In his speech at the A-TEC Academy ribbon-cutting yesterday in Aberdeen, Governor Dennis Daugaard uttered these vitally important words:
The Future Fund was started by Governor George Mickelson decades ago to invest in South Dakota’s workforce and build its economy, and I can’t think of anything better to invest Future Funds in than career and education programs throughout the state and right here in Aberdeen [Governor Dennis Daugaard, speech at A-TEC Academy, Aberdeen, SD, 2015.09.01, timestamp 7:58].
If Governor Daugaard meant exactly what he said, he is making a remarkable statement about how South Dakota should dole out corporate welfare. In 2014, the Governor invested far more of the Future Fund in schools than he did in direct handouts to private businesses. His statement yesterday and his 2014 Future Fund investments appear to go beyond the standard proposed by readers of this blog in 2014, that if we must redistribute tax dollars to corporations, we should at least match those handouts dollar for for dollar with increased funding for K-12 education and higher education.
I agree wholeheartedly that $2 million for A-TEC and $1.24 million for a similar project in Mitchell are much better investments of the Governor’s economic development slush fund than handouts to Manpower, Inc., Capital One, and Northern Beef Packers. The public schools offering these vo-tech programs tend to deliver real results and not leave the state or go bankrupt.
But the Governor isn’t valuing education in itself as a great humanist enterprise. Education remains a means to a corporate end. Consider his revisitation of his disdain for philosophy majors, along with psychology majors and art historians who don’t get jobs in their academic fields:
[4:02] It frustrates me today to see many young people enter their postsecondary academic pursuits not knowing what they want to be….
[4:39] This building gives you the opportunity while you’re still in high school to explore possibilities, to try your hand out at electronics, to try med tech, or try machining or welding or some of the other things that are taught as part of your career and technical education offerings either here or elsewhere in the state. It gives you a chance to try it out.
Someone told me recently that the most common college major is psychology…. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but there certainly are a lot of them. I know when I go to college graduations, sometimes I’ll be a commencement speaker, and you can read through the program, how many graduates there are in this or that field, and boy there are plenty in of psychology grads. There’s philosophy grads, there’s art history grads. And those are great fields of study. They’re interesting. Those who graduate with those degrees will go on to become counselors and historians and great philosophers. Many of them, though, will go on to work at jobs that don’t require those kinds of degrees, and those students will be burdened with lots of debt and a job that has nothing to do with the degree that they spent a lot and borrowed a lot to obtain.
Conversely, behind these walls, lies training for a degree or the beginnings of a degree for which there is truly demand in the marketplace, for which there are jobs available and employers who want you. So career and technical education programs prepare South Dakotans, prepare students for opportunities awaiting them after graduation [Daugaard, 2015.09.01].
The Governor says a couple nice things about philosophy, but the thrust of this passage discourages students from pursuing education in the humanities. I don’t mind the Governor’s promoting career and technical education. I agree that for plenty of students, CTE is a good career path. But I still don’t get why the Governor has to persuade students away from one education path in order to promote another. Studies and career paths are like towns. Saying “Aberdeen’s a nice place to live” does not require that (and is not proven if) I say, “Huron and Watertown suck!” I can say, “Huron and Watertown are nice; Aberdeen’s nice, too.” Why can’t our Governor stop playing the grouchy, narrow-minded dad and say, “Psychology and art history are nice; vo-tech is nice, too”?
The Governor’s statements here suggest that education is valuable only if it translates into a clearly related, lasting, and lucrative job. But graduates of any educational program, liberal arts or vocational/technical, may change career courses for perfectly good reasons. An math major may reach graduate school and decide he’d rather be a lawyer and work in politics. A welder may move to a market where she can get better pay or better working conditions as a carpenter or a freelance writer. An art historian may meet a wonderful mate, take twenty years out of the workforce to raise wonderful kids, then jump back into the workforce as a pastor or a pastry chef.
And that’s fine! We need not view any of those choices to work outside one’s academic preparation as a loss, a waste, or a declaration of error. The demands of the marketplace change. People change. Philosophers and welders, humans both, share the potential to tire of philosophizing and welding and to crave broader horizons. That’s why, instead of programming them to follow one paycheck-promising career path, we must teach them to be open to broader possibilities.
The Governor ignores the non-economic value of learning. Some students willingly devote time and money and go into debt to study certain subjects just because those subjects are fascinating and beautiful parts of human culture. The Governor’s philosophy of education seems formed entirely by employers and the transient demands of consumer culture, with an at-best dismissive eye toward the more enduring intellectual and spiritual aspects of learning. (Check this out: Dennis Daugaard is the live-in-the-now materialist in this discussion, while I am fighting for the everlasting soul.) In the Governor’s impoverished view, education is not for building souls; it is for building tools to be used by corporations to make widgets and profit.
I welcome every two-million-dollar investment Governor Dennis Daugaard wants to make in my school district to help give kids more opportunities to learn and grow. The Future Fund grant that built A-TEC is still corporate welfare, but less direct, and providing broader benefits for young South Dakotans through our public school systems than any handouts filtered through corporate exploiters of state largesse.
But if the Governor can spend $8.5 million dollars to help kids in twelve K-12 districts try out welding and carpentry, why not spend another $8.5 million to fund a gifted education coordinator/teacher for every South Dakota school district to help kids develop their fullest intellectual potential? (151 districts, $8.5 million… that’s over $56K per district.) What are you afraid of, Governor Daugaard: that the gifted kids might do more philosophizing?