I taught for 40 years, and in that time developed a number of new courses and researched and published in fields new to me, and in one case — science fiction studies — worked in a field that was itself new. But I did that learning while working at one school for 35 years and earning in that time a pension I could live on in retirement (and in pensioned retirement try to learn some aspects of the film business).
I’ve experienced peachy-keen lifelong learning, but my experience is nothing like what faces many of my recent former students and most Americans under 50.
What the upcoming cohorts and generations face is a lifetime of job insecurity, where many or most will have to “retool” periodically to learn new skills to compete for whatever jobs might be available.
As a friend of mine says, “If you’ve got a design flaw, market it as a feature.”
It sounds so negative to talk about long-term job insecurity and hustling for work and to stay ahead of creditors. The upbeat version delivers the message as:
“None of your grandparents’ boring work, year after year; now you can have frequent changes and an opportunity for — tah dah! — lifelong learning!”
That’s the production angle, with its dark underside. The other angle is consumption and Americans’ job as consumers. And I’m serious about the word “job.”
A participant on a recent panel on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” withheld sympathy from people who got the middle seat in a row on a commercial flight because they hadn’t done their homework to find out if the airline assigned seats and, if so, when they did so — and when and how one should fire up the computer to go online to get seats, find out about baggage charges, etc. Indeed, he seemed to have little sympathy for all us cheap and lazy sorts who hadn’t taken his seminar on flying.
Not how to fly a plane, he offers a course on how to be a savvy consumer of airline travel.
And so forth: We Americans are supposed to study up on our investments, health care, travel opportunities, insurance, taxes, important purchases — and, of course, the computer programs that will help us get these jobs done.
Again, lifelong learning, or alternatively put: People who aren’t you or me, for their power, profit and/or convenience are expropriating our time and labor, making us learn to be “informed consumers,” learning what is mostly trivia, and ephemeral trivia at that, trivia soon replaced with new trivia to learn.
Screw that. A goal for Americans should be more time for lifetime education and thought — and a whole lot less time spent training for new kinds of drudge work, or studying up as consumers so we’re not taking the wrong medicines, or fleeced while shopping, bankrupted while investing, seized by the TSA, or forced to fly in a seat with no little legroom and shared armrests.
Lifelong education: Yes! Expropriated time and labor: No!
Richard D. Erlich is a professor emeritus at Miami University in Oxford. He has retired in Ventura County, Calif.