Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education recently bombed academia with the suggestion that the government should use standardized tests to measure public universities' success in educating students. The Commission's final report is due by August. Apparently, the nation's universities are not prepping us for competition in the 'new global economy' or the 'flat world' as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's calls it. The Commission's recommendation suggests that professors are mere providers of services, and that a college student's mind can be calipered. Higher education does need reform, but reform must go beyond improving the service.
Contemporary education in the United States is depressing: De facto racial segregation, an under-funded No Child Left Behind, draconian cuts in funding. Additionally, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy reports that, as of 2003, only 31 percent of college-educated U.S. citizens are proficiently literate'that is, able to write and analyze complex prose. In 1992, the figure was 40 percent. Standardized testing would presumably allow bureaucrats to judge a university's performance in raising that percentage. To say nothing of possible government coercion or the worry that professors might 'teach the test,' the Commission's suggestion implies that universities are only providers of services.
In the 'new global economy' that is exactly the role universities are intended to fulfill. Thomas Friedman and the business community tell us that in the near and bright future ours will be a nation of Lumbergh-esque office managers at worst or idea-men and information-traders at best (ideas and information being the goods of the global economy). Yet no more than 31 percent of the most highly educated U.S. citizens can analyze and articulate complex ideas and information. How will U.S. college graduates compete?
We won't. Or, to put it another way, the 'new global economy' is a lot of bad gas. It is not exactly obvious that a better college education at UW-Madison will enable any of us to compete with equivalently educated South Asians when they work for next to nothing.
Literacy'reading and writing'is not only a necessity if one is to compete in the marketplace. It's a necessary curative to the woes of modern life in the United States. Nineteenth century French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his classic book 'Democracy in America' that people who live in times of equality like us suffer isolation both in time and from each other. Nothing binds individuals in set relationships. So we 'bowl alone' (while listening to iPods) oblivious to the outside world.
The real problem is not our lack of integration into a 'new global economy.' It's our lack of any meaningful integration at all. Sedated with consumer goods, we allow the modern bureaucratic state to think for us while we hide from one another, history and tomorrow.
Would a better college education help us live life more fully? It might seem a strange-sounding rhetorical question: how can reading and writing about Marlowe, Goethe or Santayana help a UW-Madison student live better? Well, the very fact that we can plausibly ask such a question speaks both to the pedagogical failure of our professors (not to mention our K-12 teachers) and to our own poor imaginations.
If more of our professors would come down from the Ivory Tower and meet students halfway'as popular political science professor Donald Downs does in his classes'a college education might rise above the status of an economic service to help us live life more fully.
In a sense, Secretary Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education is right to seek improvement. Yet, the Commission is mistaken to treat education as just an economic service, improvable by standardized tests. As Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, said, 'Excellence comes in many unusual ways''a reference to the excellence of living a fuller life, something standardized tests could never capture or compel.
