(In tandem to Jason’s piece on Higher Ed in last week’s Sundayed, Tim thought it would be good to provide his unique insight into the situation. Tim, a Cultural Studies professor at St. Edward’s University, is seeing these changes from the inside, where Jason’s insight comes from the outside. We collectively look forward to your comments.)

This fall we will see the greatest college enrollment in 40 years, and of course this comes with good reason. Now, more than ever, the high school diploma has become fairly useless. Employers and creditors expect a person to have completed high school the way Taco Bell expects people to wear shoes in their establishments. Sure, some people don’t, I will admit that, but it is the norm. This lack of love for a high school degree has funneled not only the youth of America towards higher education, but also the mid-career folks who are looking for advancement in their professional lives, after all times are hard. In the process, colleges have reached something of a crisis point. At the college level we are beginning to examine the business of “education” versus “schooling”.

This spring, Michigan State University quietly announced the disintegration of American Studies and Humanities courses, a pragmatic move by the Spartans. This is an effort to move away from “education”, a system dedicated to problem solving and deduction, and a move towards “schooling” a Pavlovian structure commonly credited to Eastern European schools designed to prepare students for factory work and the military. Michigan State is, essentially, the farm school for the poster-boy-state of recent hard times and by heading towards a system of conditioned response, a system devoted to standardized testing and away from critical thought, is simply more attractive to a student who wants to serve fours years of schooling and, hopefully, get a decent job when they are done. Anyways, it can be difficult business to administer a standardized test around a humanitarian subject. Have you ever taken an exam on the implications of animated gender roles during the Disney Renaissance of the early 1990’s? Better yet, have you ever explained to incoming freshmen as to why they should learn such things in college?

With full disclosure I am a college professor, and I do teach a unit on the implications of animated gender roles during the Disney Renaissance of the early 1990’s (Hint: they were more damaging for men then women in the gist of eating disorders, but I am not here to “educate” you.) Coming out of high school my students are accustomed to the ideas of schooling. So, I like to tell my students how I handled my final exam in Philosophy when I was their age. My professor placed a chair on a table and asked us to prove the chair was not on said table by using any matters we had learned in his class. The other students noticeably panicked. I thought the girl sitting next to me was about to cry. Many of us were hoping for a multiple choice, standardized test. I looked at my bluebook, and titled my exam “The Metaphysics of a Chair”, then wrote one small phrase, “What chair?” I gave the professor my exam and walked out the door. Later, I got a handwritten letter via campus mail from that teacher (this was before email was in wide use). The letter said. “Good work, Mr. Braun. The business of being a student is not A+B=C. The business of being a student is 2+2=?” I tell my student’s that is the difference between “education” and “schooling”.

Higher education is a business, and remember what President Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The business of America is business.” I learned that from the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back To School. In the movie, the Dean of Students spoke that line after Dangerfield buys his admittance into the university via a new business building. The problem with a push towards “schooling” and away from “education”, is the elimination of risk. As schools are tailoring curriculum towards the wants of the students, the concept of problem solving, the idea of developing a well or better-rounded thinker is losing out to training. That, and the falsehood that students gain the illusion they have the right to be in college. They don’t. That is the major difference between high school and college. My philosophy teacher had every right to fail me, but he didn’t. I took a risk and it paid off and I learned that if I studied and placed my own imprint on what I had learned I could be rewarded. I was rewarded for an innovative approach to the assignment. A few years back I was having coffee with Eduardo Machado, the head of the Dramatic Writing Program at New York University. He told me he was frustrated with the expectations of students. Machado said his students expected to learn about writing as if they were studying to make bread. A pinch of this, a dash of that, and “bang” (as Emeril Lagasse would say) you have a hot, fresh play! Machado saw this as indoctrination. Thus, he had his students read psychology books. Many fought against this, but he felt the result was more innovative writing from his students.

Without the promotion of innovation, without risk, without the system of “education”, colleges make the four-year experience nothing more then a fancy trade school.

And that is bad business.

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Timothy Braun is a writer living in Austin, TX. He has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, HERE Arts Center, Edward Albee Foundation, and a Warhol Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. He is a frequent contributor to the Austin Chronicle, culturebot.org, and is the founder of Federal Prisoner 30664. He holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and is a Cultural Studies professor at St. Edward’s University. Learn more at timothybraun.com

Tagged in: Disney Renaissance of the early 1990’s, education, higher education, schooling, “The Metaphysics of a Chair”