ARTICLE: Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School

[Ryan Goble]

I read this article in Harper's and was able to get a hold of the PDF. It is written by an English PhD, so that will explain the POV just a bit. The whole article is attached below but I'm pasting some of the juicy paragraphs below. It is a nice link to a previous editorial: ARTICLE: The idea that we must choose between science and humanitie....

Dehumanized:

When math and science rule the school

Harper's Magazine September 2009

Some bits:

state of the union

Then there’s amortization,

the deadliest of all;

amortization

of the heart and soul.

—Vladimir Mayakovsky

***

That we are more nurture than nature; that what we are taught, generally speaking, is what we become; that torturers are made slowly, not minted in the womb. As are those who resist them. I believe that what rules us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions, and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us; that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed age, “the human condition” can we hope to make our condition more human, not less.

***

In a visible world, the invisible does not compute; in a corporate culture, hypnotized by quarterly results and profit margins, the gradual sifting of political sentiment is of no value; in a horizontal world of “information” readily convertible to product, the verticality of wisdom has no place. Show me the spreadsheet on skepticism.

***

That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.

We’re pounding swords into cogs. They work in Pyongyang too.

***

Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital, and please note what’s modifying what. It’s about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy. And what of our political perch, you ask, whether legitimate or no? Thank you for your question. Management has decided that the new business plan has no room for frivolity. Those who can justify their presence in accordance with its terms may remain; the rest will be downsized or discontinued. Alternatively, since studies have suggested that humanizing the workspace may increase efficiency, a few may be kept on, the curricular equivalent of potted plants.

***

Times editorialist, Thomas Friedman, begins a column on the desperate state of American education by quoting Bill Gates. Gates, Friedman informs us, gave a “remarkable speech” in which he declared that “American high schools are obsolete.” This is bad, Friedman says. Bill Gates is telling us that our high schools, “even when they are working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.”

What do our kids need to know today? As far as Friedman is concerned, whatever will get them hired by Bill Gates. “Let me translate Mr. Gates’s words,” he writes. What Mr. Gates is saying is: “If we don’t fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids.” Really worried now, Friedman goes to talk to Lawrence Summers, who explains that “for the first time in our history,” we’re facing “competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China and Asia.” The race is on. In order to thrive, Summers says, we will “have to make sure that many more Americans can get as far ahead as their potential will take them,” and quickly, because India and China are coming up on the inside. It’s “not just about current capabilities,” Friedman concludes, by this point quoting the authors of The Only Sustainable Edge, “it’s about the relative pace and trajectories of capability-building.”

***

It can be touching to watch supporters of the arts contorting themselves to fit. In a brochure produced by The Education Commission of the States, titled “The Arts, Education and the Creative Economy,” we learn that supporting the arts in our schools is a good idea because “state and local leaders are realizing that the arts and culture are vital to economic development.” In fact, everyone is realizing it. Several states “have developed initiatives that address the connections between economic growth and the arts and culture.” The New England states have formed “the Creative Economy Council . . . a partnership among business, government and cultural -leaders.” It seems that “a new economy has emerged . . . driven by ideas, information technology and globalization” (by this point, the role of painting, say, is getting a bit murky), and that “for companies and organizations to remain competitive and cutting edge, they must attract and retain individuals who can think creatively.”

You can almost see the air creeping back into the balloon: We can do this! We can make the case to management! We can explain, as Mike Huckabee does, that trimming back funding for the arts would be shortsighted because “experts and futurists warn that the future economy will be driven by the ‘creative class.’” We can cite “numerous studies” affirming that “a student schooled in music improves his or her SAT and ACT scores in math,” and that “creative students are better problem solvers . . . a trait the business world begs for in its workforce.” They’ll see we have some value after all. They’ll let us stay.

***

Nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant.

—Dennis Overbye

***

All of this helps explain why, in today’s repressive societies, the sciences do not come in for the same treatment as the humanities. Not only are the sciences, with a few notable exceptions, politically neutral; their specialized languages tend to segregate them from the wider population, making ideological contagion difficult. More importantly, their work, quite often, is translatable into “product,” which any aspiring dictatorship recognizes as an unambiguous good, whereas the work of the humanities almost never is.

To put it simply, science addresses the outer world; the humanities, the inner one. Science explains how the material world is now for all men; the humanities, in their indirect, slippery way, offer the raw materials from which the individual constructs a self—a self distinct from others. The sciences, to push the point a bit, produce people who study things, and who can therefore, presumably, make or fix or improve these things. The humanities don’t.

***

If these bits caught your attention you may enjoy the whole article below.

Enjoy!

RRG:)