By Desiree Alonso on Jun 03, 2011

“It’s called The American Dream because you have to asleep to believe it.”  Very telling words stated once by George Carlin.  Wish I could prove him wrong.  But the truth is, the American way of life is not only a dream, it’s a racket.

If you haven’t heard about the news buzzing around regarding The College Loan scandal. A scandal that I am sure will be resolved the way government solves the problems it creates, more agencies to oversee the problem so that everyone feels like somebody is doing something.

Here are some of the headlines and background info on what is happening.

• Student Financial Aid Scandal grows. “…Documents also show the bank, JPMorgan Chase, paid five college student-loan officers to work for the bank while they still held their jobs at the colleges….”
• Education Dept. Rules on For-profit Schools created with Investor’s help. “A proposed regulation from the Education Department threatens to devastate for-profit career or trade schools, but one thing is even more controversial than the regulation — how it was crafted.  Education Department officials were encouraged and advised about the content of the regulation by a man who stood to make millions if it were issued.  It’s all part of a growing scandal, in which lenders gave colleges and top officials money and perks — sometimes based on how many students signed up for their loans…”
• Student Loans make Education affordable or do they? “Everyone knows we Americans are swimming in credit card debt.   But just this year a new debt has quietly surpassed our consumer spending addiction.  Student loans, now at $829 billion.”
• Price of Admission:  America’s College Debt Crisis. “As millions of American families struggle to cope with college costs that are rising at twice the rate of inflation, CNBC investigates a system that encourages widespread borrowing—often with little regard to a student’s ability to pay—leaving the average college graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt.”
• College Conspiracy.PLEASE Watch this.  Period.

Long story short,  the bubble is about to burst… the cat is out of the bag.  What cat?  An American College Education and the Government’s push through the Department of Ed and all the Testing companies to push “The College Education Agenda” is beginning to being exposed for what it is, a system designed to create lifetime indentured servants.  The entire loan industry is a scheme to make a few rich and make everyone else poor and indebted for life.

Friends, follow the money… just follow the money.  Wars i.e. The Military Industrial complex; Education i.e. The Education   industrial complex; Medicine i.e. The FDA and Big Pharm industry. It’s all big  racket.  Just follow the money.  It’s not rocket science.  It just takes an ounce of your interest and curiosity ( the very traits that our well organized and effective Government Schooling has succeeded in schooling out of us )  it just takes your interest to *see*.   To see the machine and to see it for what it is.  Money is what keeps it moving.   I think many of us still believe we live in a period that wrestles between political ideologies and ideas.  However, that time has passed.  Nobody really believes in that system anymore and certainly not the ones who reap all the benefits.  Only the poor souls who still think we live in a Democracy do.  I won’t even call it a Republic, that died a silent death to cheers a long time ago.

It’s a machine and every day that we send our kids to it’s schools, that we swipe that credit card, that we buy the car and house we can’t afford, that we take out that loan that we will never pay back, that we tell ourselves we are sick and depressed and need a pill to make us happy, that we believe there is something wrong with our children because their bodies and souls are screaming to us to not imprison them in jails called schools with overwhelmed and trained guards called teachers and so we drug them so they can sit still… so the machine can do it’s thing.

Every single day that you participate in this madness, you hand over a part of your freedom.  You hand over a part of your humanity. You hand over good old common sense.   All so that a handful make huge profits.   There is no Freedom.  There is no choice.  The only Freedom and Choice is to pull away, to unplug from these institutions of control and death.  There are only 2 million Home Ed Families in America today.  Let’s make that 5 million, 15 million, 20 million.  Let’s work together to wipe out Government Regulation of our families.  Let’s prepare our children for real life, action and responsibility and not some Job and the illusion of choice.   Choosing between job security A or B, 600 channels and between puppet Red or puppet Blue is not a choice.

It’s all a big racket.   All of it.    They make money and we keep paying.  We pay with our children, our health, our financial freedom. We pay.

What’s left to do?   Leave it.  Don’t try to change it, IT CAN’T BE DONE.   Want to see it end?  Walk away from it.  Take that first step… and don’t look back.  Starve it.  Only then can we begin something new.

