Education is a phenomenon so different from anything else that it cannot be accurately compared to anything else and so very difficult to understand. This is clear ever since Plato who regarded education as consisting of a statement considered and somehow incorporated or modified into being a statement already asserted as one’s own, as happens when you say a person has a point when he or she offers an advantage of a contrary political opinion. What such dialogue does requires some generosity of spirit to open oneself up to the possibility that the opposing point of view has some credence, but to describe it that way is already metaphorical, a way to allude to education rather than get to the heart or essence of the matter. Yes, education is like open mindedness, but that is not exact because education is not just or essentially an emotion, but the ways in which distinct facts or ideas get somehow conjoined.
There are other matters that are sui generis. One contemporary example is birth, a biological process whereby in sexual reproduction a new being is created through mixing the sperm and the ovum to create a new entity. People inquire as to when that new being comes to exist? When the zygote is made? When it implants on the uterine wall? When its heart begins pumping? When it emerges from the womb? When it survives the first night when put to the test by swaddling a baby but leaving it outside in the cold, which is what the Romans did? A question that has been debated and decided in law and philosophy for millenia and to the present day but really unanswerable because to ascribe “beginning” to this distinctive phenomenon is inappropriate in that the process is just what happens in biology even if metaphysicians and lawyers can say what they think is definitive. There is also a class of phenomena that are also so distinctive that they can be treated as each one unique. These are the arts of literature, music painting and ballet, even if all of them are deliberately crafted performances but each creating a special kind of experience, and even though Cassirer thought of the arts as based on symbolic representation and so the sine qua non of human consciousness.
Now consider a very different kettle of fish: a social policy. Affirmative action was a policy designed by the Nixon Administration to allow minority members certain advantages in getting school placements and is therefore totally different from the predecessor policy, which can simply be called “racial discrimination”, because minority members were disadvantaged in such placements. How does this policy accommodate or alter education during the fifty or so years since that policy was enunciated? That is my basic question but antecedent to that is the question of what metaphor or association with education was being invoked when people were speaking of affirmative action as having righted the long standing wrongs of racial descrimination of education.
The kind of education that is most associated with it as an ideal as a consequence of education is selfhood. This can be read in to Plato as treating education as the cultivation of self because Socrates is insistent on self examination, but that is a misreading because people cannot alter their souls, those having been assigned from the available ones who reside before and after they lead their lives and so not subject to improvement of character through education. Rather, the idea of education as the cultivation of self occurs in the late eighteenth Century with such personages as Rousseau and Goethe. Every life is a place for education, for the flowering of the distinctive self. This paen to the joys of building character as an end in itself is presented very clearly in Mattfhew Arnold and also adopted as well by that very political writer, W. E. B. DeBois, who reflects in his “The Souls of Black Folks”, that the aim of education is for people to become truly free because they become cosmopolitan, which means they can savor and appreciate the literatures and cultures of many people, not just their own, and are thereby equal in spirit to any of them or the groups of which they are members. That is true equality, something to be arrived at through political and social means but itself the end of where society should come.
Universities have invoked the idea of cosmopolitanism as the reason for affirmative action, which means letting in otherwise unshown to be as able candidates so as to achieve what they call diversity, the idea being that people will educate one another by having peop[le of different groups mingle with one another in the classrooms and in the dormitories. Everyone is therefore better off because of diversity. But the integration of different sorts of people is half-hearted. People are not assigned to classes so as to insure racial diversity and people are not assigned roommates to insure diversity, though in the past white students from only northern cities were ruined with black students. The idea of cosmopolitanism is that people who go to school so as to learn something other than their own cultures and backgrounds, to experience what they do not already know about. But that is very far from the ideal value as reported by a number of black students who enter into collegiate education. Rather, the recent ASU incident, where a student with an inappropriate slogan who was studying at a minority cultural center was confronted with a Black student who said such a slogan was inappropriate or offensive. The idea is that minority members are to be protected from remarks they might find offensive. There are places where students are told that they are to be warned that students discussed in class might be controversial. Students are to be protected from shocking ideas. But the idea of a cosmopolitan education is that classrooms are safe places precisely in that they are free to say what they please so as to try out their new ideas. No classroom is safe from controversy. Affirmative Action was to bring students of color to go into the mainstream rather than to become enclaves embattled over and against those who had previously found the others to be foreign, but to learn from what they can of them. To do otherwise is to infantilize them so that they can remain thinking about what they did before they entered college or university. To be sure, Historically Black Colleges are confident enough so that they can pepper their own offerings with ethnic inclined studies because that is where they can learn about their own heritages, but most of the curriculum is standard fare. English courses at Fisk or Howard include Shakespeare and the Victorian novel. But there is some question as to whether the point of education is exposure to what you don’t know rather than confirmation of what you already think.
