How Colleges Can Ensure Quality, Not Inequality

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.

Today, many schools deprive students of those opportunities by failing to teach them basic skills and by isolating them from people from walks of life different from their own. The American education system functions to ensure that poor kids will have ever-reduced chances for changing their economic conditions. Wealthier students in more highly performing schools, by contrast, will be able to expand the social networks already available to them.

Poverty plagues many of our school districts, and underfinanced schools reinforce poverty. This undermines our democracy because people without opportunity will not be able to participate effectively as citizens. The dramatic growth of inequality over the last 40 years feeds on and reinforces the impoverishment of our public life. Geoffrey Canada's Harlem experiment, which aims to create an enriching environment of college-oriented students and supportive adults, does not have all the answers for our public-school system, but he has challenged us by asking why we allocate resources to reinforce social hierarchies rather than invest them in opportunities for all.

Our higher-education system is also functioning to re-inforce inequality, and this will increasingly be the case if we do not ensure that large public institutions provide well-rounded curricula rather than just tracking people to specific jobs at the lower end of the pay scale. In an age of seismic technological change and instantaneous information dissemination, it is more crucial than ever that we not abandon the humanistic foundations of education in favor of narrow, technical forms of teaching intended to give quick, utilitarian results. "Certification" and "completion" are no substitute for the practice of investigation, critique, and experience that enhances students' ability to appreciate and understand the world around them—and to innovatively respond to it. A broadly pragmatic liberal education, one that translates traditions of learning into contemporary contexts of inquiry, is our best hope of preparing all students to shape change and not just be victims of it.

Many selective colleges and universities have been able to fight against the reinforcement of inequality by maintaining robust financial-aid programs. But these are coming under severe economic

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