"You know what? They need to get education in areas where they can get jobs," Scott told a right-wing radio host Monday morning. He continued:
"You know, we don't need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It's a great degree if people want to get it, but we don't need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees. That's what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on. Those type of degrees. So when they get out of school, they can get a job."
It's no idle sound bite. The governor, an ex-corporate CEO with a checkered business past, is pushing a plan that would all but kill liberal arts and social sciences at the Sunshine State's public universities.
Scott is articulating a limited although quite popular belief that intellectual inquiry exists solely for the purpose of honing marketable skills.
It's remarkable just how pervasive this view can be. It finds expression on the right through business elite political tools like Scott who desire social institutions that only produce efficient and obedient workers. But something like it also gets parroted by education advocates and administrators at all levels and of all political persuasions in search of a utilitarian selling point for better school funding.
"Education is the key" to a better economy, to better jobs, they always tell us. None of this is necessarily true, however. It may be generally the case that specialized training can increase the value of one's labor in specific fields but it doesn't follow that a so-called "highly trained" workforce translates into a higher percentage of employed or adequately compensated people.
In fact, as we saw last week, a central complaint of the "99 percenters" you see getting arrested today is that their level of educational attainment hasn't met their expectation of its supposed market value. Many of the personal messages in these photographs bear that out.
The problem there, of course, is that complaint only makes sense if you believed the con in the first place. 99 Percenters who believe, like Rick Scott wants them to believe, that "education is the key" to the comfortable life and have dutifully committed their time and resources to pursuing whatever bland ambition Scott prescribes for them are understandably feeling a little ripped off right now. Because they've internalized the con, however, they're just as likely to remain disdainful of those who haven't, in their estimation, "earned" the right to demand a fair living standard. Which is why nothing politically useful for "the Left" such as it is will come out of what is essentially a Tea Party for Yuppies.
Meanwhile Scott's conceptualization of education solely as a facilitator of financial or social status attainment will remain the consensus view of both those who have and those who resent being denied such status. And those of us who tend to see education as an end unto itself will remain about as relevant as this talking manatee.
Update: Thanks to Pat for pointing out a concurring argument about Occupy Wall Street here.
It is extremely disturbing to me how quickly a movement opposing our system of prestige and wealth becomes a movement about those who thought they were entitled to succeed in that system. Complaining that a college education hasn't moved you into the material comfort and social strata you wanted isn't an argument against this system; it's a complaint about the outcome of the system that tacitly asserts the value of that system. When someone says "I have a law degree and I work as a barista," the necessary assumption of that statement is that their law degree entitles them to a certain material and social privilege. That privilege is precisely what animates the system they say they are protesting.
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