A short article in Nation supports other reading I have been doing.
More and more evidence suggests that the eventual income level of a child is directly tied to the income level of the parents, and more and more this income level is determined by the ability of the child to get a college education.
Class mobility has declined significantly in the last 10 to 15 years. Personally, I don't think social mobility ever went up in any significant degree from the 70s to the 80s. Experts would disagree with me. But a lot of the people who did go to college in the 70s and 80s went to community colleges. A good and democractic idea, with something like an 80% drop out rate.
It seems to me clear as I have contended and been ignored for contending college is a middle class indoctrination and boot camp. And it's overall goal has nothing to do with what I call education but with the acquiring of units towards the acquistion of a certification for a degree to do a job any monkey, with or without a degree, could do.
Higher education as currently practiced serves only social, political and ecomomic needs and not educational ones at all.
This helps me to understand my students a bit.
They have never not thought about going to college. They have always known they would go and always been told they would go. And they go not, as kids once said, to be well rounded, but to get a job, and this attitude in turn has utterly warped any sort of educational agenda higher education might at one time have had.
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