Ryan Adams w/ Emmylou Harris – Oh My Sweet Carolina
Public Education as a Social Wage
I realize that’s it’s a sort of “back to the future” idea, but I was reading an article about Diane Ravitch’s speech to The American Association of School Administrators, and I starting thinking about the idea of the social wage, or, rather, the destruction of the social wage. The social wage, according to the dictionary of Marxist terms, is “That part of workers’ means of subsistence which is provided as a free public service rather than purchased.” (You have to scroll down the page to get to the definition.) Republican budget cuts will make us all poorer most dramatically by continuing ongoing cuts in the social wage.
That sounds more narrow than it is. In fact, it’s one of the great human achievements of the last century. The social wage can also be thought of as a kind of standard, or base-line, for material affluence. It’s what everyone deserves (our historical entitlement, what we have earned together) simply for being alive, ideally, or, more practically, because we are citizens of democracies. The social wage includes legal protections, such as work safety and child labor laws, and food safety and minimum wage and work week laws. You could also include transportation infrastructure, as well as public education and pensions.
This is a collective measure of affluence, one that should exist alongside and support individual and family wealth. The ongoing assault on public education is, of course, an assault on the democratic distribution of resources and an acceleration of the concentration of individual wealth. It’s not simply quantitative, though. Here’s Ravitch’s description of those aspects of the social wage that have to improved if we are to improve education: “access to decent medical care; exposure to the arts and physical education programs… science and… nurturing programs for children up to age 5.” It takes a village, as the cliché goes.
Anti-Intellectualism as Infotainment
You’d think that a major university like Rutgers would be largely immune to the anti-intellectualism that plagues U.S. Higher Education. That’s apparently not true as their recent hiring of “Snookie” for a recent speech. She was paid $32.000. (Strangely, for once I agree with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which reported the story here.) I think this might signal some sort of benchmark for the class divide in U.S. Up there, of course, money is no issue.
If this were a state funded school, or any non-Ivy league university, I imagine that the outrage would be much louder. I don’t mean the public at large, though, I mean the outrage inside Rutgers. My guess is that the students at the school, all no doubt destined to be our betters, are too completely secure in their superiority to be threatened by mass entertainment. It’s no more (or less) anti-intellectual than Naturalists in late 19th century America visiting freak shows.
It’s bad faith humanism, or domestic Orientalism, as if the literate and materially and socially affluent now feel so distant from the less literate, less affluent that they seem like exotic animals, fascinating examples of other cultures. Something like this must explain why there are now so many “working class” television reality shows, like “Coal” and “Dangerous Catch” and so on. I suppose that earlier shows, like American Chopper and Dirty Jobs were the earliest signs of the trend.
Interesting Times
It may or may not be a true Confucian saying, but I have always liked the idea of cursing someone by hoping that they live in “interesting times.” “The clear implication,” says the Phrase Finder Website, “being that ‘uninteresting times’, of peace and tranquility, are more life-enhancing.” Or, at least profitable, if you are in the textbook industry. May they live in interesting times.
I bring this up only because Google is having an “interesting time” meeting its Utopian goal of making all of the world’s books digitally available. (“Could Google Books ruling affect college textbook market?“) If you put this together with cheap, electronic readers, and perhaps with a simple– and elegant, one hopes– printing system, then the end of our current intellectual property era looms ever closer.
At a certain point– depending, among other things, on when Google gets its permissions in order– a “textbook” will be a search algorithm that gathers together a list of the best available resources on a particular subject. These algorithms could have all sorts of parameters: an introductory” or “advanced” filter, or a filter that excludes or includes information posted after a certain date.
We not yet to the point– as far as I know– where we can begin designing that search engine. The problem is, of course, is money. Or, to be more accurate the problem is both wages– how authors can get paid– and profits, that is, how publishing houses can stay afloat. The first makes a lot of sense: we created copyright in order to encourage writing. We shouldn’t worry so much about the publishers.