Original Articel

By: David Sirota
Tue Jan 18, 2011 at 12:00

Most of us fundamentally understand that our political system is deeply corrupt. Our politicians are bought and sold. Our capital city teems with corporate lobbyists and our government legislates “greed is good” at every chance it gets. This is not news.

What is news is just how deep the corruption and moneyed influence goes. It reaches not just into federal tax and trade and financial policies - it’s most likely right in the school house in your neighborhood (if you are lucky enough to still have a school in your neighborhood). That’s the overpowering conclusion to be drawn from Dissent magazine’s mind-blowingly devastating piece about the corruptive effects of huge corporate forces like the Gates and Broad Foundations, and the rise of the pernicious Education-Industrial Complex. Here’s an excerpt:

A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy-where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision-investing in education yields great bang for the buck…

To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests-the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study-break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.

The article, by Joann Barkan, is an absolute tour de force - and a must-read. It shows how a small handful of super-wealthy elites are using their money and political connections to hijack education policy. This might be OK if the heist was delivering tangible results - but it isn’t. In fact, it’s causing serious destruction in communities all over America.

What’s so troubling about this story is not just the ideologies that are being pushed by the corporate forces - it’s their hostile takeover of both the government that is supposed to be making dispassionate policy, and the media that is supposed to be objectively reporting on education. This is as sophisticated a campaign as we’ve ever seen in American public life, utilizing every instrument of control, from subsidized media outlets to policymakers regularly going through a corporate-government revolving door. And this is all being done under the auspices of seemingly altruistic philanthropic endeavors.

Again, this piece is a must-read - and it is that because the story has been so ignored by the rest of the media. It reminds us of just how aggressive Big Money is these days, how central in our lives it has become, and how the death of real journalism threatens to keep huge issues like this from public scrutiny

Original Article

- Professor X teaches at a private college and at a community college in the northeastern United States.

Americans are finally starting to ask: “Is all this higher education really necessary?”

Since the appearance in The Atlantic of my essay “In The Basement of the Ivory Tower” (2008), in which I questioned the wisdom of sending seemingly everyone in the United States through the rigors of higher education, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that I’m far from the only one with these misgivings. Indeed, to my surprise, I’ve discovered that rather than a lone crank, I’m a voice in a growing movement.

I hadn’t expected my essay, inspired by the frustrations of teaching students unprepared for the rigors of college-level work, to attract much notice. But the volume and vehemence of the feedback the piece generated was overwhelming. It drew more visitors than almost any other article on the Atlantic’s web site in 2008, and provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor. It even started turning up in the syllabi of college writing classes, and on the agendas of educational conferences.

 In the months and years since then - and especially now, as I prepare to add to the critical tumult with a book expanding on that original article - I find myself noticing similar sentiments elsewhere. Is it merely a matter of my becoming so immersed in the subject that I’m seeing it everywhere? I don’t think so. Start paying attention, and it becomes readily apparent that more and more Americans today are skeptical about the benefits of college.

“Some Say Bypassing a Higher Education Is Smarter Than Paying for a Degree,” reads a recent headline in The Washington Post. (The article, which addresses everything from higher education’s outsize price tag to its questionable correlation with career success, garnered more than 4,000 Facebook recommendations on the Post’s web site.) And just last month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a study suggesting that (gasp!) four-year college is perhaps not for everyone. Rather, for a growing proportion of students, the report contends, internships, apprenticeships, and vocational training would be far more beneficial.

Even for the academically inclined, the value of college in this economic climate is increasingly subject to question. “Is Going to an Elite College Worth The Cost?,” asked New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg in December. He surveyed economic studies, perused labor reports, and interviewed economists and sociologists to ascertain whether there’s really a significant payoff for choosing a swanky private college over someplace less glamorous. The answer?  Inconclusive. Parents, of course, obsess over the Ivy League admissions game, carefully studying up on how to give their kids an edge. And U.S. News & World Report’s annual college breakdown gets as much publicity these days as the Oscar nominations. But are those students fortunate enough to gain admission really getting an education worthy of the fuss? Reports of rampant grade inflation at many of these schools throws even a straight-A transcript from a prestigious university into question. (Some colleges, including Princeton, have taken to imposing limits on how many A’s instructors can award in any course, while the University of North Carolina has resorted to including median class grades on students’ transcripts so as to make it more readily apparent which A’s were earned in easy courses.) And a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, makes the case that students at elite colleges are being left to fend for themselves while their impressively credentialed professors take constant sabbaticals and leave the actual teaching to inexperienced assistants.

