Intriguing post on education and its social value in Philip Greenspun's Weblog. He says, "Just back from a workshop at MIT on technology for community-building in America. The focus turned out to be poor communities. Apparently the middle class don't need community because they can enjoy their suburban comforts."

The mismatch of expectations is instructive. "Community-building" may well be a 'term of art' for nonprofits and activists: these specialists use it in a special way that they understand, so outsiders are left a beat behind. It can be very worrisome, the degree to which anti-poverty and anti-racist activists use such jargon, since their enterprise is not meant to be an elitist one, and yet they commonly alienate the middle- and upper-class people who they need to draw their resources from (they make it up on guilt, I suppose).

But let's read on:

"The non-profit world likes to think about affordable housing, leadership development, better health care, specialized training, etc. If everyone in a poor neighborhood were educated to the standard of the average Harvard graduate all of the other problems would be solved."

It's pretty to think so, but alas I believe this is a bit too sugary for my stomach to bear.

I'll be the first to say that a strong education is the key to ameliorating all the other social ills. And I'll spare the ink on that bit of name-dropping; the number of words required to properly denounce it would cause a heart attack in my editor here at Letters.

Many people don't take well to formal education, and indeed many of the smartest and most effective people I've met do not. Furthermore, many people don't want to endure the rigors of education, even if it means a better standard of living would result at the end. The glory of capitalism, after all, is not that you can work to become rich if you desire, but that you can work as little as you like, as long as you make ends meet. Point the third: like it or not, we have a need for plumbers, carpenters, street-sweepers, and candy-counter attendants, and it is doubtful that these people need an education at "the standard of the average Harvard graduate" for purely materialistic purposes.

What are the real fruits of such an education, and are they useful to lift poor communities out of poverty? Certainly a liberal education can be empowering, but isn't it possible that an appreciation of rhyme structure in Milton, or of the non-provability of certain statements of formal logic--though perhaps enriching--are not relevant to the liberational efforts of poor communities?

We have an amazing number of people in the industrialized first world who are "over-educated" (perplexing term) in the sense that they "know lots of stuff that doesn't help them improve their (material) standard of living, or anyone else's." If that's the purpose of an education (and it is what Greenspun is getting at) then what is important about "Harvard-level" here (as opposed to, say, "a slightly higher level than what is minimally required by the best job role that person could aspire to"?)

Lack of access to good education—to the information, the cognitive and social tools that education can provide—is undoubtedly a barrier for the under-served to obtaining social power: to entering the upper class, the upper-middle class, or the lower-middle class. But the problems are intertwined, and housing costs, leadership, and health care all have an impact on the learning experience that a student has (cf. Savage Inequalties).

High-school students, particularly in poor neighborhoods, have a tendency to be unmotivated, and the reason is clear: they can see it will win them no benefits, both because the education itself is not strong, and because their socio-economic position (and the biases that others have about it) will make them unpopular in the job market. As a society dedicated to humanistic values, we need to attack this on both fronts.

Closing in an effort toward beneficence, Greenspun sweeps aside the digital

"One bright spot... a handful of folks had set up free wireless Internet access blankets over struggling neighborhoods in various parts of the country. All of the academic papers written about the "Digital Divide" turned out to be nonsense."

That's a startlingly quick stroke. He seems to misunderstand what the digital divide refers to--it includes the material lack of access to technology. These urban warriors who set up WiFi were directly reducing the digital divide, not proving that it doesn't exist. Finally, referring to the users of this WiFi, he concludes:

"...the poor person was able to leap right over the exotic language and cultural barriers that sociologists had posited. I.e., it turned out that these folks were poor, not stupid."

Greenspun seems to be under the impression here that cultural barriers are the same as stupidity. While the ego- and ethno-centrist may commonly confuse the two in practice, it seems downright cruel to conflate them in concept. As a computer scientist, Greenspun ought to recognize that "cultural barriers" are a two-position symmetric relation, while "stupity" is a property of an individual--so how can stupidity of one person follow from a barrier between two?

If everyone in a poor neighborhood were educated to the level of an average 12th-grade graduate, then we would have made some significant steps toward equality.