This, again, is where some history courses would come in handy.
For some it builds character, and those “some” are the ones who manage to succeed without major loss. (Ten years is a significant loss.) But for most – when you’re talking about a wall that difficult to get around, meaning many will never manage it – it builds resentment, despondency, despair, bile, rage, mistrust. Especially if they’ve been told all along that the sky’s the limit and that such walls don’t exist – or, if they do, are surely climbable with enough pluck.
The young people in this country are poor now, and minority white. I don’t talk to many students who have a memory of a middle class, and in that sense I’m an ambassador of the past. When I tell them what was possible for a middle-class American child in the last century – what we just had around, had available to us, regardless of what our parents made or owned – they’re shocked and a little nauseous. They know they’ve been missing out, but it hasn’t occurred to them what might be possible. They’ve been taught to ask for not a hell of a lot.
When people say that being poor is scarring in this country, they aren’t joking. It is. I know too many young people who are exquisitely aware of what their parents have gone through trying to get them safely to adulthood, and of how their parents were defeated. They carry all this with them. It’s very different from my family’s story, which does involve people working, working, working, working, but also, unless ill somehow, succeeding.
When you get too many of these kids, coming from nothing and being sent to walk through brick walls, they stop trying. They just stop playing your game. The kids I see at the beginning of a semester are frequently angry by the time they sit down. They’re not excited about school and learning. They’re not excited at the thought of their futures. They see how their parents have been steamrolled and how they’re being robbed for a bachelor’s degree, and that they effectively have no choice but to let it happen. And they’re already exhausted from the amount of work and fear it’s taken just to get them to this point, the endless anxiety and competition with people who are supposed to be friends.
I see kids who are hostile by the time they get here. That’s a change. It’s one thing to see a kid get pissed off at you because they don’t like you as a teacher, but when they walk in that way, something else is happening. They used to be numb from anxiety, headed for breakdowns. Before that they were anxious but driven. Before that they were optimistic about their futures and looking forward to learning. Before that they were so into learning something – something! – about the wider world that they’d run away from home and pay for it themselves, even if it had no obvious use in the world, they just wanted to know things.
I can’t remember the last time I had a student like that. Like in this century. I still do get kids who are excited about the prospect of learning something, but it’s always subsumed deeply to “can I use this”, though of course they don’t know enough about the world yet to have any idea of what might actually be useful. Regardless, they’re extremely risk-averse and increasingly they don’t see the point.
If in effect you lie to these kids and tell them about their wonderful promising futures at the end of all this dread and anxiety and debt-mountain-building, so that after years of good-faith hard work and indebting their parents and denying themselves fun they get to the end of the sidewalk and for the majority of them it’s weeds and a brick wall and more gumption stories, this does not build character. This teaches them that the system is so rigged that they have to break it and start new. And the difference between now and, say, 20 years ago is that – apart from young people being poorer than they used to be – there are gazillions of them. It’s a big, big couple of generations – again poor, again majority minority – and in pretty short order they’ll be running the show at all levels. They’ll do it for a long time. So they’ll be in a position to break things and try to rebuild, which is why I think it’d be very nice if they had all those history courses and a sense of their own selves as future-shaping, and the ability to walk out of a state U and be taken seriously even if they’re not so worldbeating that they’ve got the whole Truman-Fulbright-GRFP-etc. charm bracelet.
Breaking stuff isn’t that easy, but you can do it without a solid education. Rebuilding well without history, though, I don’t fancy the odds.
Call it a report from state-U land. If your defense against that story is that here and there, some wildly exceptional kids do great and learn to pole vault over brick walls, then again, I have to refer you to those history courses you didn’t want. Or English courses. Le rouge et le noir comes to mind. And anything by Zola.
The thing is – and we go around and around, but there really isn’t any need – these are not difficult problems to solve. We know how to do it because we’ve done it before. It is about removing tax and regulatory advantages that have accrued to wealthy people and institutions over the last forty years. It really is as simple as that. Even if you roll the clock back to 1985, we were by far the most aggressively capitalist nation going, and we had a whole Manhattan full of rich people, whose parties I greatly enjoyed. It was hardly a Maoist landscape. But that’s all there is to it. I’ll let you know when I hear an argument against a stiff rollback and redistribution that can’t be exploded like Wile E. Coyote TNT.
It hasn’t escaped my attention, btw, that these middle-class educational benefits began evaporating at around the same time that it became as normal for girls to go to university in this country as it was for boys, a few years after campus protests became a big thing, and in a time when we saw the publication of a whole lot of books freaking out about multiculturalism and bell curves and the natural superiority of the western canon, which was about to be drowned in a demographic tide. That wonder-machine, the state university of the 1970s, was a wonder machine primarily for young white men. I don’t think that gets enough attention. But putting the money back there again will work just as well for everyone else as it did for all those Steves and Jims and Eddies way back then.
Or just poach Nicola, she seems to know what she’s doing.