Utah lawmakers push workforce training at colleges and universities at the expense of higher learning. 

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Speaking with the Deseret News on Nov. 21, Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams asserted that Utah should be jumping onto bandwagon technologies like AI as well as supplying a workforce in such fields as healthcare, biotechnology and defense.

"We need to embed those employers into the universities," Adams said, "and we need to embed the universities in with the employers."

To this end, he and his legislative colleagues are signalling their desire to cut—excuse me, "reallocate"—resources at our colleges and universities so that they will operate in a more "efficient" manner and more efficiently produce workers who are trained for these fields. Potential actions may include a shortening of the time required to earn a degree and narrowing options for what a student may pursue.

"Higher education is the heartbeat of our economy," Adams explained.

And with this one statement, Adams gives away the charade of what so many in this world conceive to be the role of education—ironically said here not as a slip of the tongue but as an explicit point of pride, generally accepted today as some kind of universal truism.

Adams, whether operating from a place of public interest or not, confuses the business-minded, career-oriented "education for success" model for genuine education. To people like him, it's the kind that really counts—the kind that pays.

I don't wish to give the impression that I demean anyone who happens to work in so-called "hot" fields. What I resent is the attitude—which has been brewing for generations—that life's vast tree of knowledge must be hacked down to only the portions we have chosen to find lucrative for the moment, specifically those that aid corporate interests and their profit margins.

I would assert that education's legitimacy does not rest on its ability to help us manipulate existence to our wills or to extort it for our benefit. Rather, it is a lamp that guides us toward that larger object: to live well, rather than merely living. And there is a difference.

"Will education feed and clothe you, keep you warm on a cold day, or enable you to build a house? Not at all," Brigham Young once remarked to his congregation. "Should we cry down education on this account? No. What is it for? The improvement of the mind; to instruct us in all arts and sciences, in the history of the world, in ... laws of life, and how to be useful while we live."

Having gone through school as a student and later as an employee, I know only too well the shortcomings of our modern system, stuck as it is between the sincere desire to help pupils and operating upon the impersonal methods of an industrialized factory.

How often have we been drilled to retain some bit of information for the purposes of an exam as we impatiently jump the required hoops to our coveted degree? Memorization, rote action and docile obedience to bureaucratic mazes frequently amount to the only lasting things we carry with us from such an environment.

Well, that and crushing debt.

More rare, but thankfully not extinct, has been the process of an improved mind and an expanded horizon when a student savors the fruits of education beyond the need to "market" oneself, pander to economic trends or—heaven forbid—discover another path that genuinely nourishes their soul.

For those mediocre but high-status individuals who expect certain qualities of their potential employees, all this other ivory tower stuff is harmful to profits. Inefficient, even.

"Official credentials, a foolproof shield against criticism and scrutiny, were naturally coveted most by those who needed them most: it was the poorly qualified who clamored for the status symbol of the degree," a Utah professor observed of modern education in 1971. "As in the days of the Sophist schools, the great demand for this valuable commodity caused factories to spring up everywhere, competing for degree-seeking customers by making their products ever easier and cheaper to get. At the same time the degree became the object—the sole object—of 'education.' And when it reached that point, it was, of course, worth nothing."

As is always the case, it is money that is at the root of our woes.

We took the education of the human soul and turned it into a commodity. Resentful of anything that doesn't directly benefit ourselves, we routinely underfunded our institutions to the point that they turned to mega corporations and partisan donors (see the countless buildings and programs tailored to their specifications). Vexed by how poorly that has worked out, we now heed the siren song of private boosters that promise improved programs with a minimum of the undesirable poor and best of all, minimal checks on how they operate.

From start to finish, our cupidity has hampered human education and will continue to do so until we disentangle ourselves from the dead-end lie of "education for success." It's high time we reacquainted ourselves with the lofty ideals of an education unencumbered by the dictates of capitalism and a school system free from the burden of being the arbiter of who is "qualified" to flourish in life.

Well did Shakespeare's Timon of Athens speak of the malign influence of money upon his discovering gold: "Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. Ha, you gods! why this? what this, you gods? Why, this will lug your priests and servants from your sides, pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave will knit and break religions, bless the accursed, make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves and give them title, knee and approbation with senators on the bench."

I can see why the powerful are threatened by an education in the humanities.

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