I think often about what college is for. If it is not a
gateway to professional career and prestige—which it never really was,
especially not for students like ours at CSU Stanislaus—, and not a means of
increasing individual wealth, then what? In brief, if all the (mainly crude)
economic justifications for higher education are not true, what could be a good
reason to go to college?
I reject
the citizenship rationale, because not only do very few of my students aspire
to this in any meaningful way, but it is not clear what citizenship would mean,
and whether developing citizenship would be good for students (unlike the
economic rationale).
I think I
can say honestly that I believe the following.
College
education is the best way to learn to understand how knowledge, information,
and power work at the level at which they work to control the world. What
college educators can do is explain how knowledge functions as a shape of
power, how knowledge shapes social institutions and practices, and how it
shapes us. The practical use of understanding all this is to be able grasp how
the people who own knowledge use it, and what they do to manufacture reality
with it.
Yes, there are
people who own knowledge and information. These are not your teachers, but the
people who, ultimately, determine what your teachers teach. They are not
researchers at Stanford or Cal Tech. Instead, they are the owners of knowledge,
information, and power in our society. For instance, the research professor at
an R1 institution must get funding for research, and competes to get it, from
those who have a vested interest in that research—the funding agencies, which
are government and corporations. They own the products of that research. They
literally own it. They control to a great degree whether the researcher can publish the research,
profit from it, make changes to it, develop it along new lines, or anything
else. In grant contracts, this is laid out specifically: who owns and controls
this new knowledge. The Department of Defense, the Department of Energy,
Monsanto, Dow, and Chevron use this knowledge to maintain and increase their
power. This is not power wielded repressively on us, not power that coerces us
by threats of violence. This is power wielded by controlling the shape of the
world, the shape of reality—and by controlling reality, the people who own
knowledge shape everything that anyone can do in the world.
Knowing how
this happens means you are more free, because you understand what your own
choices and actions in life mean, and what they don’t mean; what you can and
can’t do; and what could matter and might not matter about what you do. Knowing
how knowledge, information, and power are distributed, and how the owners of
them build the world we live in, makes it possible to consider strategic
options for living in that world.
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