Yet despite the mounting skepticism about the value of a college degree, and in the face of the economic downturn, colleges continue to demand ever higher fees, saddling graduates with crushing debt along with their diplomas. In June of last year the Federal Reserve released new figures showing that the nation’s total student loan debt now sits at about $830 billion - for the first time surpassing the nation’s credit card debt. Student loan debt, it should be noted, is in many respects less forgiving than credit card debt: “These loans typically can’t be discharged in bankruptcy,” explains the Wall Street Journal. “They have different repayment terms, some of which have heavy consequences for borrowers who miss payments.” Some commentators have even suggested that the crimp the financial downturn is putting on students’ ability to get loans may in fact be doing those students a favor. In a piece titled, “Huge Debt Incurred for College Tuition Just Doesn’t Make the Grade,” syndicated financial columnist Michelle Singletary writes, “I’ll be honest. I think if college students and their parents have a harder time getting loans, that’s a good thing. Perhaps now more people will stop and consider the long-term implications of taking on so much of this so-called good debt.”

Adding to the anti-academic backlash is the fact that at a time when most businesses are contracting, colleges are growing inexorably, swallowing up residential neighborhoods in ways that alienate the towns and cities that host them. NYU’s ongoing expansion, for example, has angered many, leading some to dub it the “2031 Plan to Take Over the World.” (A June 2010 Bloomberg article, titled “New York University Assails Greenwich Village,” derides the university’s recent spate of building as an “overbearing onslaught.”)

And at the other end of Manhattan, Nick Sprayregen, the owner of several self-storage facilities in West Harlem has been making headlines with his battle to prevent his properties from eminent domain seizure for a planned Columbia University expansion. (Sprayregen was ultimately denied a hearing by the Supreme Court, but a New York appellate court ruled in 2009 that Columbia had inappropriately colluded with the state in its effort to take his land. “The record overwhelmingly establishes,” the judge wrote, “that the true beneficiary of the scheme to redevelop Manhattanville is not the community that is supposedly blighted, but rather Columbia University, a private elite education institution.”) Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Harvard is regularly lambasted these days for having bought up large swaths of land in working class neighborhoods across the Charles River, then failed to build as promised, leaving vacant lots and gaping, rat-infested holes in the ground.

*            *            *

Since when have colleges become so controversial? They used to embody humankind at its most elevated; now, they’re just another institution to be wary of.

I attended college in the 1970s, when higher education wasn’t newsworthy. When you went away to college, you really went away. I checked into a sylvan campus far away from everything, signed up for a meal plan, submerged myself in the library stacks, and essentially disappeared. Society took little note of academia’s somnolent doings because there was little to take note of. Student activism on any significant scale was moribund. The Vietnam War was over.

Colleges were viewed, in the main, as a hiatus from the real world. In my cinderblock dormitory, I watched no television and read no newspapers. We went to see few current movies—it wasn’t all that easy to get oneself off campus and to a theater, even for the likes of Woody Allen and Jill Clayburgh and Burt Reynolds—but we did dig revivals, Duck Soup and Flying Down to Rio and Sunset Boulevard. We seemed to dwell more in the dusty, monochromatic past than the present, even when we weren’t reading Chaucer and Tacitus. I spent four leisurely years imbibing great books and ideas. I could write a good literature paper—it seemed one of the few things I was suited to do—so a degree in English was my destiny. In those days, college was a lot cheaper, so I didn’t rack up much debt. I knew my degree wouldn’t get me a job, but no one had promised that it would. It wasn’t as though the college was hoodwinking me. My pursuit was rather solipsistic and no doubt shortsighted but harmless—a solitary pastime, like collecting penguin figurines or breeding orchids.

