Lots of people believe that importing business theory into the university blights the institution. I have no doubts about this. Running schools like businesses, especially the way businesses are run these days, with emphasis on the short term and “cost cutting”—i.e. firing people or cutting back their benefits—has resulted mainly in miserable teachers and ignorant students.
But the invasion of schools by Cold War philosophy its not just a matter of structuring educational institutions around the idea that the people who work and learn in them are nothing but utility maximizers. A recent story by Rebecca Klein at The Huffington Post shows how Cold War philosophy also shapes the content of the curriculum. Referring to a report from the the Century Foundation, Klein writes:
The American education system has focused on “market values” over “democratic values” for the past several decades…. Rather than preparing students to be responsible members of society, the report argues, schools have chiefly taught them to compete in a global marketplace
What does it mean to prepare someone to be a “responsible member of society?” Klein writes:
The report argues that students must learn to think critically and make informed decisions … They need to appreciate the factors critical to a functioning democracy, like civil rights.
Education for citizenship, then is just education. As Aristotle said, in a just society a good citizen is a good human being. Education for citizenship is therefore teaching students to make correct (rational) use of the human mind: how to reason and how to get clear on facts and values:.
So in orienting their curricula to market vales, what American educators have abandoned is education itself. Why on earth did they do this? Aren’t educators among the first to get hit by market malfunction? Where did they get rewarded by it? Teachers in the lower grades are at best down-market, watching their pennies disappear as they buy paper and pencils for their students. In higher education, advanced training—a Ph.D.—usually makes you distinctly un-marketable. How could people who suffer from the markets abandon the idea of education for citizenship?
But wait! There is no trade-off here once you accept that the two goals are the same—that educating the mind to function just is educating it to perform correctly in the market. And you will accept this if you accept Cold War philosophy’s view that the human mind itself operates on the principles of the market, as codified in rational choice theory (see Chapter Four of Scare). Then market rationality becomes the only rationality there is, and education’s job is to teach and instill “market values.”
Can Cold War philosophy have gained such purchase on the minds of educators that they don’t see this? Writing an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last October suggested to me that it has. Looking at the two main families of arguments in favor of the beleaguered humanities, I realized that both of them assumed that the humanities, to be beneficial at all, had to be of direct benefit to individuals. One family of arguments claims that the humanities can indeed provide the skills necessary to go on the job market—an obvious case of a market curriculum. And the other argues that your life will be more interesting and perhaps even virtuous if you know something about the humanities—which is just an attempt to highlight a particular definition of “utility.”
As the article points out, both arguments are valid, but neither is successful: they are both out there in the “marketplace of ideas,” but resources are not flowing (back) to the humanities because of them. They have accepted, in fact, the premises that are causing the problem. Proving that market rationality tolerates humanistic education is not the same as challenging the claim of market rationality itself to be coextensive with all reason.