An issue of education that is of very long standing impacts on the question of Affirmative Action. There is a long debate about whether education is easy or hard to do. Plato would have thought to settle the matter in the Euthyphro, where Socrates needles someone who is inclined to support him in his upcoming trial by probing why the man is making ceremonies for the gods. The man does not want to be disabused as to whether there are rites, after all, that other people follow, and after a while dismisses himself, having perhaps been satisfied that Socrates is indeed someone who misleads the young, something of which hangs on in most education in that education incites unexpected and foreign thoughts and feelings. .
Rousseau thought it was easy enough to get educated. Just let young people expose themselves to experience and they will learn from trial and error, teachers needed mainly to keep the students by testing what will happen if the students put their hands into fire. Curiosity is enough of an incentive. Dewey modifies that by suggesting that practical activities, such as learning craft-like skills, will generate into abstractions because people are naturally apt to do so. Working a lathe will lead to figuring out mathematics. Both Rousseauist and Deweyite education mean that schools and customs get in the way of people developing an ever more clarified sense and knowledge of the world. They are the villains that stymie learning and should be seriously reconstructed so that students are free to learn, and that is wh
They should be unencumbered, schools less intrusive and authoritative and authoritarian, less modeled by Charles Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind, who forced people to learn definitions and formulas rather than try to shape definitions out of their own experience. A circus rider knows more about a horse than does an Aristotelian definition. An underprivileged student will apply his own initiative to figure things out if he or she is given some space and supported in exploring what he or she can, perhaps beginning with estimates and guesses and partially correct answers than applying algebraic algorithms that are to be answered with exactness and through rote memorization, those methods stifling attempts to learn. Don’t crack the whip on young students. That is not dumbing education down; it is that there are many roads to learning.
On the other hand, Kant thought that education was very hard and so schools had to inculcate into their students the need to be disciplined so as to master things. Learning is contrary to ordinary inclinations. Thought is itself difficult and so contrary to usual thoughts as well as because what is learned is contrary to ordinary experience where people are allowed to comfort themselves with obvious platitudes rather than to hold cliches up to standards of evidence and reasoning. Schools have to urge people to learn, to overreach their expectations, because otherwise they will not learn. There is no reason for an easy A or for praising people for meeting an ever lowered standard or by making excuses that minority students can’t be expected to learn more. That is because there is an endless depth of facts and ideas to learn and however much you succeed you inevitably come short. It isn’t just that minority students have to do twice as much to show themselves as equals to others; it is that learning is a hard taskmaster and have to avoid being sheltered from coming up short, able enough to know enough of what better prepared students may already know rather than compared to a pool of inadequately prepared students. That is a reason for Affirmative Action. Students exposed to only the higher standards of education will know what level they have to achieve even if the minority students may be doing the best of a weak student pool.
The balance of the truth is probably with Kant rather than Dewey. People are not open to new ideas, preferring their old ones, or simply accustomed to custom and not thinking about thoughts at all. An uncle of mine was offended when I suggested that a college education opened me up to the world in that he was perfectly reasonable in conducting his life and thinking his thoughts without having gotten a college education. But in the Sixties and the Seventies, education seemed like the royal road to success because the job structure rewarded professional based vocations while manufacturing and other low tech jobs were languishing. This was the period of the Rust Belt when northern and Great Lakes cities were languishing as America de-industrialized though soon to recover because of computer technologies which revolutionized office work and required fewer people to produce even more manufacturing goods that had previously been produced. So nowadays there are jobs for non-college people or only for associate degree graduates who can get jobs in allied medical work or in servicing wind farms and solar panels. But the idea back then was that everyone wanted to go to college unless they were to be prevented from doing so by discrimination and Affirmative Action would solve that problem.
