Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education
by Mike Rose

Reviewed by Kevin C. Moore

The most interesting thing about Mike Rose’s Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education is how broadly interesting it turns out a self-described “argument for democratizing knowledge” can be. In our time, discussion of public higher education—with which Back to School is primarily concerned—is usually made in stony, economic terms. Because right-wing education policy fetishizes the aspects of college that directly prepare students for employment, even advocates for a less rigidly market-oriented approach to education regularly phrase their arguments in reductive economic language. Rose, by contrast, unapologetically considers the entire endeavor of public adult education—from remedial adult education programs, to occupational education workshops, to the prestigious research university—as an institution worth valuing and supporting; for purposes economic, yes, but also “intellectual, social, civic, moral, and aesthetic.” For Rose, education is the profound human idea, the dominant means for individual transformation for adults as well as children. In arguing for a more expansive understanding of what higher education should be providing, Rose shows, with cautious optimism, sites for real improvement and restructuring. Back to School is an optimistic yet simultaneously realistic work by a thinker who believes, firmly, that education policy should be dictated, not by dubious class assumptions about different types of education but instead by a qualitative analysis of what really matters.

Rose’s survey spans the total adult educational system, honoring the distinct virtues of both remedial skills classrooms and occupational ed workshops—not just the idée fixe top-fifty universities of the US News and World Report and other national rankings. This is absolutely crucial, for, as he points out, “most education beyond high school in the United States goes on elsewhere,” outside “America’s Best Colleges.” As remedial and occupational classrooms are not simply the most disadvantaged settings in higher academia, but also the most attended, Rose accordingly directs the majority of his focus there.

Make no mistake, the portrait Rose paints is one of stark—in many cases even bleak—educational settings, underfunded and forced to carry enormous societal burdens. But, Rose insists, the truth of the matter is actually far more auspicious than we acknowledge. For, to imagine that the remedial skills classroom setting is not an inspiring place is to miss entirely the excitement and value of what occurs there every day. Indeed, for Rose, occupational courses function very much along the lines of what Michel Foucault called the heterotopia, an ephemeral, in-between space where a temporary, alternate society is formed. For Foucault, as it is for Rose, the back and forth between heterotopia and “real world” is the surest basis for the latter’s renewal.

The root problem, Rose suggests, lies in the collective habit of criticizing educational settings without pausing to witness them first. “What you see depends on where you sit,” Rose reminds us. According to Rose, this habit has its basis in the assumption that remedial and especially vocational settings are, ipso facto, not settings for meaningful intellectual activity. This phenomenon of the “academic/vocational divide,” Rose stresses, is a cultural misunderstanding of enormous consequence, for, in undervaluing and underfunding “secondary” adult educational settings, we harm the institutions where the vast majority of the nation’s formalized learning takes place. And, in so doing, we accordingly harm society as a whole.

Rose investigated this problem of the “academic/vocational divide” previously, in his 2004 study The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. Providing in-depth accounts of where and how high-level thinking skills come into play in working class professions, such as waitressing and plumbing, The Mind at Work is a class-sensitive revision of Howard Gardner’s influential theory of “multiple intelligences.” When vocational programs are stereotyped as training for “basic-technology” work, it is, Rose suggests, because there is a long history of bias in the West against the intelligence of “blue-collar” workers. This same bias was the subject of the education policy debates after the failure of Reconstruction, when thinkers like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois disagreed sharply over how best to prepare newly emancipated slaves for industrial, capitalist society. This tendency persists to this day in the US, which, Rose points out, is “odd in [that the US is also] a country with an anti-intellectual streak and such a strong orientation toward practicality.” (It is interesting to note that, as Rose reminds us, Plato called the craftsman’s soul “warped and maimed,” while Aristotle sought to deny citizenship to artisans and merchants “because their work [was] ‘ignoble and inimical to goodness.’”) Certainly the fantasy of American classlessness can sublimate in nasty ways.

