Reading Review: Occupy Art Education

February 26, 2012

Robert J. Sullivan

The Common Touch

It seems abundantly clear to me from my own experience, as well as from the array of

authors we have been exposed to in this class, over the last thirty years or so, education

curriculum has been co-opted by a segment of our population more interested in creating good

workers than good thinkers. Henry Giroux, in his article Chartering Disaster; Why Duncan’s

Corporate-Based Schools Can’t Deliver an Education that Matters writes; “Public schooling is

more and more shaped by a pedagogy of containment, security and conformity that undermines

critical thought, teaching and dialog while emphasizing market values that often create what

William Black calls a ‘criminogenic environment’ – one that promotes and legitimates market-

driven practices that include fraud, deregulation and other perverse practices” (Giroux, 2010). In

general, I would suggest the lack of interest education administrators lend to the study of art and

liberal education has more to do with a recently developed misguided notion of what exactly an

education is supposed to be, rather than an overt attempt to create more Bernie Madoffs. Though

creating Bernie Madoffs, or creating a ‘criminogenic environment’ such as what spawned the

resent banking crises, is a prime example of the prevailing meme in our education system which

results in costly sociopathic criminal behavior.

Our new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, in attempting to promote privatization of

our public schools, is a major case in point of an administrator with this mentality. In the same

essay mentioned above Giroux opines, “Duncan ignores, if not disdains, a long tradition in

American life extending from Thomas Jefferson to C. Wright Mills and Hannah Arendt in which

it has been recognized that citizens are produced, not simply born, and that public schools are the

crucial political site where socialization for a healthy democracy takes place” (Giroux, 2010). I

would propose there is no real devious and concerted effort to flout these classical ideals, but that

these principles have been increasingly ignored over the last thirty years because of a great

transformation and paradigm shift that has taken place as a result of, ironically, an attempt to

better democratize higher education for the “common” good.

(Lesson 7) Reading Review: Occupy Art Education p. 2

While public education in our country has been with us since colonial times, the

beginning of the end, it seems, of offering a public education (particularly post secondary)

unconcerned with priming students for the marketplace, started with Roosevelt’s GI Bill. A truly

great piece of democratic legislation, the GI Bill made higher education an accessible goal for

millions of Americans that could never before afford it. This boon in millions of common

Americans entering higher education for the first time brought with it a “vocational school”

mentality that has appeared to have insinuated itself into our public education system at all

levels, especially the more economically challenged segments. This attitude is quite possibly the

root of today’s education problem. It needs to be uprooted; after all, the mindset is relatively new

and in my opinion, has yet to produce any sustaining growth or much less blossom.

By “vocational school” mentality I mean a predominate notion that education is nothing

more than a precursor to and preparer for employment and at best only tangentially concerned or

related to ideals of what a classical education should be. The fact that higher education was, prior

to the GI Bill, a bastion of the privileged class and used predominately to reinforce long standing

traditions of educating people without concern for “finding a job”, is something we don’t

normally see written or talked about. A good many of the of people graduating from colleges

and universities prior to the GI Bill had positions waiting for them through family connections

or, in many cases, did not even need to be concerned with making money, as they already had

plenty. This is still the case, especially for the predominantly privilege class that graduate from

prestigious private colleges and universities. Over and over again I read accounts of people that

graduated from, for instance, Harvard or Yale, with a degree in history for example, who go on

to obtain decent positions with banks, media companies or other major corporations. There is an

assumption that they probably have pretty good connections for obtaining these good jobs, but

there is also the thought too that these private school graduates are “educated” individuals that

can enter these institutions as employees and learn the “pragmatic” aspects the positions entail,

on the job. These individuals didn’t necessarily need to have learned these “technical” and

“practical” fundamentals at college or university, that’s where they got “educated”.

I am not suggesting a public good, such as the GI Bill, is something we need to end

because it is quite possibly responsible for turning public education into a huge “shop class”. No,

(Lesson 7) Reading Review: Occupy Art Education p. 3

what I would propose is quite the opposite. We need more types of programs that stimulate,

encourage and enable everyone through different types of public compensation to get an

education, and ideally a very “broad” education. And where my vision perhaps deviates from an

education focused on nothing but classical modes of learning, I would suggest a marrying of the

two, vocational/technical and classical, so that we advance a society whereby everyone is

exposed to the richness of both a liberal and pragmatic education that reveres classical education,

labor, work, technology and entrepreneurism equally, and as something we all participate. In this

perfect world would result in everyone having to do their our own “work” and “labor” because if

we provide everyone with great educations, there will be few people that will want to wash

dishes and cut grass for meager wages. In this more perfect world we will have created, by

default, an economy whereby, because of laws of supply and demand, we will have to

compensate all vocations, and rightly so, with professional wages.

No doubt there have been recent road blocks to realizing a more egalitarian and liberal

education in this country as the standard. The old guard of true liberal arts education seems to

have died out resulting in the relatively recent taking over of our schools by technocrats and

administrators fraught with MBAs and short on true classical educations. However, through

speaking out and making people aware that a shift has occurred for the worse, I feel we can put

our country back on course, especially as more empirical data comes in showing that

standardized testing and for-profit schools are not fulfilling the false prophecies of doing a better

job of educating our failing students. Delacruz’s “four frame-works” (Delacruz, 2011, p. 8) in

her essay entitled, The Teacher as Public Enemy #1, A Response: New Approaches to Art

Education in These Most Uncivil Times (2011) could serve as a splendid step by step guideline

for any and all educators to get us on the correct track of educating today’s populace. Amongst

these four frame-works she states the most important step we teachers need to pull out of the

catacombs of seemingly lost or at least challenged ideals, is to “advocate for a notion of the

commons and the pursuit of a global and civil society” (Delacruz, 2011, p.7).

Giroux points out an irony that seems to have surfaced of late when he criticizes anti-

intellectualism in America by pointing out many people resent intellect “as a quality which

almost certainly deprives a man or woman of the common touch” (Giroux, 2011). The founders

(Lesson 7) Reading Review: Occupy Art Education p. 4

were inspired by ideals the Age of the Enlightenment brought to the “common” person, and that

is that knowledge is for everyone because it ultimately benefits the “common good”. We need to

get back on track toward a once “common” mode of thinking that suggests everyone should be

able to bask in the “common” ray of enlightenment.

References

Giroux, H. (2010, June 25). Chartering Disaster; Why Duncan’s Corporate-Based Schools Can’t

Deliver and Education that Matters. The Freire Project [Online website]. Retrieved from

http://www.freireproject.org/blogs/chartering-disaster:-why-duncans-corporate-based-schools-

cant-deliver-education-matters-henry-

Delacruz, E. M. (2011). The teacher as public enemy # 1: A response in these most uncivil

times. Art Education, 64(6), 7,8.