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that the schools must be preoccupied with teaching them. In fact, almost anything the schools might teach would be suitable for preparing the young for such work. Of course, well-paying, highly competitive jobs will be available, as always,to those with a high degree of competence in the uses of language. But no serious argument can be made, not even by orthodontists, that the sole reason why language competence is useful is to ensure entry into a privileged profession. Even if such a proposition were put forward, we would not know which professions our students might aspire to, and therefore we would not know what specialized competence they would require. If we knew, for example, that all our students wished to be corporate executives, would we train them to be good readers of memos, quarterly reports, and stock quotations, and not bother their heads with poetry, science, history? I think not. Everyone who thinks, thinks not. Specialized competence can come only through a more generalized competence, which is to say that economic utility is a by-product of a good education. Any education that is mainly
about
economic utility is far too limited to be useful, and, in any case, so diminishes the world that it mocks one’s humanity. At the very least, it diminishes the idea of what a good learner is.
    Sad to say, some of America’s most important political leaders believe that one who learns how to be useful economically will have learned how to be an educated person. A headline, early in 1994, announced: C LINTON T ELLS E DUCATORS Y OUTHS A RE N OT G ETTING P RACTICAL S KILLS FOR J OBS . 6 The story quotes the President as saying, “In the nineteenth century, at most, young Americans needed a high school education to make their way.… It was good enough if they could read well and understand basic numbers. In the twenty-first century, our people will have to keep learning all their lives.” Of course, in the nineteenth century it was also desirable for people to continue learning all their lives. In fact, there was far more technological change in the nineteenth century than is likely to occur in the twenty-first. The nineteenth centurygave us telegraphy, photography, the rotary press, the telephone, the typewriter, the phonograph, the transatlantic cable, the electric light, movies, the locomotive, rockets, the steamboat, the X ray, the revolver, the computer, and the stethoscope, not to mention canned food, the penny press, the modern magazine, the advertising agency, the modern bureaucracy, and, for God’s sake, even the safety pin. But let us suppose the President did not learn about this in Arkansas schools and was advancing the standard-brand argument that with continuing, rapid technological change the job market will require people who are adaptable to change, who can learn new concepts easily, and who can discard unusable assumptions without trauma. This is a very difficult task for the schools, and one that John Dewey held to be of the utmost importance. The President’s solution is to provide the young with more practical vocational skills, which appears to be, not surprisingly, the same solution offered to California educators by Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Education Secretary Richard Riley. 7 Of course, this is exactly the wrong solution, since the making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies. The President’s speech and the advice of his colleagues demonstrate that they themselves have difficulty discarding outmoded assumptions, including their belief that if something is not working—for example, training people for jobs—then what is needed is more of it.
    Yet it must be admitted that the President and all his men were cheered, and cheered by educators, for placing the god of Economic Utility before all others. One may well wonder, then, why this god has so much strength, why the