THE PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED FAILS THE MARKET TEST. The dean at Anonymous Community looks for ways to develop cultural capital.

At Proprietary U, all degree students were required to take a Career Development class before graduating. (They typically took it in their last or second-to-last semester.) It covered the basics of resume writing, interview etiquette, and even professional dress. The idea was to ensure that the students didn’t sabotage themselves with presentation styles that suggested that they wouldn’t fit in a professional setting. It was badly needed; I recall intercepting one student I knew on the way to an interview and suggesting that he lose the “do rag” first. I couldn’t imagine doing that here.

In the more elite provinces of higher education, a course like that would probably be considered redundant, if not insulting. When you have students mostly from upper-middle-class or just plain wealthy backgrounds, you can usually assume some level of attendant cultural capital; they know how to present themselves in certain settings. (They often choose not to, but they can when they focus.)

But if you’re in the first generation of your family to go to college, and the folks around you are blue collar or marginally employed, the world of the professional workplace may be mysterious. The skills that the Swarthmores of the world could largely take for granted may or may not be there.

His challenge is nothing new. I recall an article in the Milwaukee Journal, probably 35 years ago, about an interview preparation seminar Wisconsin-Milwaukee (in those years much more of a commuter-nontraditional enterprise than I understand it has become) provided to prevent horror stories including an interviewee whose mother pressed his shirts rather aggressively (scorch marks aren't pretty) and another who grossed out the recruiting team at breakfast by putting peanut butter on a slice of toast, folding the slice into a manageable ball, and snarfing the ball in one gulp. On occasion Northern Illinois offers a one-day golf etiquette seminar wherein the focus is on the social aspects of a business outing, rather than the finer points of the sand wedge.

In those days, however, we did not have social theorists who produce neither theorems nor testable implications, but who can provide amusement, to mau-mau the education system into viewing cultural capital as a social construct worthy of deconstruction or transformation. It is interesting to read the suggestions the dean's readers offer, particularly when they offer opportunities for the students to self-select (what makes clods so charming is their self-unawareness) or they attempt to square their constructivist views with their desire that students don't toast-fold their way out of the middle class.

The root cause of the dean's problem, however, is with the constructivists.

To do so would require the colleges of education to lose their fascination with Rousseau and understand their objective as preparing teachers to develop the habits of the middle class in youngsters. Oppressive as that sounds, it is less oppressive than allowing youngsters to believe that anything goes.

I wrote that post just before I crashed my bike. Today I was released from rehab with a home program. I'll soon be back at fighting weight, and there has been no shortage of stuff for me to throw roundhouse rights at.