To Cultivate or Prepare: Why Education and Workplace Readiness are Incompatible
On the principal contradiction of U.S. schools that is driving the systematic failing of its children.
“They won’t let you get away with that next year!”
“In college they don’t allow late work.”
“When your boss tells you to do something you don’t want to, are you just going to react like that?”
When does preparation for the labor force begin in the timeline of a student’s education? It’s certainly not an afterthought. There is no, “Oh yeah, before you go, you’re about to enter a rigidly hierarchical and exploitative labor market. Let’s just get you up to speed real quick.” It starts much, much earlier than that.
While explicit mention of job readiness may not be made until late secondary school, conversations about what students want to do after high school—conversations which are usually occupation-oriented—begin earlier. And even before we get kids thinking about their next steps, the cultivation of traits valued by the job market has long been under way. Preparation for the job market begins as soon as the structure of education starts to mimic the structure of wage labor. It has begun the first time someone sits you down and tells you to work on a topic of their choosing for a time of their choosing. It has most definitely begun when the products of said work are scrutinized and evaluated for their quality. These days, in the US, that’s usually in Kindergarten—4 to 5 years old. Shortly after a child speaks their first full sentences, the first seeds of wage labor are sown in their minds.
With the frontier of training for the labor market encroaching closer and closer on what used to be “protected” time for self-directed exploration and play (the current Kindergarten curriculum closely resembles the 1st grade curriculum of even a decade ago), the society-wide conception of what education truly is warps further beyond recognition. Is education about learning for its own sake? Is it about self-discovery, or training for the real world? This is a redux of the classic “conservative” vs. “progressive” education debate: Is the purpose of an education to teach kids how to fulfill traditional roles and values of society, or to give them the skills to create and rebuild society in their vision? Like every one of these questions, the only real answer involves a little bit of both. I personally lean heavily toward the latter—I believe in the value of tradition and morality, and I know that the only way they can be effectively reproduced is to be skillfully modeled—placed on offer for students to adopt based on their own merit—not taught in prescriptive fashion. Conservative ideas can be taught in a progressive manner, and vice versa. But a key distinction here is the difference between “fulfilling traditional roles and values” and fulfilling roles in a capitalist economy. One has a social, generative basis—honesty, honor, faith, whatever it may be, are values that humans have decided are good. The other is responsive to the needs of a system that is draining the Earth of its life and funneling wealth directly into the hands of A Few Guys. When we prepare students for roles as cogs in this machine, even with good intentions, we are complicit in its maintenance.
The idea of job training as a necessary component of education is a greedy one. Once it is legitimized through a foothold in the final years of secondary education, its voracious appetite for achievement sees it working its way backward through the grade levels, colonizing new age ranges with its rigorous, performance-based approach. High school becomes a boot camp for the type of heavily supervised hierarchical relationships experienced in the secondary labor market—jobs characterized by low pay, high job insecurity, and little to no autonomy over the labor process. As the shape of high schools changes, middle schools are forced to adapt. If they fail to do so, the transition from 8th to 9th grade becomes concussive. In my experience as a psychologist in a high school, 9th grade boys tend to have an especially hard time. Behavioral issues, disciplinary involvement, failed classes, and mental health struggles are par for the course when unfamiliar academic rigor is layered atop profound social transition at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives. Instead of high schools relaxing their standards, which are often effectively set in stone by state legislation, middle schools take up the burden of preparation.
“They won’t let you get away with this next year.”
How often has this sentence been the basis of arbitrary harshness? Logic of this type prompts schools to intensify academic and behavioral demands at increasingly younger ages, not because doing so has value in itself, but because not doing so may lead to academic failure at the next level, whose demands have just increased. As one grade level tightens up to prepare students for the next thing, preceding grades are forced to tighten up to accommodate for the change, and the cycle continues until grade levels formerly reserved exclusively for play-based learning begin to incorporate academic demands and the systems of evaluation and discipline that are necessary to enforce them. For a grade whose name translates literally to “garden of children”, Kindergarten bears a peculiar resemblance to industrial agriculture.
The prospect of schools preparing kids for the workforce may sound like a sensible thing, and I’ve heard the idea promoted with good intentions. After all, economic life is a reality of the world we live in, and what are schools for if not to prepare us for the world? But let us be careful to not confuse job training with education. If schools are to be for job training, then let them be for job training. Do away with notions of critical thinking, whole-child development, and self-realization. Job training and the doctrine of Preparedness For The Next Level are cancers in the body of real education—a process of discovery which takes place at the pace of the individual, is directed by the individual, and is for the purpose of expanding the mind and the understanding of the world. This process has no end date. Job training, on the other hand, is a process of forgetting and alienating. It demands that these basic principles of education are put aside, if indeed they were ever learned. In their place, the labor market requires the worker’s mind to be placed in a box the size and shape of which is prescribed by instruments of hierarchical organization—replacing creativity and autonomy with adherence to protocols, procedures, and codes of conduct stated and unstated. “Best practices” is the newest permutation. In the labor market where most spend the majority of their waking lives selling themselves, compliance with directives and predictability are prized above critical thought, a negative attribute given its proclivity to get in the way of obedience. These traits, which are valued by the labor market, are trained and rewarded in schools. They are antithetical to education.
The fundamental contradiction in terms of US schools—their paradoxical association with the concept of education and their function as reproductive engines of existing class structures through the preparation of students for the labor market—is the cause of so much consternation on the part of parents bewildered and frustrated by schools’ inabilities to accommodate their children’s unique needs, as well as proponents of liberal education reform. This contradiction is why the diversification of school access has done so little to democratize the distribution of wealth in the US. It’s why no matter how equitable schools become in their provision of services to students, the oppressive class structures maintained by economic stratification that govern our lives the moment we leave school remain unchanged. Every time we entertain the notion of preparing students for the social demands of wage labor (often disguised as preparation for the “real world”), we are being subtly complicit in the maintenance of oppression. We are recognizing structures of arbitrary authority and rigid hierarchy—profoundly undemocratic structures—as legitimate and inevitable, and doing work to ensure their continued existence.
If we are interested in maintaining transparency in our system of education, we must either let go of our expectation that schools are for education and accept their purpose as training centers for initiation into the labor market; or we can remove “job readiness” from consideration entirely, asserting that our schools are places to learn and discover on our own terms, not places to neglect our personal inclinations in service of integration into a predefined niche within the capitalist machine. These two roles are incompatible—it must be one or the other if we are to understand what schools are really for, and avoid confusion when they perpetuate injustice. As long as schools remain responsive to the needs of a capitalist economy, they will be antagonistic to the type of personal empowerment that remains associated with education in the public consciousness, and will continue to create dismay for children and families when they prove themselves hostile to personal development and diversity of expression.
The purpose of this essay is not to proffer solutions to the education problem, or to suggest that democratizing schools and insulating them from the demands of the market will magically reshape society in its image. The purpose of this essay is to identify the foundational contradiction in the functions of the US education system, which continues to present itself as an unsolvable problem. Understanding this allows us to see more clearly that what we originally thought were “failures” of the school system are in fact natural byproducts of a contradiction: schools’ imagined role as facilitators of personal development—education—and their material roles as locations of preparation for the undemocratic reality of economic life.