My first hard news has to do with my favorite topic (some might call it my obsession), education, what I prefer to call learning, and, no, they’re decidedly not the same. In his marvelous piece on the educational charade called Race To The Top, Michael Winerip delineates precisely how this program to create so-called excellence in American education does nothing but push the burden down into the states and cities. It scatters meat bones to the starving and shortchanges the people doing all the work. And the accumulated results are meager and exploitative.
In terms of real money, this Obama administration charade is done on the cheap. $5 billion sounds like a lot of money until you spread it out and realize, for example, that New York state’s share, the largest 4 year federal grant from the program, is $700 million, one third of one percent of the state’s $230 billion education budget. And that includes providing money to all the hoops and hurdles the feds mandate. In addition, the states need to provide all the stuff that the feds don’t provide (relevant standardized tests, alternate forms of evaluation, etc.).
In short (read the whole piece; the details would make an excellent absurdist play) Arne Duncan and his minions determine that hoops and hurdles must be conquered before the little bones get tossed, but the local districts must blindly figure out the what, the how and the why…and hope they’re right. That’s hard news, because we Americans tell ourselves it’s some sort of answer, and even if it isn’t we look like we’re doing something. Hence, the charade.
And that leads to my second hard news, which is consistent with the idea that the American Dream is actually grounded in our persistent and pervasive need to deny actuality. We continue to be Delmore Schwartz’s “True-Blue American,”
Jeremiah Dickson:
“Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began:
Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European;
Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between;
Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing
in his breast
The infinite and the gold
Of the endless frontier, the deathless West.
…‘Both: I will have them both!’ declared this true-blue American.”
In a different article, regarding Apple’s use of China’s and other nations’ work forces, production operations and general valuations of education and life expectations (none of which is based on a dream), we can get the hard news about the actualities of life in the new era (information age, whatever). It's hard news, because we know we can't accept it.
The difference is profound between what we Americans think we deserve and ought to have compared to what actually is available to us as individuals living in the now. The article indicates “there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.” The problem is that according to the high expectations dream, everyone deserves to go to college. But the company executives say “they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find.” And those with the college degrees won’t work for those wages.
The article cites an example, a Chinese worker, a project manager named Lina Lin, approximately of the same employment status as many of our out-of-work managers in the U.S., who “earns a bit less than what [her co-equals in the U.S. were] paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.” The point being that Mrs. Lin has reasonable expectations—not a dream—and with her husband socks away a fourth of what they earn. If she wants more—a house, for example, which we all assume to be ours as part of the dream—she will most likely wait until that desire has a reasonable degree of actuality about it.
The hard news is that so many of the over-qualified and out of work among us are dismayed that the dream isn’t the actuality. This is hard news to swallow…for us. That having all or both or every works in dreamscapes but not where we live, not now in this life. Jeremiah is part of our mythology.
BTW—"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." -- Will Durant
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