[saraid216]

Going a little tangential.

> He seems to think that school shouldn't be primarily about training people to be "useful" to employers or the government in the short term. I'm somewhat inclined to agree.

I entirely agree; it's something I've been trying to point out for a few years now.

Something people don't recognize about, say, feminist theory on agency and objectification is that it's a subject that applies everywhere. In this case, it's the objectification of people in general as tools for businesses and governments, rather than as individuals with their own particular needs and desires with intrinsic worth. We're uninterested in discussing what a student wants to learn and instead prefer discussing a paternalistic notion of what a student ought to be required to learn.

For some reason, we've lost the vocabulary for discussing things outside of an economic context. It's probably because bringing up questions of morality is scary: between the polarizing force of political religion and the lack of education in forming one's own moral and ethical system, moral claims find little traction unless they're merely repeating something with wide support.