Beyond "Washington Learns"

Gov. Christine Gregoire recently unveiled "Washington Learns," a comprehensive set of recommendations to improve the state's educational system. Washington Learns rightly considers a high-quality education, from preschool through graduate school, the foundation for a vibrant economy and for individual success within it. From its first lines, it makes clear that "education is the single-most-important investment we can make for the future of our children and our state."

Washington Learns encourages equalizing access to the state's colleges and universities and expanding vocational, technical and professional training. By promoting equal access, Washingtonians can ensure that all citizens have a fair chance to learn the skills and knowledge they need for success in today's economy. This is a progressive vision that should be supported.

There is a danger to Washington Learns' vision for higher education, however. Despite the report's acknowledgment that "a healthy democracy depends on educated citizens," the report's primary goal, written in large red letters, is to use education to "be competitive in the global economy." Washington Learns threatens to turn the state's universities into vocational schools by expanding degrees in "high-demand fields" without accounting for the importance of liberal education.

We must consider liberal education and vocational training to be distinct but complementary public goals, even as we increasingly rely on the same institutions to provide them.

Liberal education is the heart of education in a democracy. The word "liberal" shares the same root as the word "liberty." A liberal education provides individuals the knowledge and skills they need to participate as free and equal citizens in public life. This includes not just literacy and numeracy but scientific knowledge, history, literature and moral education.

America's Founding Fathers believed that in a democracy, where citizens are also governors, every voter needs a liberal education. John Adams was confident "that whenever a general knowledge and Sensibility have prevailed among the People, Arbitrary Government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in Proportion." In its 1785 Land Ordinance, Congress decreed that all new townships in the Old Northwest should set aside land to support public schools. Education was considered a prerequisite for competent citizenship.

At the K-12 level, liberal education is a vital part of a broader program. At the higher-education level, a significant portion of public spending must be targeted at sustaining the liberal arts and sciences in the state's premier colleges and universities. All citizens should be educated but future leaders have a special responsibility: They must use their knowledge to serve the public good and not just their own interests. But first they need access to that knowledge.

Although Washington Learns largely ignores liberal education, it builds on another equally important, and equally progressive, tradition: the free-soil tradition.

Americans today often assume that a "free market" means the absence of government. For many of America's early leaders, however, a free market meant one in which people were in fact free, or not beholden to powerful economic or political elites. The market was to serve the interests of the people, not the other way around. This required massive government effort to ensure that all citizens had access to capital.

This activist tradition dates back to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Both believed that the federal government should sell its Western lands at cheap prices to individual farmers.

Today's call to use the state's colleges and universities for vocational training — which is in essence what is being called for in Washington Learns — builds on this free-soil tradition. Rather than land, today's workers need technical skills. The economy no longer calls for farmers but technicians, scientists, programmers and engineers.

In Jefferson's day, most Americans were farmers. Land helped a family achieve economic independence. Jefferson spent much of his public life trying to ensure citizens cheap access to Western lands. This meant not only clearing the land of Native Americans, but redistributing it to poor Americans.

Jefferson did not confuse cheap land with education. Believing that the people were the "only safe depository" for power in a democracy, Jefferson urged his home state of Virginia to support public education for young children. The best students would continue on to the University of Virginia, a public institution that Jefferson founded. There, they would receive a more advanced liberal education to prepare them to be public leaders.

Liberal education and cheap land were separate but overlapping goals. One would create capable citizens and leaders; the other would ensure relative economic equality in the market. Together, they would sustain an egalitarian democracy.

As president, Jefferson continued to promote policies to support farmers. He sought access to foreign markets for American produce, promoted free trade, and, when serendipity struck, bought Louisiana from France in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase gave American farmers both access to the Mississippi (a way to get their crops to market) and new land for future settlement. The apparent limitless land in the American West would be the basis for American equality and liberty. Jefferson hoped that America, unlike Europe, would never have a dependent landless class.

Lincoln and other Republicans picked up these Jeffersonian themes. Lincoln, a Westerner himself, hoped for a "free soil" West. Free soil was contrasted with slave soil: The American West should be for free and equal farmers. This ideal was embodied in the Republicans' Homestead Act (1862), which offered land to families willing to work it.

The Homestead Act was supplemented that same year by the Morrill Act, setting aside federal land grants for states to establish technical colleges focusing on "agriculture and mechanic arts." Vocational training in higher education was from its inception linked to the free-soil tradition.

Liberal education was not ignored in the Morrill Act. Although land-grant colleges should emphasize technical and vocational training, Republicans hoped that they would promote both "the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes."

Washington State University, chartered in 1890 as Washington Agricultural College and School of Science, is our state's land-grant institution. (In 1994, tribal colleges were given land-grant status, including Northwest Indian College in Bellingham.)

Farming, while still important, is no longer the core of working life. Washington's economy now also depends on knowledge workers; vocational training is the new free soil. Today's workers don't need land but intellectual capital. Nothing is more tied to future economic success than higher education.

Washington Learns advocates using education to do what Jefferson's and Lincoln's land policies had once done. Vocational training gives citizens access to capital in order to create a fairer market. But, if we attempt to replace liberal higher education with technical training, we may have better-equipped workers but we will have much-less-qualified citizens and civic leaders.

Unlike vocational training, liberal education must be insulated from the market. Its goals are civic, not economic, and cannot be determined by the market's laws of supply and demand. Liberal education requires college students to study philosophy, theoretical science, politics and history, none of which are "high-demand fields." Even as we expand and improve vocational training, we must protect our colleges' liberal arts and sciences programs from becoming subservient to vocational ends. Liberal education serves democratic, not market, needs.

It is also worth remembering how difficult it is to train people for jobs in a fast-changing economy. There is a reason that the nation's most respected colleges and universities focus on liberal education at the undergraduate level. Businesses value liberal education because it teaches future workers to be creative thinkers and effective learners. Unlike specialized training, liberal education offers the kinds of portable skills needed for Washingtonians to compete in a global economy.

If we conflate vocational training with education, we are robbing from Peter to pay Paul — that is, taking away from the liberal arts and sciences in order to give workers skills. Doing both things well is the only way to make our democracy stronger and our economy more fair and competitive. Unlike technical schools, the state's colleges and universities must not replace one goal with the other; they must sustain both American traditions.

Johann N. Neem is assistant professor of history at Western Washington University in Bellingham. The "Washington Learns" report is at www.washing-tonlearns.wa.gov/