Speaking in Waukesha, Wis., President Barack Obama joined the chorus calling for curtailing college liberal arts education due to its perceived weakness as a revenue generator or guarantor of employment. Instead, education must move to a vocational-technical focus to prepare students for the future of total work.
Obamas target was art history, but as we know, art history stands for any humanities degree perceived to be worthless. He could have easily said English or philosophy. He claims a lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacture as a viable career.
He negatively compares the potential earnings of a graduate with a humanities degree to those of a skilled laborer. He continues: You can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training you need.
Obama has also stated that we need more students graduating with four-year degrees in the hard sciences and mathematics. The advice we receive from Monster.com all the way to our high school guidance counselor reinforces that the way to attain job security, good pay and a decent standard of living is by acquiring a bachelors degree, followed by continuing education usually one or more graduate degrees.
The assumption Obama seems to make is that those who seek college degrees in the humanities do so out of disdain for manual labor (note he does not mention degree seekers in business, law, science, engineering, economics, et cetera. Presumably these people have good reason to think themselves above manual laborers). Obama claims we need to see that there is dignity to be found in manual labor and manufacturing trades. And this is true; there is no indignity in work. There is no reason laborers should barely live at the poverty line.
Obama misplaces the blame. The disdain for labor and the presumed loss of dignity laborers endure has more to do with the fact that laborers average $25,710 annually. Retail workers average $19,000 to $24,990 annually and food service workers average $21,240. Deregulation of industry, decline of union and offshoring of labor have resulted in the decline of workers wages, leaving them to take what is given in wages, hours and benefits, especially for people with no college education.
What Obama and the current administration in both parties envision is a stratified society that exists for the sake of the economy. They outline a future stratified society, one in which the people with college education take the well-paying positions in administration as technocrats who design our society and culture. Below them are the laborers, those who have received vocational training to run the machines and work in industry at lower pay.
It is an irony that our president, who occupies a position that once seemed inconceivable for an African-American to hold in our society, turns around and tells the working classes and the uneducated that they should know and learn to be happy with their place.
