Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 12, 1993 TAG: 9401140023
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
To which this cynical elder offers, in answer: Because we're trying to do too much of it.
This heresy against conventional wisdom wants explanation, of course. We do not know what the word ``education'' means. We do not all use it to describe the same thing. We do not distinguish between education as a means of preparing minds from training as a means of teaching skills and directing them toward employment.
Above all, we do not want to admit - what would be, after all, an admission that we are not equal in intellect or, for that matter, in manual skill - that ``education'' is not something from which everyone can benefit.
The nation's present mania for what it blithely calls ``education'' has shallow origins. In the euphoric conviction, following World War II, that its people could accomplish anything, it embarked on a program that extended ``higher education'' far more liberally than it had ever attempted before.
The G.I. Bill of Rights - which included a lot besides college tuition, to be sure - sent millions of young veterans to college who might never have gone there in previous eras. This proved an enormous benefit to the United States for decades, giving it more doctors, scientists, engineers, lawyers and generally educated citizens than it had ever had, and in the process, a citizenry of uncommon breadth and civility.
But there was, as they say, a downside: the widespread inference, drawn by many more millions, that putting a college ``education'' at the easy disposal of everyone would prove of equal advantage. This seemed to assume that everyone could be educated the same way to the advantage of the nation. It also assumed, contradicting human experience and common sense, that ``education'' was a natural right.
It did not quite work out that way. Colleges increased in number and enrollments. Colleges became ``universities.'' The range of degrees they offered grew, and so, of course, did the number of citizens boasting Ph.D.s but unable to read and write. So did unemployment, which was increasingly filled with the degree-boasters.
We have a mess on our hands, in short: millions of men and women who've won degrees and higher degrees from accredited colleges and universities who are out of work or so poorly prepared that they can do little but stare at a computer screen; meanwhile, finding a plumber, an electrician or an automobile mechanic gets harder and harder. And the colleges and universities whine like babies when their precious public subsidies are reduced.
It is to resolve this dilemma that I offer, in the spirit of Dean Swift and entirely pro bono publico, a Modest Proposal.
It is that the commonwealth of Virginia (and presumably other states) get out of the ``higher education'' racket altogether; that it sell off its colleges and universities to the ``private sector'' (alumni would be good prospects), plow the money saved back into the primary and secondary schools and let the chips fall where they will.
Among the benefits I foresee:
No further fuss about reduced university budgets. (There wouldn't be any budgets to fuss about).
The professorate would be put back to work (as this newspaper recently suggested) and paid for its real time, not its bleating profession of superior virtue.
Unsold ``educational'' properties could be turned into the prisons so many voters seem to want for the extended incarceration of non-parolable felons.
No further to-do over single-sex ``education.'' (Virginia Military Institute would be free to do whatever it liked - always providing, of course, that it could afford to do so without state tax monies).
The public primary and secondary schools would be able at last to hire enough competent teachers and determined disciplinarians, and pay them what it requires to teach school for a change. And they might be able to work more effectively toward teaching vocational skills if the stigma of life-without-a- Ph.D. became a bad societal memory.
Since no two of us agree on what an ``education'' is, and few indeed seem to know that it isn't just - or even primarily - an avenue to a job, why not abandon now the delusion that we are all the same, can learn the same things in the same way and expect to receive 10 job offers upon graduation?
Why not admit, instead, that vocational skills are also of crucial importance to the nation's future, but to be taught must be taught differently?
Why not give the ``private sector'' the chance it has been screaming for forever?
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB