The enduring ideological divide: Education for economy or human cultivation?

“ At a time when most of the new jobs being created will require some kind of higher education; when countries that out-educate us today will outcompete us tomorrow, giving our kids the best education possible is an economic imperative.
That’s why, from the start of my administration, we’ve been fighting to offer every child in this country a world-class education – from the cradle to the classroom, from college through a career. ”

“ I’m running to make sure that by the end of the decade, more of our citizens hold a college degree than any other nation on Earth. I want to help our schools hire and reward the best teachers, especially in math and science. I want to give two million more Americans the chance to go to community colleges and learn the skills that local businesses are looking for right now. In the 21st century, higher education can’t be a luxury: it is an economic imperative that every American should be able to afford. That’s the choice in this election. ”

“ Because at a time when companies can plant jobs wherever there's an Internet connection, and two-thirds of all new jobs require a higher education or advanced training, if we want to outcompete the world tomorrow, then we're going to have to outeducate the world today.
Unfortunately when our high school dropout rate is one of the highest, in the industrialized world, when a third of all 4th graders can't do basic math, when more and more Americans are getting priced out of attending college, we're falling far short of that goal. ”

“ That’s why we’ve invested in math and science education, and given states more flexibility on No Child Left Behind. And that’s why we’ve reformed the student loan program to put students before big banks, and increased financial aid for millions of young people – because in America, higher education cannot be a luxury; it’s an economic necessity every family should be able to afford. ”

“ We need a new vision for the 21st century education system, one where we aren't just supporting existing schools but spurring innovation; where we're not just investing more money but demanding more reform; where parents take responsibility for their children's success; where we're recruiting, retaining and rewarding an army of new teachers; where we hold our schools, teachers and government accountable for results; and where we expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate from college and to get a good paying job. ”

“ We can’t just talk about higher education without thinking about what kind of training Americans need to get hired. Instead of simply framing it as higher education, let’s create a variety of opportunities for education after high school. ”

“ Institutions of higher learning should strengthen their teaching and their capacity for innovation. Regular undergraduate institutions will be encouraged to shift their focus toward providing applied education if they are in a position to do so. We will continue to help see the increased enrollment of students from poor rural areas into key colleges, and improve and implement policies enabling children who live with their migrant worker parents to go to secondary school or take college entrance exams their city of residence. ”

“ Through this plan we are setting an ambitious goal: all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career – no matter who you are or where you come from. Achieving this goal will be difficult. It will take time. And it will require the skills, talents, and dedication of many: principals, teachers, parents, students. But this effort is essential for our children and for our country. And while there will always be those cynics who claim it can’t be done, at our best, we know that America has always risen to the challenges that we’ve faced. ”

“ It is here that a great movement in America has grievously sinned against the light. There has arisen among us a movement to make the Public School primarily the hand-maiden of production. America is conceived of as existing for the sake of its mines, fields and factories, and not those factories, fields and mines as existing for America. Consequently, the public schools are for training the mass of men as servants and laborers and mechanics to increase the land's industrial efficiency. ”

“ The academic education turns out future citizens with no sympathy for work done with the hands, and with absolutely no training for understanding the most serious of present day social and political difficulties. The trade training will turn future workers who may have greater immediate skill than they would have had without their training, but who have no enlargement of mind, no insight into the scientific and social significance of the work they do, no education which assists them in finding their way on or in making their own adjustments. ”

“ And it's the responsibility of our students to walk through the doors of opportunity.
In just a single generation, America has fallen from 2nd place to 11th place in the portion of students completing college. That is unfortunate, but it's by no means irreversible. With resolve and the right investments, we can retake the lead once more. And that's why, in my address to the nation the other week, I called on Americans to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training, with the goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the year 2020. ”

“ Maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success. But if we want to win the future – if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas – then we also have to win the race to educate our kids.
Think about it. Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree. And yet, as many as a quarter of our students aren’t even finishing high school. The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. ”

“ So that's the first pillar of our education reform agenda. The second, we will end what has become a race to the bottom in our schools and instead spur a race to the top by encouraging better standards and assessments. Now, this is an area where we are being outpaced by other nations. It's not that their kids are any smarter than ours -- it's that they are being smarter about how to educate their children. They're spending less time teaching things that don't matter, and more time teaching things that do. They're preparing their students not only for high school or college, but for a career. ”

