The real issue with male apathy toward education is how it’s framed. It’s a language problem.
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THE SALIENT FACTS
I’m a 26 year-old white bro with a BA in English from a large research institution whose liberal arts program has always been an afterthought, and a near-MFA (one credit hour away) in creative writing from that same institution. I work as a part-time grocery clerk at a supermarket in Asheville, NC. I make nine dollars an hour. I am $40,000 in debt.
THESIS STATEMENT
The real issue with “male apathy toward education” lies, I think, in how it’s framed. It’s a language problem. In other words, how might the conversation change if, instead of calling it apathy toward education, we call it apathy toward a culture’s implicit values?
FOUNDATIONAL ARGUMENT #1: WHAT’S IT MEAN, REALLY, TO BE PART OF A CULTURE?
OK, let’s do the tedious part. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, culture’s got three senses: (A) “The arts, beliefs, customs, institutions, and other products of human work and thought considered as a unit, especially with regard to a particular time or social group,” and (B) “These arts, beliefs, and other products considered with respect to a particular subject or mode of expression,” and (C) “The set of predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize a group or organization.” It’s a nebulous, encompassing term, but essentially, I think, a culture is a collection of people who all’ve got the same basic value system (even though the surface-level is often diffuse and complicated and tough to pierce), along with the stuff that collection of people produces and the activities in which it engages.
The reason I define culture here is that this basic value system—those beliefs and predominating attitudes—always involves an ethical dimension, it being pretty much impossible to carry on the business of culture without some truly sticky problems cropping up now and again (we need rules, broski, for the weird kinks in the fabric of society).
FOUNDATIONAL ARGUMENT #2: WELL OK, BRO. WHAT’S IT MEAN TO EDUCATE?
This part might be a leap, but stick with me. To educate someone is always to initiate them into a cultural/socioeconomic context.
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Let’s stick with the AHD. To educate is to (1) “develop the mental, moral, or social capabilities of,” or (2) “to provide with knowledge or training in a particular area or for a particular purpose,” or (3) “to provide with information, as in an effort to gain support for a position or to influence behavior” or (4) “to develop or refine.”
In all senses of the word, to educate is to either inculcate (code word here being “develop”) or to provide something that’s typically abstract, a skill or a bit of information, for later deployment in different contexts to help achieve success in that context.
This part might be a leap, but stick with me. To educate someone is always to initiate them into a cultural/socioeconomic context. To great degree, being educated requires accepting a culture’s basic value system (i.e. what’s occasionally termed, in fancy academic journals, ideology), even if that’s not overtly discussed during the education process. In other words, bro, your education’s a brainwashing, but not in the sci-fi hold-your-eyes-open-and-force-you-to-watch-Real–Housewives-way. Instead, it’s sublimation.
THE POINT OF ALL THIS FOREPLAY, AND THE DARK CRUX OF THE ARGUMENT
Ours is a culture of consumption.
Maybe what’s happening is a younger generation’s rejection of the cultural values accepted and enforced by an older generation.
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This may seem so obvious it doesn’t need saying. If you venture outside your home, the odds are it’s to buy something. Or else you venture out to work, producing something either directly or indirectly someone else might buy, today or someday. Which of course you do with expectations of being paid, currency’s sole function to abet consumption. Even at home, you’re inundated with things meant to strengthen your Consumer identity—TV, where over the years programs have been shortened to allow more time for commercials, and the Internet, where you’re targeted by algorithms which then determine what product might, when displayed along the sides of your Facebook page, most likely seduce you to click.
None of this is necessarily bad, it’s important to say. In fact, the difficulty is really in placing value judgments—the difficulty’s origin stemming from the fact that if you’re part of the culture, then you’ve already, to some degree, internalized its value system. How, in other words, would you make value judgments about the values you hold?
From this starting point, we can maybe see the issue of male apathy toward education differently. Maybe what’s happening is a younger generation’s rejection of the cultural values accepted and enforced by an older generation. Maybe what we’re seeing is a generation of boys (and girls, because I think the trend transcends gender) more interested in social capital than in plain old hard currency.
