Joan Venocchi takes Bill Cosby’s recent infamous statement and does a good job at turning them back onto white culture. However, in doing so, she replaces a firm grace of history with Maureen Dowd quip-as-argument:
In his recent remarks, Cosby said young black people are failing to honor the sacrifices made by those who struggled and died during the civil rights movement. He is correct, but again, the same premise applies to young white Americans who are forgetting all those great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers who came to Ellis Island as teenagers and wanted one thing for their children: an education. In learning, those immigrants saw the path to economic security, which is something quite different from the mindless acquisition of material wealth. They passed that value on to their children, who in turn passed it on to their baby boomer children, who somehow are failing to pass it onto their own offspring.
Their children all want the magic bullet, the “American Idol” shortcut to fame and material success. They know dialogue and plot lines from “Law and Order,” but law school? What a drag. If they can’t be professional jocks, they want to be sportscasters. Sportswriting might be OK, but only if spellcheck is part of the job offer.
There may be something here, but I can’t help but feel that pop culture is being unfairly singled out. Is being a fan of a TV show really that incompatible with professional education? And while the rags-to-riches fantasy behind reality TV probably does say something about the class unconscious in America, it’s probably best read as the reappearance of something that periodically marks American culture. Those immigrants from Ellis Island played the numbers game, after all.
In fact, the historical evidence doesn’t support the notion that boomers’ kids don’t want education. Is enrollment at law schools or other professional schools down? What about undergraduate colleges? Certainly spell-check and the calculator have led to an atrophy of base spelling and arithmatic ability (why wouldn’t they?); but I find it hard to believe that Americans know less as a whole than they did ten, twenty, thirty years ago.
Perhaps anomie has struck some sectors of the population, so that increasing numbers don’t imagine that education has any benefit for them or will make much difference in their chances in the labor market. If so, educating them better - and believe me, this is a goal of mine, as well - doesn’t mitigate the brute reality of the labor market, particularly in the short run. While some will climb out from undesirable jobs, others will have to take their place, and while ranks will enter the realm of the employed, employment rate proper is not likely to show much short-term impact.
In short, education is desirable a long-term aid in raising our productivity and standard of living, not a a short-term solution to class inequality or even social problems. Even op-ed columnists want their magic bullet.
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