We hear the call these days, albeit only by politicians who seem to care about creating a robust middle class, to create an "Opportunity Economy".
The concept is at least as old as America, the notion that "if you work hard, you WILL get ahead".
Unfortunately, that certainty, once a bedrock of Democratic philosophy, rings hollow to the vast majority of our people, growing in their realization that the huge wealth disparity in our country is proof that most of the people who work the hardest earn the least while a tiny minority -- people who seem to do little more than golf and take long "business lunches" and show up at cocktail parties -- make out like bandits in a society that seems to reward highway robbery.
One of my LatinX Mercy University students wrote the following during her first week of class after watching Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk "Do Schools Kill Creativity" and reflecting on evidence of how quickly the job market was changing relative to educational paradigms :
"Another thing that was mentioned in this video is " If you work hard, do well and get a college degree you would have a job" This ideology was possible ten years ago. NOW, a college degree does not matter for most jobs, a college degree is seen as a highschool diploma. It is to the point where now, college is seen as a scam because we were told that college would better out future and that if we get our degrees we will get great jobs and multiple open doors of opportunities, and yet here we are where a lot of college graduates are struggling to even step foot into a minimum wage job because the career they studied for and kept trying to get would not hire."
The sense of disillusionment in the American Dream of prosperity through schooling , the sense of injustice and the accompanying intuition that people of historical privilege are still getting the lions share of opportunities because of cronyism rather than hard work may or may not be justified. We can't really say what the ratio of input to output is for each citizen, although we do know that there are plenty of people who simply inherit their wealth without much sweat -- we don't know about the tears -- and we do know that an artfully low Capital Gains Tax creates conditions that creates conditions for a "parasitic class" to develop.
Our AI muse Chat GPT explains,
"The capital gains tax enables wealth accumulation without much effort because it taxes income from investments, such as stocks or real estate, at a lower rate than earned income from wages or salaries. This creates an advantage for the wealthier "parasitic class," who often derive a significant portion of their income from investments rather than labor.
By paying lower taxes on capital gains than on earned income, the wealthy can amass even more wealth through passive activities like buying and holding assets, without engaging in productive work. This incentivizes wealth-hoarding and speculation over labor-based income, exacerbating income inequality."
And so, as the saying goes, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer".
What the public today doesn't often realize, or isn't encouraged to talk about, although it has been the subject of many violent clashes over the centuries, is that the entire rigged system of inequality in a putative democracy is propped up and reinforced and made to seem acceptable by the school system.
We who are believers in the American Dream of prosperity and liberty and justice for all don't often look at the fundamental conditions of the school system that perpetuate structural injustice behind the guise of a "meritocracy".
In his essay "Building the Opportunity Economy", Robert Friedman of "Prosperity Now" starts by quoting Abraham Lincoln saying,
" [The objective of government is] to elevate the condition of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life."
I would argue that this should also be the objective of the school system, and many still stubbornly believe it is.
Against all evidence.
Those of us in the trenches who have been teaching in and observing the system from within for over a quarter century, as I have, at all levels, K-graduate school, know that we are failing spectacularly in this "elevation".
On a side note, we should ponder how, in France, where they are doing an admirable job of tackling climate change and greening and cleaning their cities, the word for student is actually "eleve" while in America, where the greatest existential threat to humanity is treated as a hoax and our urban squalor is atrocious, we seem to "delevate" our pupils. We find ourselves grappling with the conclusions of lifetime education reformers like John Gatto who wrote "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" and "Weapons of Mass Instruction": School makes us stupid.
If the objective of school is actually to demerit our skills and destroy our confidence and "delevate" the condition of men and women by placing artificial weights on our shoulders, obstacles in our paths and trip us up in the race of life, then it is doing a spectacular job.
The irony is that while we don't have too much of a say in how our government is run outside the ballot box and some civil service, we DO have control over our classrooms. If we can teach true democracy there, and practice rather than merely preach, I feel we can affect real change as that lived experience permeates through the rest of our lives.
My goal every semester is to model "The Opportunity Economy" in the Classroom and see how throwing the stone of democratic participation into that pond of thought and feeling ripples out into the "real world" later.
To do this, let's return to the article by "Prosperity Now".
Friedman writes,
"We start with the recognition of the capacity and productive potential of low-income and economically-marginalized people: they are all potential creators of wealth, whether as skilled workers, entrepreneurs, home owners, savers or investors. All of us have weaknesses and needs, but the truth is that meaningful development relies more on building on the strengths of people than on remedying their perceived deficiencies."