Twenty years later, I found myself teaching part-time at a small private college, and I was struck by the extent to which the institution had changed. College wasn’t the old place of retreat and meditation that I remembered—a place to quietly condition one’s mind with four years of intellectual crunches and sets and reps. It no longer seemed that intellectual a place at all. Now it was a place where students accumulated credits to advance at their jobs. College was very much part of the workaday world. All kinds of people attended because, if they wanted a bigger paycheck, they had no choice in the matter. The rolls had expanded dramatically, which seemed initially like a good thing. But I was teaching many students who weren’t prepared to do even high school work. I was expected to coax critically reasoned research papers from students who possessed no life of the mind at all: young and not-so-young men and women who didn’t read and thought not a whit about ideas.

The task was impossible. I couldn’t shake the sense that the college simply wanted to enroll as many students as possible - and that colleges in general had become more focused on the bottom line than in my day. The system had ended up expanding in ways that industry always expands: by jacking up prices, putting money into public relations, and broadening the customer base by marketing even to customers dubiously served by the product.

If my informal observations about the tenor of our national discourse are accurate, however, many of those customers are finally starting to ask some tough questions - chief among them: Is all this higher education really necessary?

And while the colleges do claim to instill critical thinking skills, these days, I’m not sure they’re thrilled to be the focus of so much critical thought.

Original Article

A new paper by Nobel Economist James Heckman is incredibly interesting if you care about the present and future of lower-income Americans.  He discusses why the War on Poverty failed, the importance of families in skill production, and why later-life interventions are not cost effective.

His argument is as follows:

1.  A lack of skills and not opportunity is the main challenge affecting workers of all racial groups.  In particular, a lack of soft skills hurts many workers.

2.  Families play a hugely important role in skill production.  While some of this is genetically transmitted, the family matters a lot.  Unfortunately, more and more kids are being raised in dysfunctional families.

3.  Very early involvement a child’s life is the most cost-effective intervention and this is best done by the family.  Public or private interventions need to figure out how to help families raise kids better early on without violating the sanctity of the family.

You should read the whole thing.

Educational Industrial Complex

I am predisposed to Heckman’s argument, especially the importance of family over later-in-life school intervention.  Virtually every teacher I know will say there is only so much the schools can do.  Testing, class size, charter schools might (or might not) be good, but teachers see a deficit of parenting as critical main hurdle.  Teachers feel like the positive impact they make is swamped by the negative impacts of dysfunctional families that have accumulated over the child’s life.  As the paper points out, even a pre-school teacher is a couple years too late.  A lot of damage has already been done to a kid with poor-quality parents.

Heckman pleads:

American public policy has to shift to acknowledge that the core skills needed for success in life are formed before children enter school. [bold in original]

By our nature we want to be gods who can engineer society.  We want to solve the educational problems with testing, class-size reductions, charter schools, technology in classrooms, Teach for America, merit pay, and so on.  What I call the “educational industrial complex” has blossomed to meet this demand.

Yet, if Heckman is right most interventions are, at best, investments with a low rate of return.  We must admit even 5 year-olds cannot be easily molded into productive citizens by a well-trained education army .  We must relinquish the belief in our collective ability to educate and admit families matter.

(This does not mean we shouldn’t try to make schools better.  My point, and Heckman’s, is that a budget constrained society may need to realize the cost effectiveness of the educational industrial complex relative to family-based approaches is poor.  We might need to think about spending resources differently.)

How to Improve Parenting

Heckman tries to show you get the most bang for your buck by targeting children at a very early age.  He also emphasizes a “government as parent” model is disastrous.  Individuals, private organizations, and the government should be asking how they can help parents be better parents.

My impression is that you don’t teach parenting from a guidebook.  Teaching parenting is a messy process that requires personal attention and getting involved in people’s lives.  Lowering class size is easy.  Working day-in, day-out alongside a new mother to help her parent better than her parents is hard.  This is all necessarily hard for the government to do well.  We all should think hard about how we can help others parent well.

I think our own president is an example of good parenting in less-than-optimal circumstances.  They were not rich, but his mother and grandparents cared deeply about his character and education.  Do you remember this ad from the campaign?:

Candidate Obama: “She’d wake me up at four thirty in the morning and we’d sit there and go through my lessons and I used to complain and grumble and she’d say well this is no picknick for me either Buster.”

