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