“ Half of the world’s population is under twenty years old. Today, there are over thirty million people who are fully qualified to enter a university, but there is no place available. This number will grow to over 100 million during the next decade. To meet the staggering global demand for advanced education, a major university needs to be created every week. In most of the world, higher education is mired in a crisis of access, cost, and flexibility. ”

“ That is our responsibility as the United States of America. And we, all of us in government, are working to do our part by not only offering more resources, but demanding more reform.
When it comes to higher education, we are making college and advanced training more affordable, and strengthening community colleges that are a gateway to so many with an initiative that will prepare students not only to earn a degree but find a job when they graduate ”

“ The system is already dead in many trades, and in others it is kept alive only to enable the trade unions to limit the number of entrants into the industry. It cannot be long, however, before common needs force education and industry into some sort of concordat. The industrial firms need skilled workers; the educationists want those skilled workers to be trained in such a way that they may derive educational benefit from their technical pursuits. ”

“ Further than this, after being provided with group leaders of civilization, and a foundation of intelligence in the public schools, the carpenter, in order to be a man, needs technical skill. This calls for trade schools. Now trade schools are not nearly such simple things as people once thought. The original idea was that the "Industrial" school was to furnish education, practically free, to those willing to work for it ”

“ Thousands of families are so poor that the children must go to work the moment the compulsory school years are over. In 1897, 14,900 boys and girls dropped from the fifth school grade, most of them going to work from necessity more or less pressing. To rise to important positions in factories, workrooms, or department stores will require a practical combination of any needed craft with the ability to utilize their school education in rapid deductions, business letters, accounts, and trade transactions. ”

“ Moreover, it was found also that it was possible to teach a boy a trade mechanically, without giving him the full educative benefit of the process, and, vice versa, that there was a distinctive educative value in teaching a boy to use his hands and eyes in carrying out certain physical processes, even though he did not actually learn a trade. It has happened, therefore, in the last decade, that a noticeable change has come over the industrial schools. In the first place the idea of commercially remunerative industry in a school is being pushed rapidly to the back-ground. ”

“ A really efficient workman must be to-day an intelligent man who has had good technical training in addition to thorough common school, and perhaps even higher training. To meet this situation the industrial schools began a further development; they established distinct Trade Schools for the thorough training of better class artisans, and at the same time they sought to preserve for the purposes of general education, such of the simpler processes of elementary trade learning as were best suited therefor. ”

“ The questions of specific trade and professional training fall wholly outside the scope of this book. However, certain facts connected with the movement to push industrial training in its narrower sense have a direct bearing on the larger question. For there is great danger just at present that, as the work spreads, the really educative type of work that is being done in Gary and Chicago may be overlooked in favor of trade training.
The attention of influential citizens is more easily focused on the need of skilled workers than on that of a general educational readjustment. ”

“ The perfection of an industrial school room equipment with its trade samples, its charts and maps, its literature, relating to the extension, of trade and of commerce, has the tendency like the curriculum to impose on the children the weight of accomplishment, if this equipment is not used to stimulate inquiry and experiment in industry as the ever fresh field for adventure that it is. But the intention of these industrial schools is to train the children in the acceptance of processes and methods which are established. ”

“ The impress of a developed curriculum, connected with an active trade experience, that is, a trade in which the children are at work, like the curriculum of a continuation school, is greater than the curriculum which has been evolved for its abstract cultural values. As the curriculum coördinates shop and school activities and as it fails at the same time to stimulate inquiry on the part of the pupil into industrial or special trade processes as they are practiced in the shop, it becomes a positive, inhibiting factor in the intellectual life of the children. ”

“ The doing of tasks in factories for the sake of rewards, gives the workers experience in winning rewards. As they are interested only in the reward, they carry away no desire or interest in the work experience. As the method of doing the work is prescribed in every detail and their only requirement, under scientific management, is to follow directions with accuracy, they are trained to do their tasks as the children in school are trained. They are trained in routine, and to do each task as it is given. This is not education, it is training to do tricks. ”