Voice-over: His life was shaped by the values he learned as a boy. Hard work, honesty, self-reliance, respect for other people, kindness, faith.

The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.
By Professor X
June 2008 Atlantic Magazine

I work part-time in the evenings as an adjunct instructor of English. I teach two courses, Introduction to College Writing (English 101) and Introduction to College Literature (English 102), at a small private college and at a community college. The campuses are physically lovely—quiet havens of ornate stonework and columns, Gothic Revival archways, sweeping quads, and tidy Victorian scalloping. Students chat or examine their cell phones or study languidly under spreading trees. Balls click faintly against bats on the athletic fields. Inside the arts and humanities building, my students and I discuss Shakespeare, Dubliners, poetic rhythms, and Edward Said. We might seem, at first glance, to be enacting some sort of college idyll. We could be at Harvard. But this is not Harvard, and our classes are no idyll. Beneath the surface of this serene and scholarly mise-en-scène roil waters of frustration and bad feeling, for these colleges teem with students who are in over their heads.

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

Some of their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old. Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home and family. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings. I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.

My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading “Araby” or “Barn Burning,” their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?

The goal of English 101 is to instruct students in the sort of expository writing that theoretically will be required across the curriculum. My students must venture the compare-and-contrast paper, the argument paper, the process-analysis paper (which explains how some action is performed—as a lab report might), and the dreaded research paper, complete with parenthetical citations and a listing of works cited, all in Modern Language Association format. In 102, we read short stories, poetry, and Hamlet, and we take several stabs at the only writing more dreaded than the research paper: the absolutely despised Writing About Literature.

Class time passes in a flash—for me, anyway, if not always for my students. I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point. When I am at my best, and the students are in an attentive mood—generally, early in the semester—the room crackles with positive energy. Even the cops-to-be feel driven to succeed in the class, to read and love the great books, to explore potent themes, to write well.

The bursting of our collective bubble comes quickly. A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught.

Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.

In each of my courses, we discuss thesis statements and topic sentences, the need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desirable, what constitutes a compelling subject. I explain, I give examples, I cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening, when the class is over and I come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task, as I’m sure my students do. I envision the lot of us driving home, solitary scholars in our cars, growing sadder by the mile.

Our textbook boils effective writing down to a series of steps. It devotes pages and pages to the composition of a compare-and-contrast essay, with lots of examples and tips and checklists. “Develop a plan of organization and stick to it,” the text chirrups not so helpfully. Of course any student who can, does, and does so automatically, without the textbook’s directive. For others, this seems an impossible task. Over the course of 15 weeks, some of my best writers improve a little. Sometimes my worst writers improve too, though they rarely, if ever, approach base-level competence.

How I envy professors in other disciplines! How appealing seems the straightforwardness of their task! These are the properties of a cell membrane, kid. Memorize ’em, and be ready to spit ’em back at me. The biology teacher also enjoys the psychic ease of grading multiple-choice tests. Answers are right or wrong. The grades cannot be questioned. Quantifying the value of a piece of writing, however, is intensely subjective, and English teachers are burdened with discretion. (My students seem to believe that my discretion is limitless. Some of them come to me at the conclusion of a course and matter-of-factly ask that I change a failing grade because they need to graduate this semester or because they worked really hard in the class or because they need to pass in order to receive tuition reimbursement from their employer.)

I wonder, sometimes, at the conclusion of a course, when I fail nine out of 15 students, whether the college will send me a note either (1) informing me of a serious bottleneck in the march toward commencement and demanding that I pass more students, or (2) commending me on my fiscal ingenuity—my high failure rate forces students to pay for classes two or three times over.

What actually happens is that nothing happens. I feel no pressure from the colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don’t mention all those students who have failed my courses, and I don’t bring them up. There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.

Recently, I gave a student a failing grade on her research paper. She was a woman in her 40s; I will call her Ms. L. She looked at her paper, and my comments, and the grade. “I can’t believe it,” she said softly. “I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper.”

From the beginning of our association vis-à-vis the research paper, I knew that there would be trouble with Ms. L.

