What We Lose By Commodifying Education
I’m frustrated by the howls of shocked people across this country following Tuesday’s College Admissions scandal. There are so many layers of context, missed, when we focus merely on privilege and its purchases.
This is a scandal that every family of children in America’s cities, at least, feel every single day. It’s not a scandal limited to the wealthy or the elite or the transition from secondary to post-secondary school; it’s a story of pressure and manipulation and usury with victims in all directions of all ages at all stages of life. It’s a story of a country of inequality and the vast, wide-spread hurt and injustice this exerts up and down the social scale on all its denizens. Mindful of false equivalencies it’s a mistake to consider the alleged perpetrators independent of the system that supports them.
One of my earliest memories from within our American school system was a mother, eyes crazed with emotion, lecturing me with increasing hysteria that my one-year-old needed to have had an application submitted for preschool already. “You have to do this right now; what are you going to do?” she insisted, while I turned and comforted myself silently with the fantasy that ‘what I was going to do was not listen to her’.
That joke was always on me because resist as one might against externally instigated and fomented pressure, we are bathed in it day in and day out. Our children raised among it as fish are immersed in water and we in air, absorb the commodification of education as an acquisition of status and certification, not of physical or intellectual development.
I am not surprised at these parents aiding their children in this way. It is their job; it is our job. The only difference between me and them is that they have more money to do the job we are all exhorted to do, to scrub the path for our CONTINUE READING: What We Lose By Commodifying Education – redqueeninla
