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i think it's pretty simple. you shouldn't go to college unless and until you know why you're there. until you reach that point, you're wasting the money of whomever it is that is fronting for you and wasting your time. i don't think it's an accident that the routine story is of waking up hung over one morning sometime during the first semester of junior year with the horrifying realization that you have to major in something.
some people know at 18. most people figure it out sometime in their early 20s, a provisional narrative that orients them until the fashion another one later on. and given that there's no standard age---and no standard path---that brings folk to this point, then it makes no sense that there should be standard expectations as to college following high school straight away. or at all.
there could be non-military national service. there could be all kinds of programs to make a couple years off between high school and college a valuable and constructive time in which folk figure out, at least provisionally, what they want to explore.
but it requires making actually educating folk a priority. abandoning the security warehousing that's all too typical of high schools, getting rid of these moronic conservative standardized tests, and diverting substantial resources away from building weapons systems into trying to make people's lives better.
the problem with the article in the op is that it assumes---apparently---that the money one spends on tuition is simply laying around and can be accessed to do other things. so it leaves out the centrality of debt generation in enabling kids to get to school outside a very narrow class stratum.
insofar as the class reproduction aspect of education----i can't figure out why this even surprises anyone. back in the old days, marxists called education the system of social reproduction. and they were right. that's it's function--to reproduce the class order.
but it also provides a variety of tools with which to critique that order and that enable people to work their way out from under the loops that constitute the dominant ideologies.
and were people not able to work their way out from under those loops, the system as a whole would collapse because the ideology is geared around making itself static in order to protect itself as a stratified, unhuman, unjust society in many---but not all---respects.
so the idea of university education being part of social reproduction is a duh point. yes. obviously. but that's not **all** it is.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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