When I give out this assignment, I usually bring the class to the college library for a lesson on Internet-based research. I ask them about their computer skills, and some say they have none, fessing up to being computer illiterate and saying, timorously, how hopeless they are at that sort of thing. It often turns out, though, that many of them have at least sent and received e-mail and Googled their neighbors, and it doesn’t take me long to demonstrate how to search for journal articles in such databases as Academic Search Premier and JSTOR.

Ms. L., it was clear to me, had never been on the Internet. She quite possibly had never sat in front of a computer. The concept of a link was news to her. She didn’t know that if something was blue and underlined, you could click on it. She was preserved in the amber of 1990, struggling with the basic syntax of the World Wide Web. She peered intently at the screen and chewed a fingernail. She was flummoxed.

I had responsibilities to the rest of my students, so only when the class ended could I sit with her and work on some of the basics. It didn’t go well. She wasn’t absorbing anything. The wall had gone up, the wall known to every teacher at every level: the wall of defeat and hopelessness and humiliation, the wall that is an impenetrable barrier to learning. She wasn’t hearing a word I said.

“You might want to get some extra help,” I told her. “You can schedule a private session with the librarian.”

“I’ll get it,” she said. “I just need a little time.”

“You have some computer-skills deficits,” I told her. “You should address them as soon as you can.” I don’t have cause to use much educational jargon, but deficits has often come in handy. It conveys the seriousness of the situation, the student’s jaw-dropping lack of ability, without being judgmental. I tried to jostle her along. “You should schedule that appointment right now. The librarian is at the desk. ”

“I realize I have a lot of work to do,” she said.

Our dialogue had turned oblique, as though we now inhabited a Pinter play.

The research-paper assignment is meant to teach the fundamental mechanics of the thing: how to find sources, summarize or quote them, and cite them, all the while not plagiarizing. Students must develop a strong thesis, not just write what is called a “passive report,” the sort of thing one knocks out in fifth grade on Thomas Edison. This time around, the students were to elucidate the positions of scholars on two sides of a historical controversy. Why did Truman remove MacArthur? Did the United States covertly support the construction of the Berlin Wall? What really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin? Their job in the paper, as I explained it, was to take my arm and introduce me as a stranger to scholars A, B, and C, who stood on one side of the issue, and to scholars D, E, and F, who were firmly on the other—as though they were hosting a party.

A future state trooper snorted. “That’s some dull party,” he said.

At our next meeting after class in the library, Ms. L. asked me whether she could do her paper on abortion. What exactly, I asked, was the historical controversy? Well, she replied, whether it should be allowed. She was stuck, I realized, in the well-worn groove of assignments she had done in high school. I told her that I thought the abortion question was more of an ethical dilemma than a historical controversy.

“I’ll have to figure it all out,” she said.

She switched her topic a half-dozen times; perhaps it would be fairer to say that she never really came up with one. I wondered whether I should just give her one, then decided against it. Devising a topic was part of the assignment.

“What about gun control?” she asked.

I sighed. You could write, I told her, about a particular piece of firearms-related legislation. Historians might disagree, I said, about certain aspects of the bill’s drafting. Remember, though, the paper must be grounded in history. It could not be a discussion of the pros and cons of gun control.

“All right,” she said softly.

Needless to say, the paper she turned in was a discussion of the pros and cons of gun control. At least, I think that was the subject. There was no real thesis. The paper often lapsed into incoherence. Sentences broke off in the middle of a line and resumed on the next one, with the first word inappropriately capitalized. There was some wavering between single- and double-spacing. She did quote articles, but cited only databases—where were the journals themselves? The paper was also too short: a bad job, and such small portions.

“I can’t believe it,” she said when she received her F. “I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper.”

She most certainly hadn’t written a college paper, and she was a long way from doing so. Yet there she was in college, paying lots of tuition for the privilege of pursuing a degree, which she very likely needed to advance at work. Her deficits don’t make her a bad person or even unintelligent or unusual. Many people cannot write a research paper, and few have to do so in their workaday life. But let’s be frank: she wasn’t working at anything resembling a college level.

