Education versus Training: What the Universities are Doing to Us

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/29/21

            No doubt many hearts were made glad by what Cobb County Chamber of Commerce COO Dana Johnson had to say recently about the need for more students in trade schools. According to the Marietta Daily Journal (May 22/23 Weekend Edition), Johnson told members of the county’s Developmental Authority that “a recent study the Chamber helped fund found rapid growth in healthcare, engineering, construction, and social work.”

            Johnson further asserted that in order to staff businesses in those industries, more students would need to be steered toward trade schools and community colleges rather than to four-year universities. Hallelujah! Business leaders are letting us know that workers are needed and that degrees in political science and other humanities, including English, just aren’t the need of the hour. Hate to say it but political scientists and English teachers like me aren’t what keeps our wheels turning, though we can make them turn better.

            I’m what the educational world calls a “humanities guy.” My study and life work have not been in math and science, manual labor, or the industrial arts, but in language, history, and politics. But even a humanities guy can see what our overemphasis on college education has done to us. It has extolled the college degree and undermined the value and nobility of manual labor and the professional trades.

            As a teenager, my lot was to chop cotton, thin corn, pick cotton, pull corn, feed chickens, haul hay, neuter male calves, fertilize crops by hand, and cut firewood. Except for cotton, I took delight in every task my father or a neighboring farmer assigned me. To this very day the sight of a corn field, the smell of freshly cut hay, or the sight of a wood pile makes me wish I could do it all again now.

            This certainly isn’t the effect that farm labor has had on every country boy who has experienced it. Southern sun can be blistering, soil is often stubborn and unwilling to cooperate, and insects and deer often must be viewed as the deadly enemy they actually are. Still, in my case dirt and the wonderful things it rendered were a joyful mystery.

            Appreciation of the soil and manual labor began to wane in the late 1950s. Post-World War II prosperity led Americans to cities and small towns. Industrialization intensified and universities wooed students with the carrot they called “a degree.” The degree soon became a status symbol even when it didn’t bring much money. Today high schools publicize and celebrate the college-bound but say little about the lad who will enter the construction business with his father or the young lady who will enter nurse’s training or become a hairstylist. This development is sad and unfortunate.

            I could not count the high school senior boys I’ve taught who needed and desired a technical college but were pushed into a liberal arts university by their parents. I doubt that this practice is limited just to educated Cobb County. Perhaps seeing so much of this is what kept me from being disappointed when my artist son Jeff left college his senior year to pursue ranching, rodeo, and bull riding, or when my son Reagan left college his sophomore year to enter construction work and eventually landscaping. Today both of them are happy and blessed.

            But there’s another aspect of higher education that we should note besides its questionable promises of status and success. Like so many corporations that use to exist to make money but have turned to bossing us around on social issues, colleges are indoctrinating. Instead of solely educating, colleges are chasing every fad that comes along - diversity, inclusion, equity, and identity politics - and are turning students into social justice warriors.  Not so our technical colleges, or not yet.

            For 15 years of teaching English at Chattahoochee Technical College, my task was not to solicit or influence student opinions on social justice or politics. In energized classes of all races and ages, students were taught how to write and speak clearly, how to put their best foot forward in a job interview, and how to, as Mark Twain put it, “use the right word and not its second cousin.” Neither my goal nor the college’s was to tell students what to think about anything.

            Not so at the university. Check out the website of any major public or private university. Their aim is for students to think a certain way about race and sexuality.

            Lately the national Chamber of Commerce has been leaning left.  But at least our local Chamber is talking good sense when it tells us we need workers, not coddled college kids.

 

Roger Hines

May 26, 2021

 

                                      False gods that fail us

              Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/15/21

            Shortly before Barack Obama’s presidency ended, his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued in the Wall Street Journal that “equipping every public school with the ultimate in electronic tools will improve student learning immeasurably.” Duncan opined that “equitable access to a world class education” would be possible only if all schools get on board and technologically arm their schools to the hilt.

            Although Spell Check, Grammar Check, and even Map Quest are often just plain wrong, we should still stand in awe of what technology can do. (Ask those of us who have had open heart surgery.) When Samuel Morse in 1838 completed his world-changing electrical telegraph system and tapped out those famous words, “What hath God wrought?” little could we have imagined the extent to which technology would spread.   

Technology is a blessing but one would be hard pressed to argue that it has increased learning. Education is one thing. Educational tools are another. Access is one thing. Understanding is another. Computers are one thing. Human beings are another. What does it matter how fast a screen can pull up information for students if there is little or no processing – discussing, comparing and contrasting, applying context, questioning – of what is pulled up? It appears that Secretary Duncan has moved as far away from Socrates as one could possibly move. Not to mention the old saw, “True education is Abe Lincoln on one end of a log and famous teacher Mark Hopkins on the other.”

            Technology is a false god. It towers over us and we bow to it. It beckons and we rush to it, whether it’s our cell phones, screens in a restaurant, or screens at the gas pump, for heaven’s sake. Since tech now pervades our world, it only makes sense to employ it in the classroom. Well, not so fast says Stanford University researcher Larry Cuban whose research has found “no clear and substantial evidence of students increasing their academic achievement as a result of using educational technology.”

            For record keeping, student information, and other necessary school minutia, technology has been a God-send. For instruction it has not. Indeed, Cuban’s words remind me of what a college freshman said to me several years ago: “We’re getting pretty tired of power point but nobody ever gets tired of a good teacher or a lively class discussion.” That student was 18.

