The Domestic Supply of Meat Widgets

In the midst of the general alarm and dismay over the leaked SCOTUS reversal of Roe, attention has been rightly drawn to one particularly alarming footnote in which Justice Alito quotes a CDC reference to the "domestic supply of infants." As Dahlia Lithwick argues, this has echoes of chattel slavery, but that's not the only thing it has echoes of.

Back in 2013, I highlighted one sentence from the Gates Foundation website. Written by Allen Golston, it was part of a piece intended to whip up business support for Common Core, and it was strikingly bad:

Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.

That is a spectacular amount of wrong to pack into a single sentence. Businesses do not "consume" the live humans who come out of our education system, and those humans are not the "output" of schools. But this view of schools--that they are factories whose purpose is to manufacture meat widgets for corporate use--just keeps cropping up. 

Here's Rex Tillerson (also stumping for the Core) back in 2014, being quoted in a Fortune article by Peter Elkind.

But Tillerson articulates his view in a fashion unlikely to resonate with the average parent. “I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

The Exxon CEO didn’t hesitate to extend his analogy. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?” American schools, Tillerson declared, “have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that have no future. Unfortunately, the defective products are human beings. So it’s really serious. It’s tragic. But that’s where we find ourselves today.”

The list goes on and on. The Florida Chamber of Commerce. Every person suggesting that colleges should be evaluated on how much their grads make aka how much corporations are willing to spend to get the skills that meat widgets acquired in their higher education. Earlier this very month, Virginia's Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera (a choice-loving reformster who used to run the Data Quality Campaign, a reformy data mining operation) said that her top goal is preparing students for jobs.

"Preparing students for jobs" absolutely, positively belongs on a list of educational goals, but when it's your main goal, that means you think education is there to serve the needs of business. Your measure of curriculum value is "Will somebody pay you for having this skill or piece of knowledge?" It's the same philosophy underlying value-added measures, the whole idea of which is to measure the value added to students as if they are pieces of sheet metal. Value to whom, exactly? To future employers, of course. 

And don't forget the kinds of proposals that occasionally surface in which Grand Widget Inc says it wants the local school to create a program that will produce 100 Widget Alignment Specialists per year; mind you, they only plant to hire 15, but they want a pool to choose from. Those other 85 students who have been trained for a singular job they won't get? Tough luck for them. Not Grand Widget Inc's problem.

For certain folks in this country, there has always been a pre-occupation with treating labor as a commodity, with an emphasis on finding a cheap source ("cheap" including the idea that you don't have to spend a lot of money training it). They view schools (at least certain public schools, the kind that Those Peoples' Children attend) as a source of human capital, meat widgets that can provide the labor they're looking for. 

There's a whole sub-genre of ed reforms that they find appealing. Cradle to career data tracking, including SEL info (like, how compliant with authority is this student)--maybe put it on that blockchain thingy. With micro-credentials! So that corporate bosses can just plug in the specifications for the meat widgets they want, and the System will spit out the candidates. 

Given all this, why wouldn't they also view gestation and birth as one more step in the supply chain of meat widgets, the initial creation of human capital. Lithwick's argument is that the 14th Amendment was written specifically to protect the humanity of a family against the demands of those who would view such families as a supply of meat widgets and who wanted to ignore the humanity of the people involved so that they could be treated strictly as a source of labor.

It is an attitude that has always and forever bumped up against the idea of public education's promise to serve the students, rather than the businesses that wish to "consume" them. It's a thin, cramped, meager view of education. Instead of helping students become their best selves, and figure out what it means to be fully human in the world, this is just meat widget training.