a group of east Harlem and Yorkville parents to help organize an “experimental” public high school—the first since World War II—that would combine occupational and academic learning and be directed, primarily, toward working-class white, black, and Puerto Rican kids from east Harlem and Yorkville in Manhattan. Its planning phase was financed in part by the Ford Foundation, which was in the midst of its brief moment of fomenting educational innovations, and a reluctant New York City Board of education. Park east High School opened in fall 1970 with 8 full-time teachers and 150 students drawn from both neighborhoods. Its first home was the basement of the local Catholic church; a nun from a local convent later joined the faculty, and other teachers, chosen by a committee of parents, were recruited from among licensed teachers credentialed by the board.

We began with no principal. Some of those duties were temporarily shared by the two full-time staff members responsible for organizing the school pending the selection of a licensed principal drawn from the official list. We had no problem with the requirement, imposed by the teachers’ union—a representative of which sat on the governing committee—to hire from the official list because from a cohort of 20,000 high school teachers, we were bound to attract a handful of talented educators who really wanted to do something new. Selecting a principal from the approved list was another matter. In the first place, the pool of candidates was very small. More to the point, by the time a person attains high administrative rank, she or he has been a part of the system for decades, has learned its bureaucratic practices, and is likely to have internalized its values and intellectual orientation. We wanted a teacher/director, but the board and the supervisors’ union would not hear of it. It turned out to be the eventual undoing of the school’s aspiration to break away from the usual dismal character of nearly all state schools, especially the mostly dysfunctional high schools that littered New York City’s neighborhoods.

Of course, the first two years were glorious. Student and teacher enjoyed a degree of freedom to invent new ways of learning. Consistent with the best work of developmental psychology, classroom practice was more than supplemented by extensive use of the vast resources of the city. For example, our biology teacher, who had studied at Indiana University with an eminent geneticist, was an ardent ecologist, so Central Park became a laboratory and our private bestiary. We commandeered a lab from a nearby hospital, and IBM donated a state-of-the-art computer lab that was in our own basement. Of course, the company had to send an instructor because none of the teachers or the administrators knew the first thing about computers. We all learned along with the students. Students were asked to suggest course electives and chose science fiction, Puerto Rican literature, the history of civil rights—and the staff scrambled to fulfill these desires. I taught the science fiction course to a class of twelve eager participants, and the course in Puerto Rican literature was taught by a neighborhood writer. For more than a few of the students, Park east was nothing short of a savior; years later a grateful parent met me at a Greenwich Village bar and refused to let me buy drinks. He claimed that I had saved his son from committing suicide. Others among the first cohort went on to become intellectuals, political activists, and top technical professionals. Thirty-five years later, I am still occasionally in touch with them.

Needless to say, this cornucopia came to an end with the arrival of the “real” principal, who convinced members of the governing committee—parents, community activists, and union offcials—that the standard curriculum was best suited to ensure that students could gain access to colleges, a claim some of us disputed, but to little avail. Within a few years after my and my colleagues’ departure (we had two-and three-year contracts to plan and execute the basic organization of the school but not to run it), Park east expanded to 600 students, acquired a real school building, and took its place among New York City high schools. It is still a relatively decent place but hardly the bastion of reform that it set out to be.

Although Park east was the first, it is by no means the last of small schools in New York and elsewhere. The most famous, Central Park east, founded by longtime school reformer Deborah Meier in the early 1980s, has succeeded in retaining much of its initial independence from the same old high school curriculum, but it has, inevitably, settled into a far less innovative space within New York’s huge secondary school system. And of the dozens of exemplars of the small school movement that emerged on the heels of its success, several must be counted as relatively good places for kids. However, since 2001, when a new city administration took office and insisted on running the schools as a mayoral agency, school reform has fallen on hard times. The mania for endless testing that marks the Bush administration’s no Child Left Behind program has been duplicated with a vengeance in New York City’s high schools, and there are few exemptions. Although small may remain beautiful, and size matters for determining the degree of care that schools bestow on students, the impulse for reform has been crushed beneath the heavy boot of a banker turned school administrator who has made the mantra of “accountability” an excuse for racing backward to the nineteenth century. What we have learned from the tragic experience of the long struggle for school reform is that, like the new Deal’s welfare state, nothing is forever. neither in the United States nor almost anywhere else can we count on “progress” to secure popular gains that benefit working-class people. Just as the labor movement has entered into an era of full-scale retreat—a backward gallop that has witnessed the precipitous decline of real wages and benefits—so has schooling reverted to the preprogressive era in which, in the first place, black and Latino working-class kids are viewed as untamed beasts requiring constant surveillance by armed guards, a characterization that has not spared white kids either.