Applying this to the classroom means starting with the recognition of the capacity and productive potential of ALL our students, particularly those plagued by "low-performance". Rather than stigmatizing the "underacheivers" and blaming the victim in the name of supposed "meritocracy", assuming that human capacity falls under a "Bell Curve", I've spent my career focusing on the needs of those who need the most help stepping up onto the elevator that lifts us to the path of prosperity.
I've based my classroom methodology on a simple application of conclusions that studies such as those done by Washington non-profit "Corporation for Enterprise Development" (CFED) and theorists such as Hernando De Soto (The Mystery of Capital) have revealed to us, for example "that all the strategies [for asset building] worked if they built the confidence, competence, connections, and capital of families."
The key is to apply to the classroom "the Asset-Building Community Development field inspired by John McKnight and his colleagues, built on the theories of Ivan Illich and Paolo Frieri, which insists on treating low-income and marginalized people as assets."
In other words, "everyone is awesome, everyone is cool 'cause we're part of a team" (to paraphrase the Lego movie). When we conceive of every individual in our classrooms as having high value, particularly those who we so often de-merit because of performance gaps, we shift the burden from the student AND the teacher to the structural realities of the system and give every individual in the class a chance to participate in improving that system so that it does, in the end, provide a chance for liberty and justice for all.
These are not hollow words, this is democracy in action, backed by faith in the dignity of every individual.
You see, in our country we have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB, "a U.S. government agency dedicated to making sure you are treated fairly by banks, lenders and other financial institutions." But we don't seem to have a strong enough "Student Credit Protection Bureau" (SCPB?) that makes sure you are treated fairly by teachers, administrators and other students.
Whereas " the CFPB defines financial well-being as:
Feeling in control of one’s day-to-day finances;
Having the capacity to absorb a financial shock;
Being on track to meet financial goals; and
Having the financial freedom to make choices to enjoy life.
the SCPB would define scholastic well-being as:
Feeling in control of one's day to day learning
Having the capacity to absorb a shock to or lull in productivity
Being on track to meet class expectations; and
Having the scholastic freedom to make choices to enjoy school.
As Friedman writes, "What makes an individual or family financially capable and healthy is very similar to what makes a broader movement successful.".
The problem is that we've been spectacularly UNSUCCESSFUL in moving students in our school systems closer to feeling capable and healthy.
With that in mind I take seriously the well-being of my students and simply apply those principles listed above. My entire "Maieutic Method" is about "Asset Building".
It starts witht the recognition that ALL the points a student makes rhetorically should be validated as assets of value. No matter what starting point they come from, no matter how large the "intellectual wealth gap" seems at the outset, their poverty in scholarship should have no bearing on the value they bring to the class. "Everyone is awesome" and each utterance is an asset. In my classes everything my students say or write or present is considered a possible "diamond in the rough" that we, as interpreters, as the audience, as allies, need to help refine and "midwife" into fruition. That is the essence of Plato's Maieutic Method -- a non-competitive variant of the Socratic Method wherein the dialog is not combative or debate oriented but uplifiting. Maieutic means "to midwife" in Greek. It is a different way to think of ideas than the usual "point-counterpoint" or "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" dialectic.
It seems Plato improved on his teacher!
This "kinder, gentler" way of holding classroom discussions, of creating uplifting ASSET-BUILDING conversations, is at the core of my methodology.
I also apply three fundamental freedoms foundational to many native American cultures and lifted to our awareness by the anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow in their tome "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity".
As ChatGPT articulates them, they were:
The freedom to move away (or relocate) – People had the ability to leave situations or communities they did not want to be part of. This freedom of movement allowed individuals to avoid oppressive relationships or conditions.
The freedom to disobey – There was no compulsion to obey a central authority. People were not bound to follow commands from leaders or rulers, allowing for more egalitarian social structures.
The freedom to create new social relationships – Individuals were free to establish their own social arrangements and forms of community, without being confined by rigid structures imposed by tradition or authority.
These freedoms highlight the flexibility, autonomy, and egalitarianism that characterized many Indigenous societies, offering an alternative to the more hierarchical and coercive norms seeWhen in European contexts."
The most salient reality of what I do in my courses now is honor these three fundamental freedoms by offering them to ALL of our students, regardless of their current level of 'self-discipline", "self-motivation", "maturity" or "accumulated scholastic capital". Our politicians love to talk about "freedom" and about "free speech" and our Constitutional rights but our school systems are downright feudal. Students in most classes are not free to move away (dropping a class carries penalties, walking away from certain "assignments" is heavily punished), they don't have any freedom to "disobey" the orders of their teachers and defnitely have a "compulsion to obey a central authority" and they have no freedom to negotiate a new arrangement of social relationships in the class nor do they have much or any say in the form of the community. They "confined to rigid structures imposed by tradition or authority".
This toxic "please the teacher" environment is the major source of discouragement and anxiety among our student body and just as these unfreedoms in the outside world constrain effective asset building and the accumulation of capital and lead to a world with fairly strict dividng lines between the "rich" and "poor", our classroom structures and expectations and demands have created a fairly strict dividing line between "winners and losers", between "successes and failures", between A and F students, with the "middle class" in the strictly imposed bell curve narrowing and diminishing in prowess and "purchase power", skills and capabilities and productivity.
However, when we apply the Asset Building Tools and Strategies of research groups like "Prosperity Now" to education, we can see parallel paths to success.
First, we have to recognize the many forms of FUNGIBLE capital that can be traded in our society:
Natural Capital, Cultural Capital, Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, Material Capital, and of course Financial Capital. We really need to focus on their fungibility - the idea that they can be endlessly transformed, one into the other.
We need to recognize that our students are evolving through different stages of capital transformation and that school is about the accumulation of Intellectural, Social and Cultural Capital. The expectation is that they can parlay those assets into Financial Capital once they graduate and hence their investment in pooling these other forms is worthwhile and can GUARANTEE A RETURN.
With that concept in mind, we can modify asset building tools used for accruing financial capital, like the Individual Development Account (IDA), to " to create the habit to save and build [ACADEMIC] wealth" and call it instead the INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT ACCOUNT (IDA) "to create the habit to save and build wisdom and intellectual capacity."
Friedman notes that effective "savings" require "a change in mindset" and he reminds us that creating those good habits requires "incentives — a match to whatever the individual saves". Retirement savings in particular he reminds us, " rank among the most developed and subsidized class of assets"
Are our children not going to school in a sense to prepare for their own "retirement" as much as they are being trained to be cogs in a labor wheel to benefit others? The purpose of work at the individual level is to find ways to eventually be able to stop working, right? But since we focus so distortedly on mere financial capital as the reward and since we give no guarantee that the time they spend laboring in our classrooms will result in a better life ("when am I ever going to use this math, or history knowledge" they always ask) our students don't see the value in building up their intellectual capital.
They see no value in the "intellecual development account" and I don't blame them for not devoting themselves to it if we don't match or subsidize their investments to show that WE (teachers, administrators) BELIEVE in the value of these accumulated assets.
We set the context, we make the rules of the game for them. A willingness to play and play along with our rules comes from an innate sense of justice and realized expectations -- their own possibility for CAPITAL GAINS.
When students, particular the "have nots" of the scholastic "monopoly board" know the game is rigged against them and that all the best intellectual "property" is already or soon to be bought up and exclusively owned by somebody else, where is the incentive to stay in the game?
So, to answer this question, I have rigged my class for pecuniary fairness.
As rule maker and "central bank" I have created an accounting system that encourages wealth creation:
I use Canvas and Blackboard as Savings Accounts.
Every time a student makes a point they make a point.
Meaning...
Every rhetorical point they bank is transduced into a credit point.
We peg the value of an A at 320 points made cumulatively over 16 weeks.
A level performance is the making of approximately 20 good points a week, and the students are tasked with "getting their points across."
In this way, using a "gamified" point system and an exchange system for turning rhetorical points into credit values, we actually create an economy. And since that economy is all about liberating students to take advantage of EVERY OPPORTUNITY available to learn and express oneself without fear of judgment or failure because EVERY POINT IS VALID when validated by getting it across to another human mind through posting it in Blackboard or Canvas and being translated into the gradebook, we create a true OPPORTUNITY ECONOMY in the classroom, one that ensures dignity and empowers authentic learning because it never marginalizes or punishes people for taking risks and stepping outside their comfort zone to expand their box and learn things that are truly new and different.
https://www.strongfinancialfuture.org/essays/building-the-opportunity-economy/
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