Affordable education

Pro Case: -Welcome to the learning society where students are subjected to ceaseless testing, training, and learning in order to activate their "potential." The organizing principle of this society is to optimize the productivity of each student, so that they can be valuable and contributing members of a risk-filled economic system. Lewis 11 " Tyson E. Lewis, PhD. in educational philosophy from UCLA The learner is the one who is not yet complete, not yet knowledgeable, not yet skillful, not yet competent, not yet autonomous. The discourse of learning emphasizes education as an economic transaction, the learner is the consumer, who has needs. The teacher, the educator, or the educational institution is the provider there to meet the needs of the learner, and education itself becomes a commodity to be provided or delivered by the teacher or educational institution and consumed by the learner. The learning society is within a society driven by capitalist production and consumption, political life has been overcome by the eternal return of laboring life. Learning becomes an organizing principle for optimizing labor productivity, the citizen becomes first and foremost a learner within a flexible, knowledge economy that demands constant retraining or reskilling to fulfill high-tech, informationally rich jobs. We live in a situation of permanent threat, threatened with exclusion. The learner must be capable of continual adaptation to an unstable economic world where unemployment is always right around the corner. Education focuses on correcting their potentialities in order to maximize competencies and efficiencies. Potentialities within the learning society are connected to self-directed, self-managing behaviors in a form of governmentality of the self. The battery of tests which the individual undergoes help to identity, classify, train, and actualize their unrealized potential as students, workers, and citizens. Agamben"s theory of study enables us to retain our impotential, if the lesson of learning is to become a self-regulating entrepreneur then the lesson of study is to become nothing at all but rather remain within a pure capacity. -In opposition to this learning society which demands that we become good and productive students, I affirm a study of the topic. Instead of activating our "potential" we prefer the role of the studier, withdrawing from the normative pressures of the education system. This interrupts the ultimate demand of the learning society, either be productive or be abandoned. Lewis 15 Tyson E. PhD. in educational philosophy from UCLA If we think of education as oriented towards the measurability of determinate, reliable skill sets, studying suddenly appears to be a useless activity, devoid of quantifiable significance in the life of the student. Studying is a paradoxical state between education for subjectification and for desubjectification. To study is to undergo a certain inoperativity where we are exposed to all its thoughts possibilities and yet are undestined to any one or any set of them. The underlying normative pressures on the studier to project into certain possibilities relation to certain ends are deferred, delayed, and perhaps forgotten. Studying suspends in order to open up new uses within the present. This zone is a real educational state of exception that is issued from below and as such is a challenge to any form of sovereign decision over and against life. The offence here is not one of making overt demands on or against the sovereign but rather is one of studying the law which, renders it inoperative and studying does not directly confront the power of the sovereign. The most threatening gesture to the power of the law is that which is most polite, most inconspicuous, most inoffensive. Without a will to battle against, sovereignty quietly retreats from the scene, ashamed of its own powers. The studious life is a blight on the order of things that quietly prefers not to submit to improve, perfect, and so on. To further disengage the figure of the student from the docile consumer is an activity of sabotage and refusal of the dominant form of capitalist production today: governance. To struggle to study is to struggle to regain the freedom of impotentiality. "We prefer not to" does not make instrumental demands or appeals for reforms, thus frustrating any attempt on the part of the learning apparatus to negotiate. Its struggle is an immanent embodiment of a freedom to come. Contemporary society is indeed infested with the law of learning, then collective study destabilizes its fundamental injunction: either be productive or be abandoned. Pro Responses: -Earlier Education Was for the rich Education needed now, proper pedagogy necessitates focus on strategies to solve oppression "education is a starting point for demanding solutions for oppression and reordering power structures. Giroux 15 Henry A. Giroux, 3-17-2015, Truth out Education must be understood as a democratic sphere which enables students to claim their agency, and learn to respect the rights of others. Education has a responsibility to educate students to make authority accountable Democracy places civic demands upon its citizens, and such demands point to the necessity of an education that is, critical, students, rather than disengaged spectators, must be able to demand a reordering of power arrangements -Education has been depreciated Refer to the Lewis 11 card showing that the learner society has been the real cause for depreciation in the education system, putting emphasis on education as a commodity has determined "acceptable learning" which has depreciated the purpose education serves. Tenure also harms education: Tenures hurt student"s education and are ineffective, Vergara v. California proves Boutros et al, Theodore J. Jr. McRae, Marcellus A. Lipshutz, Joshua S. 2015 Vergara v. California, the Los Angeles Superior Court declared its statutes violate the fundamental right of students to education. The laws create inequalities in educational opportunities being afforded to students the court issued findings. The court found three statutes pertaining to teacher dismissal make it virtually impossible for districts to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom once they obtain tenure. Finally, poor and minority students are relegated disproportionately to classrooms with less effective teachers. These students fall further behind their peers, which exacerbates the achievement gap. -Overcrowded Labor Market STEM jobs aren"t being filled Joint Economic Committee 14 " US Senate Joint Economic Committee, STEM Education for the Innovation Economy January 2014 The increase in demand for STEM skills means that there is a shortage of workers for STEM jobs. The predicted shortage is amplified by the high concentration of baby boomers in STEM occupations. These STEM opportunities will require more education and training than they did in previous decades. Although the federal government has directed significant resources toward STEM education the US is not on track to train enough STEM-capable workers to fill future job opportunities. The economy will need approximately one million more STEM professionals than the US will produce at the current rate. The U S would need to increase the number of students receiving STEM degrees by 34 percent annually. -Not enough teachers Schools can"t attract teachers with current salaries. Eric A. Hanushek 2015 Hoover Institution, Stanford, California Doing something about teacher salaries is high on almost everybody"s reform agenda. Teacher salaries have fallen relative to salaries for other college-educated workers, schools cannot attract a sufficiently high-quality teaching force without raising salaries. The concern raised is that salaries are not giving good signals to the best teachers. This in turn is not only harming the strong teachers but also doing real damage to US society and to the economy.