Why I’m Not Preparing My Students to Compete in the Global Marketplace
At a recent holiday dinner, a friend who happens to work for the State Department asked me if I thought my college students were “ready to compete in the global marketplace,” and whether I had come up with strategies to prepare them for that work.
They weren’t, I said. And I hadn’t.
In fact, I said, my environmental-humanities class had spent the better part of the semester discussing the ways the “global marketplace” had become an increasingly dispiriting phenomenon to watch. For all the talk of “globalization” as the very engine of their generation’s future prospects, my students seemed far more concerned about disappearing jobs at home, rising global temperatures, and a general anxiety about what it all meant. The world did not seem as inviting as it seemed fragmented, even fragile, especially when the conversation turned to the environment, and to the resilience of their own local communities.
In class one week, my students and I drew a chart on the blackboard listing three columns: Places, Industries, and Unintended Consequences. At first we limited the conversation to places students either had studied or had visited during study-abroad trips. We came up with many of the usual suspects: oil exploration in Ecuador, leading to toxic spills and broad human displacement; global logging conglomerates in Indonesia, leading to deforestation and species loss; commodity soybean and cattle production in the Amazon, leading to climate change. These were easy targets—environmental atrocities happening far away, conducted by faceless corporations, with little or no (apparent) impact on my students themselves. It went without saying that this particular “global marketplace” was not something my students were eager to join.
But then the conversation shifted. Environmental degradation wasn’t a problem only in foreign countries, after all, and I wanted to know if any students had experienced such things closer to home. It was not an idle question; we had spent time discussing a Wendell Berry essay in which he derides industrial “imperialism” as contributing to “destroyed communities, destroyed community economies, disintegrated local cultures, and ruined local ecosystems,” and Berry was not writing about foreign lands.
At the University of Delaware, my classes are filled with students from all over the mid-Atlantic: the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the mountains of West Virginia, the hill country of central Pennsylvania, the coastal plain of central and northern New Jersey. Here’s what some of them had to say: