This book is dedicated to Millennials and to all future generations. You deserve a better chance than you’ve been given.
I felt strangely disarmed reading the words that Cathy Davidson chooses to begin her book because I never felt like I deserved an apology. But there is also a sense of catharsis upon digesting the idea that everything is not entirely our fault or the consequences of us not working hard enough or measuring up. This is not to say that I am shopping for excuses, but rather that Davidson’s book was powerful for me because it clearly reveals our broken education system, how it is a social problem, and challenges us to find ways of creating change at a structural level.
Having just read Althusser in my theory seminar, I couldn’t help thinking about how education remains an ideological apparatus through and by which we are interpellated into “productive members of society” (Davidson 33). I remember when I entered NYU as an undergraduate journalism major and was told that within our department, double majors were required. From Day 1, I was essentially being told that my degree would not be productive on its own, and therefore I would need to hedge my chances of success post-graduation with another specialization (ironically this led me to choose Spanish as my second major and inspired my decision to pursue a career in academia).
Davidson traces the transition from “scientific labor management” to “scientific learning management,” or the ways our aptitude is now assessed by numerical scores, whether through standardized testing or grades.
Pedagogy is irrelevant. So is change. (75)
For me, this is one of the boldest statements Davidson makes in her book. But when you consider the way curriculum is now based –especially at the earlier, primary levels– around “teaching the test,” can we really argue that learning by and large has not become entrenched in standardization? I am thinking of how my IB curriculum in high school was centered around preparation for the exams senior year (the AP classes at a neighboring school served a similar purpose for their exams), or, on a macro level, how standardized tests characterize every stage of American education from elementary school on. In China, the situation is even more severe: college entrance is determined by one test, the gaokao exam, which 10 million students will take every year. The pressure is astronomical; parents will spend their life savings on test preparation services for their children to better their chances, and for students from the countryside, their score will determine if they will be the first in their families to attend college with the prospects of a brighter future, or if they will spend the rest of their lives doing manual work on the farm.
In the face of these realities, it is easy to be pessimistic about the possibilities for change. But I enjoyed the small profiles Davidson presents of the educators who are pushing the envelope, or creating spaces such as The Red House in order to encourage these conversations and think about the “What if?” It is clear that we need to shift our thinking of education from an ordered, disciplined perspective with neoliberal productivity as the priority, to what, for example, Dean Sha Xin Wei calls palpable impact. Sha eschews terms like interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary for the word synthesis; he is more concerned with the practice of knowledge to “[tackle] complex problems from seemingly opposite points of view” (Davidson 244). Of course, keeping some realities in mind, this is easier said than done. Davidson highlights the problem of student debt in our country, and through her conversation with Dr. Eric Manheimer, we can see how financial strain oftentimes directs the career paths of aspiring doctors. I have a friend who just started medical school this year, and I distinctly remember how she told me that “everyone wants to be a dermatologist, because it pays the most.” How do you emphasize palpable impact in that situation, when the average medical student graduates with $250,000 in debt? Some of the answers to the most pressing questions still direct us back to fixing the system on a structural level– this is not a question of just education, either, but of our society at large. As Manheimer says of young doctors, “They can pay back their medical school debt by going into lucrative, specialized fields, but our society loses” (279).
Davidson, Cathy N.. The New Education. United States of America: Basic Books, 2017. Print.