12. Economic Accountability: Beyond "Nannyism"

1. The classroom as an integrating force pales to insignificance next to Disney, Nintendo, and the NFL, not to mention CNN. This bugs the Nannies to distraction. They whine about culture being vulgarized and homogenized at the same time they insist on imposing national academic "standards" on everyone, but what really bothers them is that the America-inspired, knowledge age culture of economic democracy is sweeping the world without their arthritic fingers on the multimedia broom. So the Nannies chant the alarum of the flim-flam Music Man, with the corrupting siren updated from billiards to video: "Oh we got trouble! Right here in River City! And it starts with T and it ends with V, and it's bland, you fool!"
2. The truth is that television has done more to spread and perpetuate classical culture than schools could ever dream of. The relatively low ratings of public or educational or specialized cable TV networks may mask the real scope of TV's impact. The Metropolitan Opera's live TV debut of The Barber of Seville on the U.S. public television network a few years ago was seen by more people that night than had attended all the performances in all the opera houses in the world that had staged that opera in the century-plus since it was first composed.
3. Outside the classrooms, the genuine, living institutions of culture—churches, associations, museums, artists, tribes, cults-are hip to using modem media to advance their mission. Only the die-hard academics-lashed like Captain Ahab to the white whale of political and cultural correctness-are sinking to irrelevancy under the wave of an implacable technology revolution.
4. It's time to leave the business of tradition and culture to the people's own relations and institutions. In the plural society of the American system, government has no more business in the establishment of culture than of religion-which is none.
5. The American government was proclaimed and constituted by its founders to "secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity"-they didn't mention ancestors. The business of a government of the people is the future; its job is to prepare for and adapt to change.
6. Public policy now must be fundamentally refocused from education to hyperlearning—the essential instrument of liberty in the world of today and tomorrow.
7. Academic stalwarts want education to be accountable only for continuing to do more of the same. Would-be education reformers want to hold academia accountable for doing more of the same better.
8. But education cannot be reformed-it needs to be replaced. By trying simultaneously to serve two important but opposed social needs-tradition and innovation-academia increasingly is failing both. The only thing education should be accountable for now is phasing out as smoothly and swiftly as possible.
9. Accountability is much to be desired. But the new hyperleaming enterprise that is emerging to supplant the archaic architecture of academia-and that public policy must now embrace and nurture-demands a vision of accountability as different from the past as its media and mission.
   
   THE NEW ACCOUNTABILITY
   What is the learning enterprise to be accountable for? First and foremost, for economic democracy, not cultural correctness. The engines of cultural knowledge certainly are part of the overall learning enterprise. But, for reasons I've expressed, public policy need not and should not account for that role.
10. The United States was dedicated in its inception to secure the natural and unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-the latter being Jefferson's embellishment of Locke's more mundane right of property. A necessary condition for all these rights is the opportunity for each individual and family to enjoy economic self-reliance and hope of progress.
11. It has become unfashionable in academic circles to give the economic mission of learning much priority. Yet numerous surveys show that the overwhelmingly top value Americans place on education is economic opportunity. A 1984 Gallup poll aimed at rating the goals of education found that 56 percent of the U.S. public ranked as their highest priority "To develop an understanding about different kinds of jobs and careers, including their requirements and rewards." But only 20 percent of teachers given the same survey gave the same goal a high rating. Similarly, 46 percent of the public but only 6 percent of teachers gave their top rank to the goal, "To help students get good/high-paying jobs."' A central part of the mythic American Dream is the illusion that education is an effective conveyor of career opportunity and economic advancement.
12. But, in reality, the "solid gold life jacket" of education is dragging us down. As the shortcomings of America's workforce are continually exposed, as the ranks of its overeducated unemployed swell, as the price tag for schooling continues to grow, and as parents financially exhausted from finally paying for college find themselves besieged by twenty-five- or thirty-year-old offspring boomeranging back to the nest because their elite academic credentials have failed to win them gainful employment, the public is getting appropriately skeptical and restive.
13. Pressed for an accounting of education's benefit and cost, academicians rebel. You can't expect education to be productive, they admonish, after all it's not a business. (That's funny; how come you guys always complain you're not paid as much as other professionals in other businesses?) Education has a greater value than mere vocationalism, they sniff. (Oh, like what?) Like enlightenment, understanding the universe, appreciating the finer things in life, being a liberally educated person. (And how is that going to pay my rent, not to mention my health insurance?) The benefits are intangible. (Then why aren't the costs intangible too?) Look, you twit, you have to have a solid, liberal education to be a good citizen. (Washington and Lincoln had almost no education; weren't they good citizens?)
14. And so it goes. One of the more influential consultants on education reform I know likes to quote the nineteenth-century Catholic educator John Henry Newman's conviction that "the only truly vocational education is a liberal education." The way I see it, the truth is more like the reverse: The only truly liberal education is a vocational education.
15. Well, sort of, anyway. The term "vocational education" has a bad image of wood shops and welding classes as a result of a sinister tradition of "tracking" the academically disfavored into voc-ed ghettos that were rarely either vocational or educational. Actually, in the mindcraft economy, where the great majority of work is knowledge work, the content of the knowledge filed under the umbrella of "liberal" arts and sciences has considerable economic utility. But most self-styled liberal educators are so thoroughly contemptuous and ignorant of the economic world that they are utterly incapable of communicating the practical application of their "expertise."