In late spring of 1972 I interviewed for a job at the Staten island Community College (SICC) experimental school, a mélange of programs that had been encouraged by Bill Birenbaum, its president, as he later confessed, as his way of working around the largely vocational and professional emphasis of the rest of the institution. To accomplish this objective he needed to raise “soft” money—funds that were not provided by the city and state budgets. On the heels of the ’60s penchant for doing new things, it was not too difficult to fund unconventional curricula. After a year of teaching in the experimental school my niche turned out to be a mandate to organize a “youth and community studies” associate’s degree as a transfer to a parallel program at SUny–Stony Brook, which offered a bachelor’s degree in the subject. I was given a second teaching line to fill, and I hired David Nasaw, then a newly minted PhD in history from Columbia University. Nasaw was pleased to have the job at a time when history rivaled philosophy for the lack of full-time opportunities for even the products of the leading universities. We were foolish, so we took the program into three communities in addition to the SICC campus: Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Lower east Side, and Flatbush. We held classes in the storefronts and lofts of community organizations, which as late as the early ’70s were still funded by city, state, and federal money. Our students were community outreach workers and, in the case of Flatbush, young adults who had had drug problems and wanted to go back to school. What courses we could not teach were handled by adjuncts, most of whom were people with extensive experience in community organizing and were eager to try their hand at classroom instruction.

Then came the New York City fiscal crisis of 1976 to the present, and with it a huge wet blanket descended over public education. That event signaled the end of the brief period of educational and other social reforms. It was the precursor of the so-called Reagan revolution, during which Neoliberal policies—that is, privatized services—dominated public life. For the past thirty years we have been fed with a steady diet of market-driven concepts, the policy analog of which is that the private sector can do it better. The only new ideas that received any hearing were those having to do with cost cutting, administrative control of teachers and students, crime prevention, and the concept that schooling was about job preparation for private business. Government must now obey “bottom-line” criteria, as if any service were to be considered a commodity. Many professors and administrators still spouted the rhetoric of critical thinking and saw education as a preparation for “life,” but as colleges and universities hired more adjuncts and fewer full-time teachers and workloads steadily increased, by the 1990s it became brutally apparent that the gulf between schooling and education had so widened that even the most cynical among us no longer denied that state schools had, for the most part, become credential mills. In many four-year as well as community colleges, corporations virtually seized the curriculum and instructors increasingly taught by the numbers; for example, in huge classes multiple-choice tests replaced the essay. All resistance to these self-evident rules had to go underground.

Go to College or Die

Ours is the era when “higher education” credentials have become the new mantra of public schooling. The rationale for the need for credentials is the technological imperative, the material basis of which is deindustrialization. The days when a teenager could drop out of high school and get a decent-paying factory job or go into retailing or wholesaling with a prospect of eventually earning enough to support self and family with dignity are, it seems, long gone. Now, we are told, from retailing to computer services and administration, everyone needs a degree. Whereas my family and I required none of the trappings of postsecondary schooling, today anyone possessing merely a high school diploma is consigned to low-wage jobs, or, if black or Latino, often no job at all.

But earning a degree does not an education make. On the contrary, as Peter McLaren and many others have noted, schooling is most often a ritual performance, both for the teacher and the student (McLaren 1999). For one thing, many kids leave high school without adequate preparation for college-level work. College-level here means the ability to perform research and write a long paper drawing on the relevant literature in the field. Although many upper-middle-class students have learned these “skills” already, most public high schools serving working-class students do not require serious academic performance as a criterion for graduation. At a time when politicians and their supplicants sing the praises of science and mathematics as necessary prerequisites for technical jobs, many schools lack science laboratories or, if they have the space, do not supply up-to-date equipment so that students can perform even the most routine experiments in chemistry and biology. And systems are chronically short of qualified science and math teachers, the result of which is that many courses cannot be offered to meet entrance requirements of research universities and many private colleges. For another, as we have learned, environments for facilitating learning—books in the home, parents who can help teach their children how to use libraries, or even neighborhood libraries that have the materials and the staff to assist research—are not the norm. In short, in this richest and technologically most advanced society in the world, illiteracy in both its crude and its more sophisticated forms is rampant.

Ask any teacher working in a third-tier state or private college or university.¹ they normally have overcrowded classes of thirty-five or more, not only at the community colleges but at most of these institutions. In fact, some private colleges are the beneficiaries of students who have been refused admission to public colleges and universities where the pressure to maintain higher academic admission standards has reduced the number of working-class, especially black and Latino, students. In some cases middle-class whites are forced to seek private colleges because their high school records are simply not good enough for public schools. I know that this assertion seems counterfactual to the usual perception that the private schools are “better.” This may be true of the 300 elite colleges and universities where class sizes are smaller and faculty members are always at students’ disposal. But the third-tier story is quite different, at least in the northeast, where these institutions are numerous. Of these students, many of my colleagues report that perhaps a fifth—seven or eight per class—are minimally prepared to address the tasks of the course, and far fewer a...