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요즘 아이들 : 인간 자본과 밀레니얼 세대의 형성
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials(
1980년대에서 2000년대 사이에 태어난 세대.)
by
Malcolm Harris (Author)
신자유 주의자들에게 교육의 근본 가치는 개인주의, 경쟁과 선택이다. 교육의 목적은 근본적으로 경제적입니다. 그리고 아이의 이미지는 무엇일까? 미래의 인적 자본이다. 나타샤 레나드 (Natasha Lennard)가 최근에 저술 한 존 해리스 (John Harris)의 책 리뷰에서 주장하듯이, '요즘 아이들 : 인간 자본과 밀레니얼 세대의 형성'에서와 같은
개념은 사람을 단지 잠재적 돈벌이꾼으로 환원시키고, 그들의 가치는 그들의 현재 스킬 세트와 사회적 지위에 기초하여 돈을 벌 수있는 상상 된 미래의 능력에 의해 결정됩니다.. 그것은 젊은 삶을 시장의 조건으로 재구성하는 방법입니다. "
For neoliberals, the fundamental values of education are individualism, competition and choice. The purposes of education are fundamentally economic. And the image of the child? As future human capital. As Natasha Lennard argues in her review of the recent book by John Harris, ‘Kids these days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials’, such a conception “reduces people to no more than potential earners, with their value determined by their imagined future capacity to make money based on their current skillset and social position. It’s a way of reconfiguring young life into market terms”.
세편의 리뷰
1.
The Kids Aren’t Alright
A crucial new work of generational analysis explores how society turned millennials into human capital.
by Natasha Lennard
Kids These Days offers a historical materialist analysis, but Harris is too committed to accessibility to use that term or to mention Marx even once. In prose that is precise, readable, and witty, he explores the economic, social, and political conditions that shaped those of us—myself and Harris included—born between 1980 and 2000. Harris’s central contention is that millennials are what happens when contemporary capitalism converts young people into “human capital.” After reading his book, it seems ill-advised to understand millennials any other way.
It’s nothing groundbreaking to state that capitalism shapes the subjects who live under it. But Harris looks in detail at what distinguishes millennials as the product of our specific period during which capitalism, as he puts it, “has started to hyperventilate: It’s desperate to find anything that hasn’t yet been reengineered to maximize profit, and then it makes those changes as quickly as possible.” This has turned young people into “human capital.” It’s not just industry and government that frame us this way. Harris’s book shows how almost every institution influencing the development of young people—including parents, school, college, entertainment, psychiatry, social media, and work—reinforces the idea that young people are simply investments in labor.
So what is human capital? As Harris explains, its “rough paper analog is the résumé: a summary of past training for future labor.” Being viewed as human capital reduces people to no more than potential earners, with their value determined by their imagined future capacity to make money based on their current skillset and social position. It’s a way of reconfiguring young life into market terms. And it has informed every stage of the millennial generation’s development: schools organized by competitive standardized testing; résumé-building extracurriculars for the wealthy; zero-tolerance policies and the constant threat of prison for poor kids; monitoring and control of childhood behavior; prescription drugs, and little free time to play, all justified by the myth that turning yourself into better human capital guarantees a better future.
Childhood done right, according to the vagaries of this system, means getting into college and taking on huge debt—to double down on the self-qua-investment. As tuition costs have soared, median incomes have stagnated, producing a generation with little hope of paying off its unprecedented levels of debt. “As it turns out,” Harris writes, “just because you can produce an unprecedented amount of value doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed yourself under twenty-first-century American capitalism.”
As Harris admits almost as a refrain, this is a bleak story about an unsustainable situation. But this game does have winners. The question is who wins, and the answer is clear. Turning a generation into human capital provides capitalists with a steady supply of workers.
Harris’s analysis will come as a shock only to readers who previously understood millennials in terms of contradictory media tropes (they are both lazy and working all hours, sexless and oversexed, ever-connected and narcissistic, money-driven and financially irresponsible). But Harris isn’t offering up novelty—he’s giving us a comprehensive analysis of what has up until now been dealt with in fragments.
A book with this kind of scope risks the pitfalls of the very sorts of media narratives it attempts to overturn—namely, broad generalizations that assume all millennials share the same experiences. Harris sidesteps those traps by confining his analysis to American millennials and emphasizing the salience of class, race, and gender. This is not auxiliary to his analysis, but central. We are converted into human capital in different ways; the “growth of growth” requires different kinds of person-machines.
