"Hello, fellow losers" I found written in the back of the No. 20 bus on which I was riding to my first day of university. Even though the graffiti mocked me and everyone else on their ways to school and work, I smiled, because the vandal was pretty much spot on.
How else to describe us workers and students who toil away in isolation with apparently no uniting connections between the things we all do on a daily basis, except as "fellow losers"? Is it not the very absence of a shared identity, a common thread, a communal project bringing together all our efforts, that makes us feel like losers? The astute vandal recognizes that the only thing we have in common is the feeling that we've been somehow suckered into something not so worthwhile.
It's precisely this lack of a democratic, civic dimension in our lives that divides us and keeps us narrowly focused on our individual, self-interested pursuits. Hardly anyone thinks of themselves first as citizens anymore. Citizenship as a role, not surprisingly, usually ranks below family, job, hobby and consumer roles. But most disturbingly, it's in schools, exactly where citizenship is meant to be forged, that we see the near absolute loss of any democratic dimension.
Use the word “democracy” sincerely and you'll probably receive a blank stare. Unless you've got an ironic Chomskian hate-on for the word, its very mention inspires confusion and resignation. Nobody really takes it seriously. Democracy is a failed, naive experiment. Politicians are all corrupt, ineffectual pencil-pushers.
And so, universities and colleges have long been on the path to privatization, cutting liberal arts courses in favor of training in business, high-tech, and other trades that "respond to the demands of the global market" and produce "competitive" graduates with "the right skills." The democratic element is barely mentioned, let alone sought out.
What we seem to have forgotten is that public education is the centerpiece of democratic cohesion, and without it, citizens literally have no sense of the community they belong to. The false individuality of libertarianism, the philosophy behind consumer-capitalism, has diverted energy away from the democratizing function of schools and is making them into mere training grounds for corporations.
So-called "think-tanks" like the Fraser Institute produce only the type of thinking that its corporate backers want to hear, and so its experts insist we privatize and modernize our schools, squeezing out the wasteful, extravagant, useless fields of history, literature and philosophy, and replacing them with accounting, management, and computer design. The anti-democratic, pro-corporatist forces are consciously denigrating education to the level of passive training, and by doing so, reducing the citizenry to conforming trainees and consumers.
I believe everyone should study humanities, but not just because I am. I'm studying humanities because everyone in a democracy should be. This puts me in an odd, self-defeating position. What I really should do is take accounting, get a job and be done with it. But my conscience doesn't let me. Unfortunately there is no socially-structured incentive to get a real education, and so most students float around from field to field, trying to find the least of all evils, something that "appeals to them."
In their first-day introductions, most students admit that they "took this class” because “I thought it would be easy,” “it fit into my schedule,” or “I needed the credits.”
I'm not blaming them. If governments don't make it easy to get the education required to become functioning citizens in any meaningful way, then students will continue to grope around in the dark looking for something—anything—they might see themselves doing long-term.
For reasons that are beyond me (perhaps it has something to do with the self-help industry, Oprah and Dr Phil), hoards of young women are going into psychology. Even political science students seem as detached from democratic commitment as any accounting student.
Since most of us have kids to feed and parents to please, the lack of incentive to get educated as citizens with a social vision means, simply, that we don't. So why are we strangling the life out of our democratic institutions? Democracy is running full-speed down a suicidal course, and no government is doing anything about it beyond lip-service.
We actually make it structurally difficult—or impossible for most people—to even afford what's required for study. Everybody knows the immense burden of tuition, student loan payments, and, most evil of all, the price of books. This is a frighteningly telling sign of where our values lie as a society. For what could be more evil than exorbitant book prices except book-burning? The result is the same: knowledge for no one.
What this all means is that we're denying most of the population status as citizens. Sure, everybody pays taxes and gets to buy stuff, but our identities as citizens is so fragmented and dislocated from each other that our democracy functions like a corporation. We, the workers, scramble for our pay and have little energy left for thinking of a better society. Why? Because our educations consist mostly of training for our self-interested jobs, and suggest nothing of democratic participation.
The confusion runs deep. A recent provincial report on the future of BC's post-secondary school system, called "Campus 2020," stated that: "Our research-intensive institutions must continue to be the key incubators of the innovation needed to address our most pressing social and environmental challenges and to develop a strong economy. They must also be places of teaching excellence, and they must be destinations of choice for the best and brightest students from across the province and around the world."
Nowhere is the basic, democratic role of producing thinking citizens mentioned, but the importance of a "strong economy" is. The report suggests that local colleges be re-designated as "regional universities" mostly to increase prestige and draw more international students who pay a lot more for the same services. The school system is a profit-engine.
So long as we keep genuine education out of the reach of most people, we're crippling democracy and producing only docile citizens who want jobs and nothing to do with their society otherwise. Unless our governments encourage and facilitate civic education, we will remain atomized, disconnected clogs of the system, floating in ether, with no sense of our larger community. We will remain, merely, "fellow losers."
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