A Learning Society

This is condensed from my new book Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education and was printed as a commentary in Inside Higher Ed on September 27th, 2012.

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The farmer, the mechanic, the manufacturer, the merchant, the sailor, the soldier … must be educated – Philip Lindsley, President of the University of Nashville, 1825

            Since the early days of the Republic, adult Americans have been seeking ways to further educate themselves after their (successful or unsuccessful) formal education is over. For intellectual stimulation, social benefit, or occupational advancement through the learning of specific job skills, we as a people seem driven toward self-improvement and have created a staggering number of ways, both superficial and substantial, to achieve it: from self-help books to correspondence courses to continuous incarnations of mutual improvement societies (lyceums, mechanics’ institutes, chautauquas) to classes in university extension.

            Unions such as the Knights of Labor and farmers’ political organizations, most notably the Grange, had considerable educational programs. There was the public library movement, and agricultural extension, and experimental colleges for working people. Private occupational or proprietary schools arose and grew. The public community college began in 1901 and expanded rapidly through the mid-twentieth century, and the G.I. Bill opened two- and four-year colleges to a remarkable number of returning veterans, changing the nature of American higher education in the process. There are literacy programs, and work-force development initiatives, and adult schools that offer everything from basic education to courses on local geography, French cooking, and navigating the Internet. As historian Joseph Kett put it in The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, a sweeping account of this multi-strand tradition, in the same way that “democracy seems only to whet appetites for more democracy,” so too “each advance in educational opportunity” sparks desire for more education.

            I have spent the last two years in a poor, urban community college with some of the current participants in this long tradition of self improvement. Many of the reasons this new generation are at the college are deeply troubling: inadequate K-12 schools, limited youth and apprenticeship programs, unemployment, and the effects of poverty on neighborhoods and families. They are seeking a second chance at education because, in various ways, their first go at it was unsuccessful.

Sam is sitting outside of the college’s library, talking to two older women. I know him from the welding program I have been observing.  He has been doing so well, that, with the recommendation of several of his instructors, he got a job tutoring in the Reading Center. That’s where he met these women, Dorothy and Zoe. Sam is helping Dorothy figure out what classes to take next term, so I talk briefly to Zoe – blue nail polish, cigarette, animated – about the basic skills courses she has to take. She gets serious and says she wants to learn math, finally wants to learn it. She likes coming to the college, she continues, “didn’t know it would be this good.” She waves her hand across the area with the coffee cart, the library benches, the stairs to the Humanities building. “I like it. This is nice.”

Sam and I excuse ourselves and walk into Humanities where his English class will start in a few minutes. He tells me that the work in the Reading Center has blown him away. What an honor it is to help people – especially people older than him – develop a skill that they’ll use the rest of their lives. He is thinking about getting a bachelor’s degree in counseling or adult education that will enable him to continue to do this work, to help other people become better educated. Maybe he can support himself as a welder while he’s in school. “Who knows,” he says. “I never thought I’d be doing this.”

There is a lot riding on the success of Sam, Zoe, and Dorothy, for them and for our economic and social structure. Yet in these recessionary times, the influx of all these students – many in need of academic remediation and other services – is a source of great consternation to policymakers and educational administrators. Just about everything I’ve read or heard on the topic frames it as a problem.

            While acknowledging the significant budgetary and institutional challenges involved, it is also possible, shifting to the historical perspective provided by Joseph Kett, to view the swelling enrollments in a positive light. This new population is more diverse – especially by race and ethnicity – than most of those who have participated in these types of educational movements and institutions in the past. They represent an advance in educational opportunity, an example of educational democracy whetting the appetite for more access, more possibility, more of a chance to learn new skills, master new bodies of knowledge.

A phrase you'll read in educational tracts from right after the Revolutionary War and into the 1820s and 1830s is "the general diffusion of knowledge," a call to spread learning across the young Republic. Though expressed in sweeping terms, this democratizing of knowledge didn't apply to all, either by law or because of the realities of social stratification. Sam and company are pursuing their goals within the constraints of the social order as well, but opportunities are open to them that weren't there for their forebears, and they are embracing these opportunities. There is much talk in our time of the United States becoming a “learning society.” Management consultants write about “organizational learning”, and adult development experts champion “lifelong learning.” The focus of this talk tends to be on professionals, and managers, and people with a baccalaureate degree and beyond – mostly members of the middle and upper-middle classes. But if we’re serious about our country being a learning society, then we need to include all of its members.