            But there are other false gods, one particularly to which so many bow and on which so many depend. It is the god of government. FDR and LBJ would cheer, but Jefferson and Reagan would rumble in their graves to learn of the size and scope of government in America today. The coercion that House Democrats call “For the People Act” (HR 1) is exactly what America’s Founders and others were trying to escape. Among other equally incredible measures, HR 1 would undermine and weaken state election laws.

Here’s how. It includes an automatic voter registration for public assistance applicants. In essence and in effect it would federalize the administration of national elections. HR1 isn’t hard to find. Every citizen should read it.

            Anyone who supports these measures worships government. They apparently lean on authority without question and would never be heard to say, “He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.” Instead, they would hand over their brother to Big Brother. As for the Georgia legislature’s effort to remedy election fraud, watch as Atlanta’s CEO’s (who haven’t read HR1) continue to line up and threaten to move to Timbuktu unless the recently passed election law is changed.

            Worshippers of government don’t care if boys are allowed to join girls’ sports teams, if Congress can be protected by a substantial fence but citizens can’t, if gun ownership is severely restricted, or if schools and universities cram critical race theory down our kids’ throats. They also don’t care if the USA goes the way of Chile, a nation that was one of the wealthiest nations in South America until 2013 when a new leftist government pushed the “spread the wealth” gospel, creating “equality” for sure (equal poverty), but plunging the nation into an economic free fall.

            There is a kinship of these two false gods. Pervasive technology has diminished human touch; pervasive government has diminished localism. Technology has increased fake friendship and loneliness; government has increased centralized power and dependency. The purpose of government, American style, has been to serve its people. We best beware of, yea totally resist, HR 1 as it heads to the U.S. Senate and we might consider what screens are doing to our health and to our kids and grandkids in school.

 

Roger Hines

May 5, 2021 

           

 

   America is Getting Back to Normal and That’s Sad and Scary

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/1/21

            The American experience, if dated from 1776, will be 245 years old in July of 2021. Two and a half centuries are not a long time. Compared to most nations of the world, our nation is still a babe in arms.

            Ours was a genuine revolution. Unlike the failed French Revolution or the Communist Revolution of Russia that simply swapped one set of tyrants for another, the American Revolution centered on ideas and principles that the Old World, including merry old England, knew little to nothing about. Those ideas included, above all, individual liberty and representative democracy. No more kings, queens, dukes, potentates, or ruling families. Americans would choose their leaders. They would live under written law, not spoken edicts. That written law would allow farmers, frontiersmen, small businessmen, surveyors, ministers, and every other stripe of commoner to serve in legislative halls.

            These political ideas and principles of the early Americans were not totally new. The Greeks, actually the first westerners, lit the first glimmers of democracy. The amount of freedom that Englanders enjoyed was dependent upon whichever ruling family was in power. What happened in Philadelphia in 1776 was primarily under the leadership of self-dependent, freedom-loving men, not royalty.  

            The short history of self-government is immensely important. Its pinnacle and its best illustration is still the radical, revolutionary action of America’s founders. What they birthed and cradled was not normal. What their parents had fled was normal. Historically self-rule has not been the norm, but the exception. Oppressive government and tyranny have been the norm.

            Yet, America’s current prevailing culture objects to saying that America is an exceptional place. Barack Obama explicitly stated, “I believe in American exceptionalism just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism.” Those are weasel words and they reflect the view held by leaders in politics, education, entertainment, sports, and corporate America. To them the claim of exceptionalism is xenophobic. Their favorite song is not “America the Beautiful,” but “We are the World.”

            Unlike Henry Ford, the Vanderbilts, and others, today’s corporatists are trans-nationalists. America is just one of many nations with whom they do business. Corporate CEO’s shame us for being “racists” while doing business with China where freedom and love hardly abound. What hypocrisy!

Today we have a national administration that puts America down and makes it clear that its aim is to return to the normal, the pre-America normal of Big Brother, the governmental tyranny of the Old World. Forget America’s rugged, individualist, frontier spirit. It’s all about the collective Village now, not the villagers, so get with the program.

President Biden and Vice-President Harris will not get off their rant that we are a racist nation, that our racism is systemic, and that they intend to transform/reset all of us, especially our cops whom they’re demonizing because of a few bad apples. Even police chiefs around the nation are shilly-shallying, refusing to defend their cops while caving to the Left’s tiresome script. Watch the next time a chief of police appears before a microphone just after a shooting.

 Forget that slavery was abolished, that Republicans (not Democrats) are chiefly responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Forget that White “racist” Americans elected and re-elected a Black president. Laughably, President Biden calls for unity while showing scorn for cops and evangelical Christians. Call it statism, centralism, or whatever you like, his party is moving the nation from capitalism to socialism. ($200 billion for pre-schooling?) His party is calling for more government power and regulation, higher taxes, and a curtailment of our federal system. In other words Democrats seek to reclaim the normal, that which characterized the world before 1776 and still does in huge corners of the world today. The growth of the state is upon us.   

            So is unchecked violence. Black on Black crime is off the charts and the Biden administration will not address it. Neither will it address the Leftist riots or the fact that cops in large numbers are retiring or resigning daily.

            As for unity, there is no middle ground when it comes to issues like abortion. One side must win and one lose, or we will continue to fight for decades to come. Child sacrifice was practiced in the Old World. Today we sacrifice babies to the god of convenience or “women’s rights.” What’s the difference when dead is dead?

            No, history’s normal has not been pretty. With all her shortcomings, America like no other nation altered that normal. Too bad that liberals want to return to the old ways. The specter of the liberals’ big state looms over us, darker than ever. We had better resist, and fast.

 

Roger Hines

4/28/21