What Education is For

A few months ago, I wrote about what use Education was.
By now most of us must be tuned in to the fact that, though, on the face of it, getting an education is --at least mostly-- still a voluntary thing, people are out there furiously getting an education.  (At least, when they do expend the least bit of effort getting their education, they certainly let everybody know about it.)
I had been firmly of the opinion that, among other things, an Education was all about what to do with oneself when one was home from work; in other words, it is all about one's leisure time.  In the light of the terrible unemployment picture that obtains presently, this attitude is laughable: how in the heck is one supposed to enjoy one's leisure when one hasn't got a job in the first place? 
This brings out an enormous contradiction in our society.  The vast majority of people are in occupations that merely give them a living: sales, services, management, whatever: be it an office job or a floor job or a job in the outdoors, most employed people keep their jobs just to bring home a paycheck. This means that they use, possibly, a very small proportion of their education in their actual workplaces: a little arithmetic, a little language capability, a little knowledge of law and accounting principles, and that's all; all the rest they pick up on the job, so it's a common complaint that the education they received was "useless".
My claim was that the education was for when you really began to live each day, when you came home. Surrounded by your family, you can focus on the things you choose to do, rather than the things you have to do to earn your bread.
I completely recognize that most people are exhausted by the time they come inside the house and slam the door shut. You know, this wasn't always the case: half a century ago, a middle-class citizen spent a moderate amount of energy at work, and came home with a certain amount of energy left to talk to the kids and the spouse, cast an intelligent eye on the newspaper (if it hadn't been read at breakfast already), and possibly had a friend or two pop over in the evening, to play a hand of cards, or go out for a night of bowling, or whatever. If you look around you, those who have the energy to do any of that are rare, except for those who have some fun on the weekends. The Great American Business Boss has gotten much better at sucking every last calorie of energy out of you before you head home.
Given that this is the case, it is perfectly true that one's education is useless. It is preparation for your leisure time which you simply do not have the energy or even the time to enjoy anymore.
It is our leisure time that makes us human, and civilized. When our ancestors were out hunting and gathering, they had to be on the alert every moment, to keep from becoming food for some wild animal. Once we settled down in villages and in farms, it was the leisure we found that enabled art, and music, and literature. The whole point of education was that every new generation did not have to start from scratch.
But I'm seeing a different side to the story. Everything I teach seems immediately forgotten by each class. Every semester, I have to start from scratch. Starting from scratch has become a way of life for everyone, even young people who haven't started working yet. Somewhere they have got the idea that it is better to learn the same little thing in their ten mathematics classes than to learn ten different things.
My students, are, by and large, a lazy bunch. A few of them forget themselves and find themselves actually learning something in a class, to their extreme embarrassment. They recover quickly, and manage to forget the material quickly in time for the appropriate ignorance they have to display the next day.
At one time, this country truly was civilized; it is difficult to put one's finger precisely on the era in which this was true. There was a recognition of the higher things, the greater good, the dignity of labor, the equality of Man, and the things held in high esteem by the Founding Fathers were in fact truly admired by all educated citizens. But in the course of time, people found themselves professing these high ideals, while not actually understanding them, or even understanding the vocabulary that was required to explain the ideals. Today, it is very likely, even if the great Preamble to the Declaration of Independence were to be translated into the modern idiom, that a large proportion of the population would not have the background for understanding what it is saying. Isn't it obvious that everyone should be able to understand at least that? After all, it encapsulates almost everything that Americans hold dear. But I doubt that, in fact, it is any longer the body of axioms that holds this nation together.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that it is the enormous influx of immigrants into the country that has diluted this knowledge. It is simply the fact that the vast majority of people have been trapped into working so hard that they have no leisure to think about anything but work. They cannot convey their ideals to their children because they simply have no time. They could not learn the ideals of their parents, because their parents had no time for passing it on.
From being the Land of Plenty, the USA has become the Land of Plenty of Work for those who have jobs, and Plenty of Worry for those who don't. We are working in the Mines all over again.
Those in upper management work a lot less, it is true. All their time is spent appearing to be a lot busier than they are. In principle, they should be perfectly able to interact with their families in culturally meaningful ways: convey family values, engage in cultural pursuits, interact with their friends in civilized ways. But I suspect that mostly what gets done is a lot of drinking, smoking, and boasting about fictitious achievements. Things are set up in this society in such a way that most people get to be wealthy because their parents worked extra hard, which means that those parents had even less time to engage with them in ways that allowed family values to be meaningfully transmitted. So once junior gets to be a big shot on the shoulders of Papa's labor, junior has hardly any family values to speak of.
Perhaps the complaints about the irrelevance of education are true. A typical American liberal education is perfectly suited for a society in which obtaining a job is not a desperate thing. The fact that the American economy is uncontrolled to the point where every young person cannot be guaranteed some sort of a job, is deplorable. In this situation, where the economy is based on public mood rather than rational decisions, it is obvious that young people will insist that their education should guarantee them a job. In other words, most students will migrate towards narrow, technical educations, leaving only upper-crust kids --who typically do not worry about obtaining employment once they graduate-- to seek a liberal education: i.e., an education focused on understanding civilization. This is a situation that will lead to an even greater stratification than we have now. No doubt there are those who think this is a good thing. I think it is a very bad thing, because the most affluent students are by no means the ones who are most capable of understanding civilization. We shall be throwing our civilization before swine.

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