Students aren’t on an assembly line. They need diverse viewpoints | Opinion

A lot of new research and media reports suggest that American higher education institutions are losing their competitiveness. While many commentators blame the lingering effects of the pandemic and social media, another deeper reason may be that our educational system is becoming increasingly one-sided, univocal and methodologically less diverse.

While faculty members in the US seem free to craft their presentation methods and choose their own teaching methods, the topics they want to discuss are restricted in an indirect way. Social science departments usually embrace one worldview (either left or right-leaning) and their curriculum barely makes other voices in their discipline heard by their students. And the new hires are always from the followers of the dominant worldview.

The desire to create a common culture, a common language, and a division of labor within the same department is understandable and fair. But leaving the students completely ignorant of other theoretical approaches is an unfair and deeply flawed approach. To give an example from my own field, economics, our students are completely unaware of the content (and even the existence of) feminist, evolutionary, institutional, ecological, Austrian, post-Keynesian and radical economics. What they learn is only neoclassical economics, which is important, but not the only way to analyze real-world economic phenomena.

A valuable upper-elective course, “History of Economic Thought,” used to serve as “the last harbor of viewpoint diversity” for economics students, but it has also been removed from the curriculum of many Econ departments.

These valuable classes and topics are the victims of standardization efforts in American education: We want to create a common denominator for all departments nationwide, and want to make both our students and professors “interchangeable” — which means a student can complete, say, her sophomore year in Idaho and continue her education as a junior in the Midwest if necessary. That was the whole idea of Henry Ford when he standardized vehicle production processes and the product (the famous Model T) at the beginning of the 20th century.

Standardization in industry transformed our world forever, and mostly, in a positive way. It made luxury goods affordable for everyone. But can it work for education?

When it comes to designing consumer goods, it is easy to use standardization because we know what we want from our final product. In the 1920s, what we needed were cheap and durable goods. That’s why Ford produced the Model T in one color to simplify the product and focus on the desired characteristics.

Can we say the same thing for the final “product” of education? Do we want to raise “standard” citizens who can think only from one perspective, who can see the world only through a single, rigid lens which is not their own product and who will tend to label all other opinions “unscientific” or “ideological?”

Would believing in the possibility of a standard characteristic of a citizen not create a world like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, which produces only workers for Fordist factories who can live only in line with the values of a Fordist world? Is presenting only one type of worldview not just another way of indoctrination, which we, Americans, thought was just a characteristic of authoritarian regimes?

The target of American universities should be raising generations who can think critically about themselves and the world; who can shape, imagine and create different futures rather than being the beholders of the limits imposed on them. This is especially important in a world where technology, politics and global dynamics are constantly evolving. Only a generation nurtured by such institutions can restore the true greatness of the United States.

Emre Balikci, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Economics Department at Boise State University.