Will the college provide people like Sam, Dorothy, and Zoe with the kinds of instruction and services they need? Will there be decent work for them at the end of their journey? Will we give these students a vital second chance – and through them realize the second time around a broad-scale societal commitment to the general diffusion of knowledge? We live up to our egalitarian ideals when the answer is yes.

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A Cab Ride in Vegas

So I'm in Las Vegas for a conference, staying in one of the swanky hotel-casinos, perpetual nighttime, flashing lights, bells and buzzers, erotica that's not erotic, manufactured enticement. Fear and loathing, straight up.

           It is about 10:30 on a Saturday night, and I'm getting a cab from a restaurant in one hotel on the Strip back to my hotel. The scene is controlled mayhem. People from everywhere, it seems, are streaming in and out, many with drinks, "after five" attire to bermuda shorts. Groups of young women in stiletto heels are getting into two Hummer stretch limos heading to bachelorette parties. Men in hotel uniforms bark commands and blow whistles, directing a swirl of traffic, cabs and town cars and those steroidal Hummers. The whole vehicular cluster is drenched in testosterone.

           The next cab in line is a small one, my cab. I slide in, relieved to be out of this mess. My cabbie is a slight woman, weathered face, mid-to-late 40s, looks to be from Central Asia. She is soft-spoken and cordial and talks to me with a quarter-turn of her head, keeping both hands on the wheel. The larger cars are unforgiving as we circle toward the exit, and she navigates carefully, defensively. Once out on the Strip, which is moving at a crawl, I start up a conversation.

           At first, given her pronunciation and limited vocabulary, I think she might be a fairly new arrival to the States, but it turns out that she has lived in Las Vegas for 25 years, working most of the time in the restaurant industry. She's only been driving a cab for six months. I ask her how she likes the new work, and her answer leads to another question or two, and here's what emerges.

           There was a lot of stress in the restaurant business, she says: the managers, the customers, complaints about the food. Driving a cab has less of that. You're more on your own – though there's stress here too, she adds. She keeps both hands on the wheel the entire time, eyes on the road. When we approach a yellow light, her fellow cabbies gun it, but she stops, explaining that if she gets in an accident, she could lose her job. Somewhere in this flow of conversation, she repeats – with a little apologetic laugh at the contradiction – that there's less stress driving a cab than in the restaurant, but that there's stress here too. A different kind of stress, I ask? Yes, she says, a different kind of stress.

           As we speak, her vocabulary increases markedly, and we end up talking about the economy in Las Vegas, the terrible housing bubble, how it devastated so many, the recession, the slow, slow comeback. All the while, we're surrounded by a creeping stream of revellers, honking, yelling from car windows, booze, the lights, lights, lights.

***

           I thought about that short ride off and on all the next day: Both hands on the wheel, the slight turn of her head, the unfolding, semantically and syntactically elaborated conversation about making a living in Las Vegas. I assumed my driver was new to the country, that her English was pretty limited. But as is always the case when people feel just a little more comfortable, so much can open up. I was familiar with her contradictory attitudes about work from my mother and so many other blue-collar and service workers – her parsing of different kinds of stress, and her relief to have new work that, however, kept both of her hands tight on the wheel.

           A former student of mine is a union organizer in Las Vegas, and he pointed out to me that cab drivers, as independent contractors in a Right to Work state like Nevada, have virtually no protections. It is possible that when she worked in the restaurant industry, she was a member of the Culinary Workers Union, the largest union in the city. If so, she gave up whatever protection she might have had for work that, in some ways, creates less stress for her. 

           One other factor in this job change is gender. I didn't see another woman cab driver in the loud flow of vehicles through the hotel roundabout. The next day I was telling the cabbie's story to a friend I had made in Vegas, someone who until recently had worked in the casinos, and she said it was very unusual to have a woman driving at night, for there have been some robberies, and one cabbie was murdered. So my driver was fighting the odds on several levels, trying to make a living catering to people like me. She had to choose between one stressful job over another, the better option exposing her to danger, threading her way through a bad economy, laying low, not taking any chances, being cordial to people who rush into her city for short bursts of pleasure, many of whom barely notice her, part of the vulnerable, semi-visible human machinery that animates a strip of illusions in the desert.

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