Workforce

This week, Trump's Department of Education, the department he wants to eliminate, issued a proposed new rule. The department called it "Accountability in Higher Education and Access Through Demand-Driven Workforce Pell: Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) and Earnings Accountability."

"These proposed changes aim to incentivize institutions in every sector of higher education to offer programs that deliver economic value," the department stated. "This framework will require degree programs at institutions of higher education to show their programs 'Do No Harm' and provide students with increased earnings compared to the median earnings of high school graduates who did not pursue degrees at institutions of higher education." As an English Lit and political science double major I found this pretty alarming. I have old high school pals who did not go to college, but who have outearned me by a wide margin. They are master electricians, building contractors, car salesmen. But what I learned in college, and the life I've lived since, were never all about money. There were other values to pursue. The government is now saying money is the highest value.

In her book Paper Girl, Beth Macy writes about how Pell grants allowed her to become the first member of her family to go to, and graduate from, college and to start a career in journalism. She then cites her salaries from working at newspapers. The people who collect your trash made more money. Under this proposed rule from the Department of Education, Macy would not have had the successful career she's had as a writer and we'd all be a little poorer for it.

A year ago, I was invited to speak to a group of students at Ohio University in Athens. Some of them joined me for dinner the evening before my talk. They were all sweet and earnest and smart. Some of them worried about the reaction of peers and family members when those people learned of their academic passions. One wanted to be an art historian. Another wanted to major in music performance.

"You'll starve!" parents said. "That's stupid. Whattya gonna do with that?" friends said. The American religion of cash-as-highest-value was forcing them to reconsider their futures.

That attitude is everywhere, now. States, cities, counties, boards of education, mayors, business are all talking about the "workforce," the need to create a better workforce, the incontrovertible requirement that we all become part of the workforce, that the workforce is the point of education.

Republicans say it. Democrats say it. When Boston mayor Michelle Wu announced a new initiative to put AI into the city's schools, the city stated it was done to “equip students with the skills, curriculum, and real-world opportunities needed to build proficiency with AI and prepare for college, career pathways, and the future workforce.”

“This is a public-private partnership between city government, higher education and industry," she said.

All of this reminds me of those Soviet and Maoist propaganda posters depicting strong-jawed people shouldering hoes and shovels and marching into the fields and factories to fulfill the next five-year plan. Now, though, instead of surrendering to the tyranny of the state to increase potato and steel production, we are surrendering our humanity to the tyranny of "the market," and the market, in turn, is increasingly created by a smaller and smaller group of oligarchical titans who wield coercive power.

AI is the perfect example. We are now being told that we have no choice but to embrace AI. Boston and other places are working arm in arm with the tech industry to inject subservience to AI into the minds of children. Instead of resisting AI, kids will be taught to accept what industry is selling them.

"Kennewick School District is one of 10 Washington school districts selected for a Microsoft program to expand artificial intelligence skills among the state’s future workforce," reads a headline from the state of Washington this month.

“'This is an exciting partnership for the future of Kennewick,' Tina Brewer, director of professional learning and development, said in a statement. 'We believe every student deserves a world-class education, and the support from Microsoft allows us to level the playing field.'” This is school as propagandist for industry.

Remember when the early internet was going to be a kind of free utopia and techies were hippie do-gooders? In just a few years, the whole thing became all about profit and the "do no evil" guys became proto kings who began to dictate how we would live our lives. To question any of it was to be tagged a retrograde Luddite. The self-interested CEOs and their media cheerleaders told us resistance was futile. Now this is what's happened with AI, only sped up. Open AI went from a humanitarian non-profit to a for-profit juggernaut that will not let anything, including the law, stand in its way.

Thirty years ago, schools "partnered" with computer makers like Apple and Google to get every kid a laptop. This was going to revolutionize education, and kids were going to become coders to recession-proof their lives. Their futures were in the hands of the tech industry. STEM became the mantra. Education became less and less about enlarging the humane lives of students, teaching humane values, self-awareness, the ideals that formed this country, the meaning of good government and civic involvement, how to be a person living in a communal society. It became workforce training.

Well, now there's this:

Democracy requires a well-educated, well-rounded citizenry. Students ought to know at least a little something about Plato, Huckleberry Finn, DaVinci, Einstein, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. They ought to know why 40 to 50 million people died as a result of World War II, how to tell a lie from the truth, and what Thomas Jefferson had to say in the Declaration of Independence. They ought to hear Mozart, Patsy Cline, and Miles Davis. Nobody has to be an expert in any single one of these things, but whether one becomes a doctor, a plumber, an engineer, a musician, a banker, every person should know a little something about their culture, its arts and sciences, its ideals and philosophies. They ought to know how their government works, or is supposed to work.

This week also saw the issuance of a mini-manifesto from Palantir, the surveillance company run by Trump supporter Alex Karp. It's a wrong-headed, ill-informed and self-serving screed masquerading as commandments that aims to tell us why we should continue to support Palantir with our tax dollars and make Karp even richer. But Karp's bullet points actually prove the danger of a limited world view because it's an astonishing display of blinkered ignorance.

"We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism," Karp wrote. "We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity."

This is nonsensical sociopathy. What is "the West"? (I wrote a post about this awhile back.) Who is to be excluded? On what basis?

This is the kind of thinking that people like Karp wish to instill. But it's narrow and limiting.

Many of us feel we don't have control over our own lives any more. Yesterday I listened to an NPR interview with Jim VandeHei, who runs the political news site Axios. We all must submit, VandeHei said, to the AI wave. If he's right, that means we must submit to the few corporate giants who will control it, and to the leaders of those giants who, like Karp, have already displayed contempt for America's founding values and those we've since gained by hard struggle. If we do this, we will have given up on representative democracy. We'll feed ourselves into the maw of what Silicon Valley types call "the techno-capital machine."

Then we really will be just a workforce. We will have given up our individual humanity, the only riches that really count, and offered it up to the gears.

P.S. Quick reminder that my forthcoming book, The Mayor, is available for preorder. May I recommend your favorite local bookstore?