Education and the Unemployed

Barbara Ehrenreich makes the point in her new Bait and Switch that modern corporate practices of laying off workers of long-standing loyalty and productiveness will ultimately be counter-productive for this nation. (She doesn't say "for the world," but I think it may be extrapolated to that.) And it seems to me that modern America post-NCLB education will be a central player in the continuance of this.

Bait and Switch, a follow-up to her eye-opening Nickel and Dimed, is an account of how Ehrenreich went undercover as an unemployed woman looking for a job in early 21st century America. It is a long and painful and sad journey through an America that is cold, heartless, phony, exploitative, and demeaning beyond belief. It shows how the unemployed and underemployed white collar workers in America, seven million in number yet uncounted by cleverly massaged governmental statistics on unemployment, have been sold a bill of goods by our society. They were told, get a good education, work hard, be creative and thoughtful, and you will have a rewarding job, health insurance, and security for life. In fact, those who get a good education and work hard are likely to be among the tens of millions of workers laid off summarily and unable to find any form of employment even close to what they have a right to expect or what the nation and world need of them. As educated and skilled workers commanding good wages in the new American economy, they are most threatening to mega-corporations' profits and thus need to jettisoned in the name of the bottom line.

It is of course too early for the NCLB to have affected these people, most of who are in their forties or fifties with decades of productive work behind them, but it's important to examine the role the current trends in education will play in perpetuating that world. On one hand, it may be argued that a mindless education that teaches nothing so much as how to take dumbed-down tests, follow orders, and not think may be the perfect education for a corporate America that values exactly those traits. Ehrenreich notes that as her job searches proved more and more futile, it became clear that one thing working against her was her intelligence and ability to think independently. (Others were of course her age and her femaleness, as you might imagine.) For corporate America, the much-sought-after "Team Player" is really just bizspeak for "Unquestioning Order-Taker." She ends her book with a sobering recounting of the challenges facing America's educated and experienced and skillful unemployed and a sort of call to action: "Nothing will change until America's disposable and disposed-of white-collar workers begin to come together to reclaim their dignity and self-worth...." (page 247). She has developed a website, http://www.unitedprofessionals.org, to jump-start this coming together.

Now, who better to come together in a mass refusal to take it anymore than millions of highly educated, creative, intelligent people who have been grievously wronged? Imagine a new Cesar Chavez stepping up and mobilizing all that intelligence!

Which is why education is such a threat to the wealthy Republican right, why they take such amazing steps as teaching "creationism" in place of real science, promoting private school vouchers so that privatized schools can make more money off our children, continuing to channel huge amounts of money into already wealthy suburban white school systems while withholding funds from inner city schools as "punishment" for failing to meet "standards," and, most important, using the NCLB to dumb down education to ensure generations of non-thinking, multiple-choice-test-taking, order-accepting students.

Now, if this were just a matter of isolated entities like Exxon-Mobil or IBM existing in their own little worlds, with no effect upon most of us, I would have no complaint. But in fact, these corporations engaged in laying off, downsizing, outsourcing in the pursuit of ever-larger profits are citizens of America and of the World. Ehrenreich makes a good case that it's not only profits that impel them; even worse, it's sheer incompetence, a culture built on firing the educated and talented and experienced and creative and successful, and rewarding the glassy-eyed yes-men. (The sexist reference is intentional here.)

We have the resources and education and brain-power in this country right now to solve many of our problems, indeed many of the world's problems. We need medical researchers and nurses and software engineers and writers and accountants; most of all, we need thousands and tens of thousands more teachers. And we have them, but they are being systematically cut out of useful positions, stripped of healthcare, forced to spend 10-12 hours a day looking for a job--any job, even if it's a people greeter at a Walmart. Our economy, once the envy of the world for its ability to marshall its brains and resources to solve huge problems, allows New Orleans to drown and doesn't even know how to save it. Children educated under the NCLB, multiple-choice tested into submission, won't have a clue about how to come up with a smart, creative solution to anything.