He bags on “undemocratic machine culture,” then takes us on a bull-to-china rampage through the CC design, reducing it to an opiate for liberating the masses into the workforce–a worker-replication instrument built on false dreams of wealth and upward mobility. Sum: out with conscientization, out with Freirian teaching and learning. Vocationalism and critical thought are incompatible (for a whole bunch of reasons he offers).
I don’t agree with several of Shor’s sweeps, of course, but I bring it here to offer the possibility that his ideas carry forward with considerable force. It’s a much more complicated scene today, I think, than it was in 1980 (even 1987, when CTEL reprinted), because four-years and two-years have blended. The “two-years do vo-tech training, four-years do critical thought stuff” just isn’t the case any longer. Four-years are loading up with vocational emphases and many two-years have grown incredibly rich, thoughtful liberal arts cores that rival the lower division offerings of their four-year counterparts–big and small, public and private. I’ll stop here b/c I haven’t finished Shor and I’m not saying anything much that I suppose you haven’t already considered. I just meant to point out the “vocationalism is the enemy” notion gets pushed by Shor, and takes ideological root as a counter to critical thought, liberatory pedagogy and Freire’s impact on the field of comp.

Joanna

While two-year colleges also perform a credentialing function, I wonder whether they also offer a more particularly skills-oriented curriculum to the students who are there who are not so much interested in that credentialing function. Cindy, Joanna, John — what do you think?

Maybe I can try to make it a little more clear what I’m talking about, with a dismayingly commodified example. At The Four-Year Institution Shopping Mart, you give them a check for $100 — no less, no more — up front and take your shopping cart down the aisles, filling it all the way up with a diverse array of products, but perhaps with a certain focus, that you’ll actually give to the particular corporate cashier at the checkout counter who you think will most like the selection of products you’ve taken, in the hopes that the cashier will in return give you a voucher good for one entry-level position in an appropriate career. At The Two-Year Institution Shopping Mart, it’s the same arrangement, only you can spend however much or little you like.

I’m not sure how well that analogy works — but if it does, does it begin to get at the differing ways commodification and vocationalization work at different institutions?

(p.s.: Joanna, I don’t have posting privileges over there, and I don’t really think I ought to, since I feel I have zero expertise from which to post about community colleges — but maybe a two-year college teacher with more expertise than me, wink, might post a link?)

Second, I’m not sure if the class issues are as simple as CC= working class and universities= elite. EMU is very much a “working class” university in a working class town. Most of our students come from less than privilege backgrounds, and the contrast in educational experiences, expectations, and economic class with that quaint liberal arts school in Ann Arbor is pretty striking. I guess what I’m getting at is students at Washtenaw tend to look a lot less out of place at EMU than they do at U of Michigan.

All of which leads me to wonder if the university compositionalists ignore or study adult students in these programs. Do they? Do they not?

The September issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College (edited by non other than Mr. Tinberg himself) is devoted to scholarship, teaching and the two-year college. Once I’ve digested it, I’ll be posting my thoughts over at CCE, which, yes, Mike, does not grant you posting privileges, but I have friends and said privileges can be easily arranged as can my simply linking to your site.

I’m really impressed to see Mike reading Tinberg and Derek reading Shor. And great to see Steve noting that when it comes to working class, there’s a lot of overlap among CC’s and many public universities.

Here’s my problem with Shor’s vocationalism, tool-of-the-corporate-interests argument: he’s never looked at community colleges nationally. He grew out of the big open admissions flap in New York that gave us Mina Shaughnessy, Don McQuade, Lynn Troyka and many others. He draws on critiques really popular with left-leaning scholars in the early 70s–almost none of it coming from scholars will long experience in community colleges.

Here are some key sources: Burton Clark, “The ‘Cooling Out Function’ in Higher Education.” American journal of Sociology (May 1960), 65: 569-576. Also the same year Clark published The Open Door College with McGraw-Hill.

Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis had an article in the Harvard Educational Review in the early 70s that extended the radical left economic argument regarding CCs as vocational dead ends. They put it in book form in 1976: Schooling in Capitalist America, Basic Books.

In the early 70s, I did an article I titled “The Role of Criticism in Community Colleges” and revised it in 1982. The only place I submitted was Harvard Educational Review, which rejected it because, said the letter, “my reach was greater than my grasp.” My own naivete about academic publishing let me accept this response at the time. It also made clear to me that those who had published on the CCs were heavily invested in the Clark-Bowles/Gintis critique that Shor has been megaphoning for 20 years. I’m not aware that Ira has done any new work or that he keeps up with the literature on CCs. We’ve had a few interesting exchanges at various CCCC panels–and he acknowledges having no awareness of CC’s in California, for instance.

Jerome Karabel has also influenced this discussion with his Harvard Ed Review article “Community Colleges and Social Stratification” in 1972, 42: 521-562.

Rick was a top student out of the local Jesuit high school and did a double major in philosophy and anthropology at Santa Clara, where both his father and grandfather attended. But he was working in retail trying to figure out what he wanted to do. He had an interest in documentaries, so he came to De Anza and completed our sequence of film production courses. [We also have a great program in animation now.] He started working on his documentary and got some work at San Francisco TV stations. Then he went to San Francisco State to do a Master’s in film production.

A concept that some CC leaders have tried to promote for assessing CC outcomes is “value added.” Even a student who never completes a certificate may have made important improvements in reading, writing or math skills that give both personal and social value, but we have no measures for capturing this outcome.

P.S. A good, solid, useful text is Henry Giroux and David Purple’s Moral Education and the Hidden Cirruculum (1983).