SO WHAT’S THE ISSUE? LET THE OLD WAYS DIE!
This is a thought experiment that, unfortunately, we can’t engage in, being inexorably tethered to this culture and these values.
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Not so fast, brah. Our society is hierarchical, and so culture is dominated and propagated by those on top, who are, by and large, still very much invested in the old model. This creates (at least) two problems. First, the rejection of a culture’s values means necessarily you’ve got a teensy negative influence on that culture (I wasted nearly half a shift and an entire lunch hour trying to work this into a genuine mathematical formula). Second, your rejection of/rebellion against a culture’s values is then cast in terms favorable to the propagation of that culture: e.g. “Our male youth are in trouble,” according to The Boys Initiative, “as a group they are failing to adjust to a rapidly changing economy[1].”
In a sense, it’s evolutionary: if you don’t adopt a culture’s values (and again, our own culture revolves around an amplified concept of consumption; gratuitous consumption, you might call it, or luxury, or being comfortable, or The American Dream) then you just won’t survive in that culture. Sorry, bro.
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The old dudes are right. There’s an education crisis for us young bros. But it’s relative. In a different culture with different values, our apathy toward the kind of education we’re currently provided might lead to different results. This is a thought experiment that, unfortunately, we can’t engage in, being inexorably tethered to this culture and these values.
WHAT YOU MIGHT CALL THE EVENT HORIZON
My rejection of my culture’s value system—each time I say no to what I haughtily term “career bullshit”—is in fact an acceptance of my culture’s most cherished ideal …
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Sometimes, while I’m stocking shelves or stalking former classmates on Facebook who’ve been more successful financially than me, I’ll wonder why I’ve made the choices I’ve made. I was a straight-A student. Took all the honors classes in high school, all the AP and dual-enrollment courses. I graduated from college a year early. I went to grad school. For Christ’s sake, why am I in Asheville NC, crashing with a buddy and working part-time at a grocery store?
I’ve had my opportunities. Each time I’ve been approached with a career opportunity, I’ve instinctively recoiled. For years I’ve told people a 9 to 5 job would kill me.
What’s happening is complex and really tough to explain. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It’s confession time now. Watch as I undercut my entire argument!
My rejection of my culture’s value system—each time I say no to what I haughtily term “career bullshit”—is in fact an acceptance of my culture’s most cherished ideal: The American Dream is two interconnected things: (1) autonomy, and (2) success built on that autonomy. I still buy into this idea. I would argue, if I weren’t already testing your patience, that my generation, and my gender (because this is an essay about bros, after all) still buys into this idea. What’s changing, what’s always changing, is how we define success.
It all comes down to language! And besides, this change is not as drastic as we’re led to believe: success is still “achieved” in our culture via consumption, it’s just that what we consume to achieve success is changing. This is a solidly established historical pattern: what we spend our money and time on changes from generation to generation.
This, I think, is a good thing (who wants a static culture, after all?). This is American. (Do I think it’s good because my culture/society’s taught me to think it’s good, thus in a way confirming the theory that it’s impossible to actually reject a culture’s values? The whole thing’s become frustratingly tautological).
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And … but … final thought: can the apathy we’re finding (and to reiterate, I don’t think it’s just bros who are apathetic) be, in part, attributed to students somehow sensing their dilemma? As in teenage angst springing in part from a teenager’s growing cloudy awareness of (1) themselves as independent people, apart from their parents, and (2) that their independence will never be complete, will never be whole as long as they remain aware of it: that, ultimately, as depressing as this might be to think about, it’s only death that will cut the cultural tether.
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Footnote:
[1] Our economy is indeed changing, just not in a basic way: the information industries are built on the exchange of capital, just like other industries. They seek profit. My generation is mistaking* social capital (prestige/cachet among each other) as the end goal, whereas in truth, it’s the vehicle getting these companies to the end goal: cash.
Image credit: khalid Albaih/flickr