One may, and indeed must, ask: are such pro-vocational ed arguments grounded in fact? Or, in other words, does vocational study include “rich cognitive content”? The answer is, of course, an overwhelming affirmative. Remarkable growth does indeed regularly occur in these environments. Through example after example, Rose shows how the basic spark of human curiosity—and through it all varieties of human “progress”—can be ignited not only in the well-funded liberal arts seminar or the ultramodern science laboratory, but in the (ostensibly) more humble classrooms of what Rose calls the “people’s college.” Indeed, in the remedial English or math classroom, or occupational ed settings such as the welding or fashion design workshop, students frequently achieve “full cognitive throttle.” Consider Tommy the welding student, who demonstrates for Rose the almost surgical difficulty of competent overhead welding. Rose explains, “We typically use words like ‘routine’ or ‘automatic’ to describe this level of expertise, but I think that vocabulary erroneously suggests that at a point in development, mind fades from physical performance.” Even though it may be “hard to know where to mark the Cartesian separation between body and mind” in such work, the “intricate interplay between kinesthetics and thought” demands nothing short of the highest intelligence. It is urgent, Rose concludes, that the structure of higher education be more inclusive of the lessons of settings like the welding workshop. As Rose puts it, “The more varied the pathways to degrees and to intellectual pursuits…the richer we are for it.”

Throughout the chapters of Back to School, Rose investigates various aspects of the adult educational setting. Consider the need for higher education to accommodate students who might attend for non-career-oriented reasons; for instance, the single-mother who takes a basic math course so she might better assist her children with schoolwork. The new learning—even if incomplete—of skills, as well as the new confidence such learning generates, contributes dramatically to the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Or consider the need for higher ed to devote more resources to those who are only barely able to attend school in the first place, students whose chaotic circumstances leave them but a single life-event—a pregnancy, a car accident—from having to abandon education entirely. Heeding the precariousness of the lives of underprivileged students is, for Rose, a vital principle – vital not only to the individual but for the social and economic well-being of society as a whole.

The basic impulse of Back to School, to reconsider the assumptions underlying cultural practices and institutions in the interest of true human possibility, ties Rose strongly to the social philosophy of American pragmatism. Not surprisingly, Rose often cites the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and his critique—in the seminal work Democracy and Education—of “social predestination.” But the thinker Rose most closely resembles in his method may be pragmatism’s founder, William James. Both bridge disciplinary lines and have the rare ability to make social science, and even policy, intensely readable and even literary. More importantly, both thinkers presuppose and advocate radical “mental pluralism,” to put it in Jamesian terms. Like James, and for that matter Gardner, Rose teaches us why human intelligence should be valued as a miracle in whatever form—and these forms are legion, if not infinite—it takes.

Rose has a rare gift for coining memorable and clever phases, many of which pull the rug—and sometimes the floor joists—from underneath deeply embedded social assumptions. In fact this is one of Back to School’s core missions, to provide a new vocabulary for describing education, for “the way we talk about education affects what we do and the way we do it.” Rather than judge intelligence in classist and racist stereotypes, Rose asks us to be interested in the “cognitive content” of all varieties of work, to escape from the “straightjackets of pedagogical imagination” tied by the academic/vocational divide. Rather than reify the isolation of academic disciplines, he asks us to step outside our “disciplinary silos” and “institutional folkways,” to view the classroom as a “miniature, temporary society.” Most importantly, Rose prompts educators and policy-makers alike to rethink the messy “texture of students’ lives,” the inertia of the “physical and moral insult of poverty,” and especially the “chaos” from which many underprivileged and non-traditional students emerge. “Chaos” is an especially important word for Rose, which he presents—rather than “poverty” or “hopelessness”—as a truly class-neutral term for the unfortunate circumstances education has the power to resolve. In Rose’s view—again, not unlike his pragmatist forbearers—there is no hopelessness. Only difficulties.

It is not possible to guarantee the success, or for that matter the good intentions, of all those who seek higher education. But it is a democratic society’s obligation—not to mention best interest—to offer educational “second chances,” a context for personal, and indeed societal, improvement. Midway through Back to School, Rose asks the deceptively simple question, “What is the purpose of education?” The book as a whole provides an answer that is just as deceptively simple: to promote personal and societal growth—intellectual, moral, affective, economic—wherever it occurs.