With the enactment of a new GI Bill, the time has come to once again recall former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins’ prediction that the original 1944 legislation benefiting World War II soldiers would convert colleges and universities into “educational hobo jungles.” Perhaps it’s unfair — Hutchins, a veteran himself, was a noted legal scholar and philosopher whose influence on the university he led is still quite visible today. But that’s the price you pay for being so spectacularly (and quotably) wrong about one of the great policy issues of our time. Helping returning veterans attend college was only the beginning of the massive mid-20th century expansion of access to higher education in America. Most people see this as an unequivocal good and a job not yet done.
Yet an active strain of educational hobo-phobia remains, a persistent, largely sub rosa muttering that perhaps too many of the wrong kind of people are being allowed inside the ivy-covered walls. It’s not respectable conversation outside of conservative circles, due to its unvarnished elitism and 0-for-the-last-60-years-and-counting historical track record. But it lives on, and now has a new standard-bearer in the person of Charles Murray, author along with the late Richard Herrnstein of the hugely controversial 1994 treatise, The Bell Curve. In his new book, Real Education, Murray offers “four simple truths for bringing America’s schools back to reality.” The third is: “Too many people are going to college.”
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As I recall, one key reason for the GI Bill was to provide a quiet environment for combat veterans to recuperate in. It was another example of the positive unintended results of education opportunity for all.
So why search so hard for guarantees? Why do we feel such a need to proscribe the BEST practice? Why do we seek data systems to inform policies that verge on social engineering? Why do we pick fights like those in the Bell Curve?
Conversely, why can't we trust in time honored liberal arts educational principles? Why fool around with equally honored principles such as intellectual freedom and the professional autonomy of teachers? Why attack unions that have been on the forefront of social justice and civil rights? Those democratic principles have helped us build the most prosperous, the most scientifically advanced, and one of the best educated citizens in history. Our individualistic, UNPLANNED, liberal arts educational values only failed when we did not heed them or tried to limit them.
The GI Bill wasn't perfect but the big flaw was its exclusion of people of color. So shouldn't the battle be for extending the same opportunities for all, as opposed to an educational Twelve Year Plan? The GI Bill trusted in people and people rose to heights that we couldn't have imagined. Why go to the quasi-social engineering concept of "a culture of (data-driven) accountability" when a democratic learning culture has served us so well?
Yet an active strain of educational hobo-phobia remains, a persistent, largely sub rosa muttering that perhaps too many of the wrong kind of people are being allowed inside the ivy-covered walls. It’s not respectable conversation outside of conservative circles, due to its unvarnished elitism and 0-for-the-last-60-years-and-counting historical track record.
Stated less pejoratively, isn't this argument utterly routine in all sorts of circles? I see suggestions all the time that colleges are full of students who aren't prepared for the work. E.g., http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/014943.html
Thanks Mr. Dorn. The need for accountability (since no-one does mea culpas anymore) is strong, and misguided.
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