Romance about education

Stanley Fish writes in the NYT about classical education, a qualitative paradigm to counterbalance our outcome- and test-based models (via Ohbadiah).

As someone who was actually educated in precisely the way Fish is suggesting (home-schooled all the way through in classics, Enlightenment, and Modern/Postmodern thought; comprehensive ancient, medieval, and modern world history and politics; plus historically- tied math/sciences), I agree in principle with his valuation of that education. Unfortunately, it only prepares you to be exactly what Fish is: an overeducated, undersocialized, snobbish, elitist academic. And more unfortunately, there are vanishingly fewer openings with that job description every day. There are no jobs anymore for the Renaissance Man. The ones we see and celebrate are leftovers from a previous era, mostly held by gray-haired white men, born of privilege.

So I find myself with a world-class education from both a serious home schooling background and serious theory training at an Ivy League university. And basically, I can't make a buck doing anything related to anything I have ever studied. Some of my current job and financial situation is of my own choosing, based on values I hold (ironically, given to me in large part through my educational background), but a lot of it has to do with having no skills that are in fact meaningfully marketable without some meaningless additional credential. I could probably have polished myself up and gotten a "consulting job" before the crash, but I'd know deep down I was a fraud in an industry of frauds. Now even that option is gone.

Fish says of current standards-based educational paradigms:

A faith in markets produced gamesmanship, entrepreneurial maneuvering and outright cheating, very little reflection on “what children should know” and very little thought about the nature of the curriculum.

Unfortunately again, this is how the adult world works, particularly at the elite levels that everyone is presumably being educated toward. This is how kids are best prepared for what their work will largely consist of in America. People trained in this way can get work and can get ahead and make more than a few bucks. Learn to beat the system at a young age, and you can probably keep beating it for the rest of your life.

So much of the emphasis on outcomes and testing is based on America's envy of its better-educated neighbors. But how do we know they're "better-educated?" Test results. So it's kind of a no-brainer why that's our current yardstick. Quantitative is always easier than qualitative, especially at scale. The real question for classics education in this time is: Is it worth living in anxious wage-slavery for your whole life, just so you can know you're "more enlightened" or "more cultured" than someone with a more rote education? Seems like an overly-romantic and hyper-nostalgic notion from someone who's been in academia for too long. If there's a true benefit to classics ed, it's the inculcation of values that go beyond cost/benefit. And that's probably achievable through some other means.

Of course, there's David Brooks to respond to these objections.