Paid knowledge work…
…changes young people’s educational and political roles
We are only beginning to understand the effects on education of the technological changes that are already roiling the economy and politics.
The idea that many people have lost and will lose their jobs to automation is on everyone’s mind. Maybe new jobs will be invented to take up the slack, maybe not. But economic change has come and is coming, and political arrangements are in turmoil partly because we have not yet figured out as a society how to adapt.
What we think much less about is that a changing economy also has many and varied effects on our system of education. One basic effect is almost never discussed.
Until the 1970s, working class young people could generally leave school at 16 years old, and begin to earn enough money to support themselves. By their early 20s, they could often afford to support a family. The labor market had space for workers without much education because the industrial economy needed people to do manual labor in factories, in warehouses, in transportation, in office buildings, in shops, and so on.
The employment structures available to young people have changed drastically. Young people cannot support themselves with less than a high school education, and recent studies show most earn too little to support a family until they are almost 30 years old, at best. But changes in employment structures have also caused changes in young people’s relation to education. It isn’t only that young people have to stay in school so they can get an education so they can get a job. It is also that they are forgoing the limited earning opportunities that do exist because they are stuck in school.
One of my students works nights at a nursing home, then comes to school in the morning. Another closes a fashionable restaurant after bussing tables four nights a week. Many sell drugs. They learn almost nothing in school, where they can occasionally put their heads down and catch a few minutes of sleep. They keep coming, because the law requires them to, and their parents get letters threatening criminal charges or judges threaten to jail them if they don’t attend. But it’s cash these students need most, and so they prioritize their jobs. Their relation to school is that it is something to be endured.
This relationship to school spells doom for what we typically think of as education. The great majority of public schools whose students come from distressed economic classes are overwhelmed by the disengagement that results. Poor students need cash. School offers only a promise of cash—maybe—four or eight or more years away. Therefore, school is phony, and no one in their right mind invests major time and effort in a phony project.
The solution is to readjust the economics of adolescence in a way that both advances education and pays cash now.