How Colleges Can Ensure Quality, Not Inequality

By Michael S. Roth

Recently, I had occasion to hear two voices calling for radical change in American education: Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children’s Zone has developed a new model for effective learning while providing significant opportunities for young people, and Mark C. Taylor, a professor of religion whose recent Crisis on Campus points out the need for radical change in higher education. Both men recognize how our educational system has evolved for many into economically and culturally destructive factories of failure.

Canada and Taylor emphasize the dysfunctionality of our elementary and secondary schools, but we might say that those systems are working to produce just what has been asked of them: increased economic inequality and cultural homogeneity. Through a good part of the 20th century, it wasn’t that way, and education was seen as the ticket to economic mobility and cultural participation by an increasingly diverse population. Even though college was a world about which my parents knew very little, they were proud to send my brother and me to college because for them it represented access to opportunity. This wasn’t only economic opportunity, but the chance to choose work, make friends, and participate in a community based on educated interests rather than just social and ethnic origins.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/How-Colleges-Can-Ensure/127233/

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