A Collective Goal
Each of these letters
assumes one thing that I realize I cannot assume: that prosperity for all is a
collective good. There would be some truly cynical people (or times when even
an optimist such as I becomes cynical) who would argue that perhaps you do not
want the whole of the population to prosper. At the darkest times, I sometimes
wonder if there is something to be gained from keeping people under-educated
and in poverty. In poverty, you do whatever you have to to get by—mine for
minerals, dig ditches, clean public bathrooms, work the graveyard shift. To
“economic minded individuals,” you must rely on poverty. Someone has to clean
the grease traps, so goes the argument. Jesus said, there will be poor always.
But this is a pretty parasitic view of the economy. The rich sit in comfortable
leather office chairs, spinning toward the full-length windows to look out
across the horizon as the street-level workers scrub and sell and dig.
And I suppose, even in my
most idealistic brain, that there will always be “levels” of work. I am
embarrassed to ask the student workers in the office to print letters of
recommendation for me, but I do it because I have fifty more letters to write.
Some division of labor is necessary. However, I do think that there should be
fluidity between these divisions. That if someone doesn’t want to work the
graveyard shift anymore, there is a way for them to quit. That the swiveling
leather chair isn’t guaranteed to the man who sits in it and certainly isn’t
guaranteed for his son to claim. That there should be some kind of symbiotic
relationship between industries and its workers. That maybe you put some time
in mopping floors but that time in counts towards a goal. When companies pay
workers to go to college, there is symbiosis. You work doing a less-great job.
We’ll pay you to go to school so you can get a better job. Raising people up
isn’t just socialism, it’s good business sense. When you have employees with a
strong liberal arts background, they are more inventive, more creative, more
communicative. As Loretta Jackson Hayes, associate professor of chemistry at
Rhodes College in Memphis, wrote in
The Washington Post in an article called “We Don’t Need More Stem Majors, We
Need More STEM Majors with Liberal Arts Training.”
To innovate is to introduce change.
While STEM workers can certainly drive innovation through science alone,
imagine how much more innovative students and employees could be if the pool of
knowledge from which they draw is wider and deeper. That occurs as the result
of a liberal arts education. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/02/18/we-dont-need-more-stem-majors-we-need-more-stem-majors-with-liberal-arts-training/
Or, even if employees just get advanced degrees for
jobs they already occupy, the new insight and new skills attained make way for
new inventions, plans, and models.
If
you are convinced that government should be run like a business, perhaps think
of this symbiotic business model. Even if you still need, say, window washers
so that you can look out the windows of your high rise, don’t you think that
some certain number of years put in washing windows should allow for enough
money to pay tuition to go to college so that you don’t have to wash windows
forever? Don’t you think that your business-state would benefit from having
someone who once washed windows invent a solar-gathering window device? If you
think of the government as a separate entity from the people (as a business is
from its employees), perhaps you can think of it as a symbiotic one.
Sometimes
businesses/governments like to make metaphors from nature. Think, Wolf of Wall
Street. But in the real forest, symbiosis is the underlying structure. Lichen,
fungi, berries, ant, nurse trees all serve to help the forest grow. Even wolves,
who in the movies need nothing or no one, appear have a symbiotic relationship
with ravens. The ravens spot potential food for the ravens. The wolves tear
open tough hides for the birds.
Go ahead and run your business like a real wolf.
Tear open the expensive hides of Higher Ed by returning state funding to the
universities. Let the ravens eat. They’ll signal more food for you later.
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