I gave Ms. L. the F and slept poorly that night. Some of the failing grades I issue gnaw at me more than others. In my ears rang her plaintive words, so emblematic of the tough spot in which we both now found ourselves. Ms. L. had done everything that American culture asked of her. She had gone back to school to better herself, and she expected to be rewarded for it, not slapped down. She had failed not, as some students do, by being absent too often or by blowing off assignments. She simply was not qualified for college. What exactly, I wondered, was I grading? I thought briefly of passing Ms. L., of slipping her the old gentlewoman’s C-minus. But I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair to the other students. By passing Ms. L., I would be eroding the standards of the school for which I worked. Besides, I nurse a healthy ration of paranoia. What if she were a plant from The New York Times doing a story on the declining standards of the nation’s colleges? In my mind’s eye, the front page of a newspaper spun madly, as in old movies, coming to rest to reveal a damning headline:

THIS IS A C? Illiterate Mess Garners ‘Average’ Grade

Adjunct Says Student ‘Needed’ to Pass, ‘Tried Hard’

No, I would adhere to academic standards, and keep myself off the front page.

We think of college professors as being profoundly indifferent to the grades they hand out. My own professors were fairly haughty and aloof, showing little concern for the petty worries, grades in particular, of their students. There was an enormous distance between students and professors. The full-time, tenured professors at the colleges where I teach may likewise feel comfortably separated from those whom they instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight hours, tend to be younger than mine. Many of them are in school on their parents’ dime. Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault: too much time spent texting, too little time with the textbooks.

But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.

During breaks, my students scatter to various corners and niches of the building, whip out their cell phones, and try to maintain a home life. Burdened with their own assignments, they gamely try to stay on top of their children’s. Which problems do you have to do? … That’s not too many. Finish that and then do the spelling … No, you can’t watch Grey’s Anatomy.

Adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students—whatever you want to call it—is a substantial profit center for many colleges. Like factory owners, school administrators are delighted with this idea of mounting a second shift of learning in their classrooms, in the evenings, when the full-time students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits of higher education as reading Facebook and playing beer pong. If colleges could find a way to mount a third, graveyard shift, as Henry Ford’s Willow Run did at the height of the Second World War, I believe that they would.

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, but we are academic button men. I roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.”

I knew that Ms. L.’s paper would fail. I knew it that first night in the library. But I couldn’t tell her that she wasn’t ready for an introductory English class. I wouldn’t be saving her from the humiliation of defeat by a class she simply couldn’t handle. I’d be a sexist, ageist, intellectual snob.

In her own mind, Ms. L. had triumphed over adversity. In her own mind, she was a feel-good segment on Oprah. Everyone wants to triumph. But not everyone can—in fact, most can’t. If they could, it wouldn’t be any kind of a triumph at all. Never would I want to cheapen the accomplishments of those who really have conquered college, who were able to get past their deficits and earn a diploma, maybe even climbing onto the college honor roll. That is truly something.

One of the things I try to do on the first night of English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels that the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has so far proven impossible. My students don’t read much, as a rule, and though I think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. Oddly, there are no movies that they all have seen—well, except for one. They’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have caught it multiple times. So we work with the old warhorse of a quest narrative. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. Everybody knows that one—perhaps all too well. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her. I skip the denouement: the intellectually ambitious scarecrow proudly mangles the Pythagorean theorem and is awarded a questionable diploma in a dreamland far removed from reality. That’s art holding up a mirror all too closely to our own poignant scholarly endeavors.

Posted on 06.8.11
By Sahil Kapur

Acting on orders from the U.S. Department of Education, a S.W.A.T. team broke into a California home Tuesday at 6 a.m. and reportedly roughed up a man — all because of his estranged wife’s defaulted student loans. She wasn’t there.

Yet, Kenneth Wright of the city of Stockton was grabbed by the neck by handcuffed before he and his three young children were put in a police car as the officers searched his house, he told ABC News10. He said he was in his underwear the whole time.

“They busted down my door for this. It wasn’t even me,” Wright told the local news station. “All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door.”

Local police were reportedly not involved in the incident.

Original Article

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I am a 24 year old who was unschooled since the 4th grade.