“ The conspicuously absent factors in all industrial educational schemes are those which give men the ability to control industry. No work in subject matter is educational which does not in intention or in fact give the person involved the ability to participate in the administration of industry, or the ability to judge the extent of his mastery over the subject. Industrial educational schemes, even the best of them, leave the pupils helpless before their subject. ”

“ It is for educators to realize first of all that there can be no social progress while there is antagonism between growth in wealth (which is industry) and growth in individuals (which is education) ; that the fundamental antagonisms which are apparent in the current arrangement are not between industry and education but between education and business. They must know that as business regulates and controls industry for ulterior purposes, that is for other purposes than production of goods, it thwarts the development of individual lives and the evolution of society ”

“ But is it true that the acquisition of such a knowledge of science as is proposed, and the communication of that knowledge, are calculated to weaken your usefulness? Or may I not rather ask, is it possible for you to discharge your functions properly without these aids?
What is the purpose of primary intellectual education? I apprehend that its first object is to train the young in the use of those tools wherewith men extract knowledge from the ever-shifting succession of phenomena which pass before their eyes ”

“ And the first canon of a sound education is to make it the instrument to perfect the whole nature and character. Its aims are comprehensive, not special; they regard life as a whole, not mental curiosity; they have to give us, not so much materials, as capacities. So that, however moderate and limited the opportunity for education, in its way it should be always more or less symmetrical and balanced, appealing equally in turn to the three grand intellectual elements—imagination, memory, reflection: and so having something to give us in poetry, in history, in science, and in philosophy. ”

“ As the latter desire that literature should be a means of educating the student's intelligence and sympathies, so the teachers of science, whether pure or applied, insist on the necessity of cultivating the scientific imagination, of developing a power of initiative in the learner, and of drawing out his inventive faculties. ”

“ The object of what we commonly call education--that education in which man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial education--is to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to prepare the child to receive Nature's education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience; and to understand the preliminary symptoms of her pleasure, without waiting for the box on the ear. In short, all artificial education ought to be an anticipation of natural education. ”

“ On the other hand, an artificial education is having one's head crammed full of ideas, derived from hearing others talk, from learning and reading, before one has anything like an extensive knowledge of the world as it is and as one sees it. ”

“ Education in the long run is an affair that works itself out between the individual student and his opportunities. Methods of which we talk so much, play but a minor part. Offer the opportunities, leave the student to his natural reaction on them, and he will work out his personal destiny, be it a high one or a low one. Above all things, offer the opportunity of higher personal contacts. A university provides these anyhow within the student body, for it attracts the more aspiring of the youth of the country, and they befriend and elevate one another. ”

“ For others, it will become what they themselves make of it through their involvement. Remaining an open enterprise, education will allow as many adjustments as each individual is willing to take upon oneself for the length of one's life. The education of interactive skills, of visualization technologies, of methods of search and retrieval, of thinking in images, sounds, colors, odors, textures, and haptic perception requires contexts for their discovery, use, and evaluation which no school or university in the world can provide. ”

“ The very presence of art and science, sport and entertainment, politics and religion, ethics and the legal system in educational forms of interactive media, books, artworks, databases, and programs for human interaction opens the possibility for discoveries. As serious as all these matters are, no education will ever succeed without making its students happy, without satisfaction. In each instance of education, good or bad, the human being, as a natural entity, is broken in. ”

“ The very industries that seem to benefit most by receiving skilled workers for the first steps of the trade will lose by it in the more difficult processes, for the workers will not have the background of general knowledge and wider experience that the graduate of a technical high school or vocational school should have acquired. But the introduction of the material of occupations into the schools for the sake of the control of the environment brought by their use will do much to give us the proportion of independent, intelligent citizens that are needed in a democracy. ”

“ If educators regard opportunities for growth with sufficient jealousy they will not wait for industry to emerge with a new program, or system of production; they will initiate productive enterprises where young people will be free to gain first hand experience in the problems of industry as those problems stand in relation to their time and generation. Their alliance should be made with engineers and architects and the managers of industry who have made themselves, through experience and training, masters of applied science and the economics of production. ”