I’ve started reading a wonderful, yet sad, book about the state of Education in Aemrica. Entitled, Academically Adrift, the authors provide clear evidence about the sad state of affairs in our education. I think the authors are spot on; their research confirms much of what I have thought and said publically about what has gone wrong in our country. While I will be blogging more about their findings later this year, last week as I shared this with my good friend Matthew, we stumbled into a simple snapshot of the state of affairs.
Generally, the authors of Academically Adrift posit that all of society is to blame for the ills presented in the book. They take students to task for being far too invested in non-essential issues of life. 
To the student, higher education is a part-time endeavor that, well, should be easy to accomplish. Faculty are accomplices in this because generally, for a variety of reasons, the professors ask or expect little from students. The vast majority of professors do not even consider the teaching of students to be their first mandate. Some of that comes via the third guilty culprit from the authors—the Colleges and Universities. In most schools, it rewards professors for virtually everything BUT teaching, turning over the process of educating to part-time professors (good people to be sure, but obviously not fully hired by any school) or graduate students (again, good people who attempt good work, but clearly not the “experienced mind” of a veteran professor).
Of course, more than these three actors are guilty, but the authors do not extend their research to the obvious failure or decline of the family, of the city and of culture itself. It is to the last there that I turn to a way to really understand what has happened. Note, the authors use clear research to demonstrate how much our culture, as seen in the evidence of students and higher education, has changed. Through their metrics, what our culture expects from itself has massively changed for the worse from the High of World War Two.
Back in the middle 1980s, two movies came out that well capture the image of education and what society really wants. In 1985, the movie The Breakfast Club came out, and one year later, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off followed to acclaim. Both of John Hughes’ movies, the sociologically deep investigation of the high school culture seen in The Breakfast Club and the somewhat silly yet still telling escapade of Ferris Bueller, demonstrate a shifting culture.
In The Breakfast Club, the movie depicts school as something to endure. The parents are almost all shown to be absent at best or overbearing horrible monsters at worst. More depressing is the character of Assistant Principle Richard “Dick” Vernon. 
Vernon, we find out, has been teaching for 22 years; instead of being someone deeply invested in being a champion for learning, he comes across as a jerk, mean, capricious and someone just skating by, probably hoping just to get retirement.
Along the way, he has an exchange with “Carl the Janitor,” perhaps the one adult who seems to be normal, who seems to be attempting to be someone fair in the midst of culture, yet still hoping to aim the students towards something better than just wasting their lives.
Assistant Principle Vernon : What did you want to be when you were young?
Carl the Janitor : When I was a kid, I wanted to be John Lennon.
Vernon : Carl, don’t be a goof. I’m trying to make a serious point. I’ve been teaching for 22 years. Each year, these kids get more and more arrogant.
Carl: Bullshit, man. Come on, Vern. The kids haven’t changed, you have. You took up teaching because you thought it would be fun, you could have summer vacations off. Then you found out it was actually work and that really bummed you out.
Vernon : These kids turned on me. They think I’m a big joke.
Carl: Come on! If you were 16, what would you think of you?
Vernon : Carl, you think I give one rat’s ass what these kids think of me?
Carl: Yes, I do.
Vernon: You think about this. When you get old, these kids… When I get old, they’re going to be running the country.
Carl: Yeah?
Vernon : This is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night. That when I get older, these kids are going to take care of me.
Carl: I wouldn’t count on it.
The movie is clearly indicating that society and culture have changed and any time spent in education is no longer a worthwhile investment. The students see school as something to endure. The faculty blame the students yet are depicted as lazy as the students. The parents are absent. Overall, education is something to obviously be avoided. Enter Ferris Bueller.
In Hughes’ next movie, he demonstrates that rather than being forced to endure the penalty of a Saturday “locked up” in some detention hell, the students should actually just skip school in total. Again, the parents are completely clueless and largely support their son’s efforts, at least support by not really paying attention to the obvious clues.
The movie posits the faculty as either boring or incompetent. The economics professor, played so memorably by Ben Stein, the oft-imitated roll calling scene of “Bueller, Bueller” drones 
through a lecture that the students mostly sleep through. The Principle, Ed Rooney, attempts to have discipline and spends the entire movie in a futile chase to apprehend Ferris, but time and time again, the youth is far too smart for him. In the end, though Rooney thinks he can still win—“I did not achieve this position in life by having some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind.”— he will be undone by the sister of Ferris who hates her little brother, but apparently detests school and its principal more.
The takeaway again is simple to perceive. Education is nothing worth working for. Realize, I like both of these movies, having seen them first in the theaters when they came out, a college student enjoying the look back at high school. Yet now, looking back, its easy to see how both movies are a snapshot at our changing culture starting in the late ‘70s and building to a head of steam in the ‘90s.
The authors of Academically Adrift might have been thinking of Ferris or Claire, Bender and the other students spending their Saturday together in the school library. For those students, and for the majority of society today, education isn’t something to work hard for, nor is there really any apparent reason why the classes even exist. If we, as a culture, do not decide now to reclaim the value of learning, to see the academic system as important in creating a learned citizenry, a value in and of itself, then we truly are in trouble.
I think, however, we can reclaim this ground. I see that fact each semester. My students are typical students, coming to my class with much of the cultural baggage. Yet, through my own steady efforts, added to their own hunger for real meaning to their lives and what they have to spend their time with, most of the students dig into the effort necessary to achieve their success. They don’t want to accept the idea that our time spent together is pointless. They don’t want to be adrift.