This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity. As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we are now starting to delve the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession. I suggest that the troubled lives of the educated precariat are a symptom of the troubled state of higher education generally - especially in the First World (also known as the Global North). Two troubled groups come immediately to mind, namely, academics (college professors or salaried researchers) and college or university graduates. We will explore the plight of new college professors and researchers later. But suffice it to say that the guaranteed career of a tenured professor is increasingly out of reach for this group. (See also, "Tenure Track for Professors In States Like Texas May Disappear," USA Today, 13 April 2023.) A third group that may not know it's in trouble consists of new and continuing college and university students whose necks will one day be broken by the mousetrap of student loan debt. A fourth group consists of the administrators and employees of the system itself. Their trouble arises from the fact that they are running out of a key resource, namely, new students! This is due to a number of factors, such as declining birth rates, as well as a sober realization on the part of young men and women that college education itself has begun to yield sharply diminished returns even as it has become unbearably expensive.
In considering the historical role of higher education in the development of global civilizations, it is natural to ask how things got to this state in which American higher education has begun to crumble. Where exactly did we come from that we have arrived at this destination? To answer that question, we need to look at where we started from - in other words, it's time to look at the historical origins of education in general and of higher education in particular.
The first thing we notice is that there are records on almost every continent from almost every civilization describing the origins and evolution of formal education and of the creation of higher education systems. Ancient places of higher learning can be found in places such as these (this is a very partial list, by the way):
- Mali, African Continent (University of Timbuktu containing the Sankore Madrasah)
- Tunisia, African Continent (University of Ez-Zitouna)
- China
- Academy of the White Deer Cavern (白鹿洞書院);
- Songyang Academy (嵩陽書院) (This was a private rather than public institution.)
- Taixue (太學) ("National University" established by Emperor Wu)
- Greece, European Continent
- The school of Isocrates
- The school of Plato (Also known as the "Academy", which was the first historical use of this term in the West.) (See also Higher Education In Greece, Kyriazis and Asderaki, CEPES, 2008)
- The school of Pythagoras
- The Byzantine Empire
- The Pandidakterion (known today as the University of Constantinople)
Note that although some of these institutions are called "universities," the actual entity known as the modern university did not come to being until the Middle Ages in Europe.
The entire educational process including both primary and higher education has been documented for the Greco-Roman and Chinese cases, and so it is useful to examine these cases in more detail. First, let's consider the Greco-Roman case. And in the case of Greece, we must consider the distinction between education in the Athenian city-state and education in Sparta. According to Wikipedia, formal education in Athens was reserved for boys who were free-born. The education of slaves was forbidden. Formal education was conducted by either public schools or by private tutors. I was not able to find out how much access to public schooling depended on family wealth, but the sources I have found do indicate that the extent of this formal education did depend on how much a family could afford to pay. Access to higher education was strictly on the basis of a student's ability to pay, and it appears that the system of higher education was largely created and run by private individuals with sufficient means for leisure. Thus figures such as Aristotle and Plato could be considered a kind of educational entrepreneur. As for Sparta, while both free men and free women could participate, the purpose of Spartan education was solely to train the nation for war-fighting.
A funny thing happened to educated Athenian Greeks who had enjoyed the status of free-born intellectuals: when the Greek city-states were conquered by and absorbed into the Roman Empire, these free-born intellectuals became slaves themselves. However, these educated slaves were able to lighten the burden of their slavery by becoming tutors and founding their own private schools (often with very slim profit margins). This system of private education began to assume the role which Roman fathers as heads of households had traditionally held as the educators of their children. In the Roman empire, there was no state-funded public education, either at the primary or the secondary level. Yet those who wanted to participate in Roman politics were required to obtain a formal higher education. This limited participation in Roman politics to the wealthy. Also, whereas in Greece, higher education was seen as an activity of leisure which should not be tainted by any practical application (From Formal to Non-Formal: Education, Learning and Knowledge, pages 8 and 9), in the Roman empire the situation was different. For Romans insisted that all education should have some practical purpose.
In China, primary education began as an informal, communal process. According to Dr. Ulrich Theobald, "The oldest word for "school" is xiang 庠, which actually means a building for livestock with two facing walls, where elderly people reared sheep, pigs or cattle and at the same time were entrusted with the duty to watch children and instruct them." Primary education in China eventually evolved into a system of both private and public schools. The public schools came into being during the Tang and Ming periods. These schools, along with private primary schools and tutors, prepared students to enter the Chinese academy system, which then prepared promising students for posts in the Chinese civil service. A couple of noteworthy facts regarding these academies is that there were times when private academies were either outlawed, disbanded, or taken over by the state as exemplified by the emperor. Also, there were periods in which the state created or funded public academies in the academy system. Lastly, some of the academies of the 18th and 19th centuries assumed research duties in addition to teaching. The Taixue 太學 "National University" had already assumed a research role during the Southern Dynasties period from 420 to 589 AD.
From the Chinese and Greco-Roman cases we can see that a key function of ancient higher education was to produce an elite class - that is, people who could either participate in politics and governance as ruling practitioners of statecraft, or as people who could serve as competent administrators/bureaucrats under these ruling elites. Therefore the function of many ancient institutions of higher learning was not primarily research, although, as noted above, exceptions to this did exist in both ancient Greece and in China. Stronger examples of a focus on both research and applied knowledge can be found in the Academy of Gondishapur in what is now modern Iran. This academy was a center for the learning of medicine and science, among other subjects, and the modern hospital system owes much of its inspiration and foundational philosophy to this academy. The Sankore Madrasah on the African continent also evolved a research function, although its main original purpose was Islamic education. We don't have time today to explore the beginnings of the modern European university, but suffice it to say that the modern university system seems from the outset to have had the dual purposes of research and teaching. Thus the early modern universities took over the function of producing the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church (the Western form of the mandarin administrator) in addition to producing research.
What is interesting to note is how systems of higher education fare in societies undergoing decline. The Byzantine system of higher education is a key example. The vicissitudes of the Byzantine empire in the 7th and 8th centuries and in the 13th century dramatically decreased the central government's ability to fund higher education and led to the privatization of higher education. It is certain that this influenced the supply of competent practitioners of statecraft as well as competent administrators. It is also true that declining Byzantine imperial power also produced declines in the number of jobs available to would-be mandarins who graduated from any Byzantine program of higher education. This has significant implications for the American system of higher education, as the process of accelerating inequality continues in the United States, and as the rich parasites at the top of the food chain continue to suck nutrients from the rest of society. More on that in another post.
No comments:
Post a Comment