It didn’t work out that way because, as I say, education is hard. It not only requires diligence; it also requires an openness to spirit that is the result, we can by now attest, to growing up in a well structured family life, something that not always happens because of poverty, children not exposed to as many words as the children of the middle class, and also because children of the poor have lower birth size and bad pre and post natal nutrition. No wonder the IQ scores of Black people are lower than that of white people. It is not genetic, only congenital and cultural. Parents from different social classes also want different educational goals and those make sense in their circumstances. Poor parents want children to learn to be orderly because that is what they want their children to accomplish while middle class children want their parents to become proficient or skillful because that will provide them with a solid living while well to do parents want their children to be free thinkers, innovative, because tht is what they will need to cultivate in their heads so as to become successful. Children get different educations, whatever is in the curriculum, because of what they are inclined to learn as what learning is.
Given the resistances to education, not everyone, and especially if they are poor, do not run to education or soon tire of it, college a way of passing the time while growing up without much concern for the icing classrooms add or detract from the college experience, filled with experiments at dating, meeting friends from away from home and enjoying the college life of sports and other distractions.Recent claims by the University of Michigan and the University of Texas claim that it is necessary to sustain affirmative action because the deprivation of that program would not make them able to achieve significant enrollment of minority members, despite the fact that a great deal of money is spent on recruitment of minorities. Minority youth are voting with their feet. They are not enticed into admissions into high quality universities because they don’t want to go there just so as to follow an old guideline that success rests on such admissions.
Affirmative Action has become obsolete because the educational mix, the parameters which allow for a successful career, have changed since Affirmative Action was implemented in the Sixties and Seventies. Rather than a place where college met a mixture of humanistic skills that led to cosmopolitanism with pre-professional education such as medicine and law and even, lately, of business, the burden of school had become vocationally oriented, measured in what it did for job preparation. How much more money would people make through getting through an education? That replaced the idea that education was something for the elite and those selected and highly qualified candidates who would do well anyway because of talent and breeding even if formal education was a leg up. Rather, the humanistic emphasis that carved people into becoming of a higher social class as well as of extra wealth was replaced by the skills that could be learned about particular kinds of work. That meant precisely the kind of education that was offered this past year by Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan for providing pre-k for everyone and fourteen rather than 12 years of education. An associate degree would provide good paying jobs without requiring people to study much Plato or Shakespeare.
Sarah Day O’Conner, in her 2003 decision about Affirmative Action, in Grutter v. Bollinger , thought of Affirmative Action as a necessar evil in that it was a form of discrimination for people of color and against Chinese children and so a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment was had to be accepted so as to deal with the results that discrimination had so long lasted in American society. She thought that perhaps a quarter century further of Affirmative Action would be necessary so that its wrongs could be righted. That is about right as the time frame until now when the question of Affirmative Action arises again and is likely to be overthrown by the now Conservative Supreme Court. But her reason for doing so to end Affirmative Action is not that it has spent its course but that it no longer serves the need for including minority students within elite colleges and universities now that state and small private colleges are also overwhelmingly job oriented and so no longer feel inclined to the idea of mixing with the swells and so getting acclimated to the higher echelons which the abler Black students find it much more easily to enter elite universities than had previously been the case. Good riddence to discrimination and allow people to get the kind of educations that they want rtther than cling to the notion that students get well rounded and a part of the upper class because they are exposed to the curricula and rituals of what was and I assume remain the formats of an Ivy League education.
It pains me to say this because I was the product of an Ivy education where liberal arts could be the basis for upward mobility. But the institutions of education have changed and the idea of becoming a well rounded person capable of at the same time becoming culturally literate, able to be an enlightened citizen, and also able to gain a satisfying and well remunerated occupation are no longer thought of as entwined. Rather than people becoming indentured to their student loans, people can follow different aims even if I wonder how a soul can be satisfied unless the person combines all three of these necessities: work, culture and citizenship, The next generation, the post-Affirmative Action generation, will have to sort these three out.