Beyond Workers and Leaders

Higher education as a training ground for citizenship

President Obama is making education an economic issue. “When it comes to jobs, opportunity, and prosperity in the 21st century, nothing is more important than the quality of your education,” he asserted in his weekly radio address on October 9, 2010. Of course, for Obama, connecting higher education to the economy is a political imperative. Having proposed that the United States place a renewed emphasis on higher education and increase its proportion of college graduates—currently 40.4 percent, lower than eleven other countries—to a world-leading 60 percent by 2020, he now must demonstrate why this initiative deserves attention in the midst of America’s economic woes.
The moment is ripe to examine the politics and policy of higher education. Yet we might enter this conversation with some trepidation. This magazine is based at perhaps the world’s most iconic institution of higher education, but debates about undergraduate education at Harvard rarely focus on the economic value of a bachelor’s degree or the marketable skills it confers.
Instead, the discourse concentrates on questions like those raised by recent HPR endpapers, such as whether the West should have pride of place in the curriculum or whether Harvard students ought to eschew lucrative banking and consulting careers. These debates are often premised on the notion that what Harvard students learn or do in their formative years is especially significant because these students may go on to affect history. Rather than merely equipping the workforce of the future, Harvard imagines itself to be preparing the leaders of tomorrow.
Yet a conceptual divide between institutions that train workers and institutions that educate an elite threatens the fabric of democracy. In a country such as ours, all educational institutions in fact share at least one task in common: preparing every student to be a citizen. This responsibility is rarely discussed when it comes to higher education; we simply presume Civics has been taught in high school and leave it at that.
Just as the 21st century requires an increasingly educated workforce, however, it also demands a more educated citizenry. Citizens unfamiliar with statistics will be deceived by misrepresented data; those with no knowledge of the cultures, religions, languages, or even names of foreign countries can hardly parse international relations, while those who know very little of biology may find it impossible to take a position in bioethical debates.
Insisting that we should devote greater resources to the universal education of our citizens reflects genuine commitment to equality. Restricting certain areas of learning to a ruling class would be antithetical to the modern American system.
Not that it has always been so; Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the gentleman farmer was someone whose leisure and comfort enabled him to study and judge from a position of detachment. But in embracing the universal franchise and the equal citizenship of everyone born in America, the United States has chosen a different path. Rather than cause us to decouple education from citizenship, however, this more inclusive model should prompt us to focus on education as the only way to move beyond formal equality and equip all citizens to actively exercise their rights. Again and again, elected officials stress that educational opportunity leads to economic success; we must become similarly preoccupied with its positive effects on democratic deliberation among all citizens, not just the elite.
For broad democratic citizenship itself is one of the assets American society brings to the 21st century. The more educated and empowered Americans feel as citizens, the more they will view the inevitable challenges ahead as obstacles to be jointly surmounted rather than problems that some distant government should confront. Improved higher education, therefore, may be an economic imperative, but it is also a democratic necessity.

Kenzie Bok ‘11 is a former Covers Editor.