When Diversity Fails the Poor; Daily Beast, 9/28/14

Jedediah Purdy, Daily Beast; When Diversity Fails the Poor:

"Knocking—or praising—schools for their share of Pell Grant recipients really is rearranging the deck chairs here. We need to talk about economic fairness, even justice—an antique-sounding but still important word—not economic diversity. Unless everyone has health care, security, a good retirement, and dignity in their job, people will come to college to escape working-class life, not to represent it, and the idea of diversity between the rich and the poor, the privileged and unprivileged, will be something worse than a joke: a confusion.

This is an argument from the left, but it has a conservative twist. We ask schools, at all levels, to do too much in this country: to make up for deep-seated inequality, to sort children and young adults meritocratically for the market economy, to be more representative and unequal than our divided and unequal society, and, while they’re at it, to pass along precious reserves of memory, beauty, and critical thought that are valuable for their own sakes. Frustration at schools that are trying to do all these things at once spurs periodic fits of bureaucratic intrusion, like the Common Core and the Obama administration’s initiative to rank the country’s colleges and universities along a return-on-investment scale. These only make it harder for education to play its subtle, humanistic, neither-liberal-nor-conservative-but-both role of giving people a space to learn things of no obvious value, because they are strange and interesting, because their value will emerge years later, in the most surprising ways.

This may sound like a luxury, and it is, but it’s also a necessity for a certain kind of civilization."