Harris details, for example, how “the gendered wage gap has narrowed in the past decades,” but that women’s gains have been far from evenly distributed. He explores late capitalism’s increasing reliance and production of so-called “feminized labor”, and how this “reflects employers’ successful attempts to reduce labor costs.” Throughout the book Harris also stresses how black, Latino, and indigenous millennials—as in prior generations—face greater barriers to financial stability, systematic exclusion from public life, and overpolicing compared to their white counterparts.
The author does not claim to offer a complete account of the millennial experience. The label “millennial” is used with messy abandon by the mainstream media and marketing agencies and in turn has been dismissed by some critics as little more than nonsense advertising fodder. Harris is keen to point out that “millennial” is anything but a useless term, but not because all so-called millennials have any one quality in common. A historical materialist analysis doesn’t foreclose attention to intersecting struggles; a good one, like Harris’s, does the opposite. He’s not bartering the idea of some vital principle shared by all American millennials; he’s looking at the conditions that have fashioned millennials into a group.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/malcolm-harris-kids-these-days-review-millennials-capitalism
2.
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
BY MARK DUNBAR •
In the United States, competition and the start of “getting on the right track” begins earlier and earlier in children’s lives. Seven-year-old boys excited about baseball are forced by their parents to practice five or six days a week. Girls who can’t sit still in class are given medication for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) out of fear that the long-term academic consequences of their behavior will soon be irreparable. Harris gives extraordinary examples of children regimented almost from birth to be brilliant violinists or pro-caliber quarterbacks. He also quotes from a 2014 letter sent from a New York elementary school informing parents that the school’s kindergarten play was canceled due to time constraints: “We are responsible for preparing children for college and career…and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers.” So no costumes or make-believe for them.
It’s news to no one that economic inequality in this country is bad and only getting worse. Although worker productivity has tripled since the 1970s, real wages have stagnated and in some instances even declined. Harris believes this “disjuncture is perhaps the single phenomenon that defines [m]illennials.” According to Federal Reserve numbers, rental income (stocks, real estate, etc.) is taking more and more of the surplus from the regular production-consumption economy; and those numbers don’t include unconventional rental incomes from the digital sector like service and platform providers. Making money rather than just earning it is becoming essential to economic security. “The American dream isn’t fading,” Harris writes, “it’s being horded.”
These cultural and material circumstances have had predictable psychological effects on millennials. With less free time than prior generations—time spent on homework and “extracurriculars” tripled in the 1990s and early 2000s—many of us have fallen for the unending tyranny of self-advancement. We’re taught to treat ourselves “as investments.”
In school, you’re warned that any misdeed will go on your “permanent record.” And with the advent of digital record keeping, there are now hundreds of different types of permanent records about you. A great plethora of state and corporate entities now monitor and (attempt to) control your behavior. Harris doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that mass incarceration and citizen-surveillance took off at roughly the same time. Nor does he think liberal fashions about welfare and education are at odds with these malevolent forces: “Unfounded assumptions about government benevolence have allowed the state youth complex to mutate in this highly aggressive form.” In other words, therapeutic liberalism and law-and-order conservatism scarcely differ in worldview—only in tone and conventionality.
Our cultural obsession with “employability,” in which people “are taught that the main objective while they’re young is to become the best job applicants they can be,” has pacified an entire generation on both a personal and organizational level. As Harris bluntly puts it, millennials “have been structurally, legally, emotionally, culturally, and intellectually dissuaded from organizing in their own collective interest as workers.”
Millennials are less likely to join a union or pay union dues than their older counterparts. Most either haven’t been convinced that there’s a benefit in doing so or are too afraid of the potential repercussions. Also, with more jobs being temporary (or at least feeling temporary), there’s an impulse among employees that, since they’ll be gone soon anyway, organized actions aren’t worth the hassle.
Free labor is also a pervasive economic phenomenon among millennials. What Harris calls “the pedagogical mask”— whereby work is unpaid because the benefits for the worker are supposed to derive from professional experience and promotion rather than monetary compensation—is “central to understanding the American economy.”
It’s how the NCAA justifies not paying college players: “They’re student athletes after all.” Despite the fact the NCAA is a multibillion-dollar organization. It’s also how companies, especially for white-collar jobs, can convince the young unemployed to take unpaid gigs: “You’ll be gaining valuable experience and it’ll look great on your resume.” Even advocates for the intern system admit it doesn’t noticeably increase chances for a better job.
Most of Harris’s social analysis is commendable. He is excellent at finding metaphors and analogies that clear up sentimental ambivalency. He likens the student loan system to a bond market where “college admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids, and once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return.” The federal government makes a decent profit from student loans, so Harris isn’t surprised to find lawmakers of both parties preaching the merits of higher education. “More college access…means more debt,” which means more debt payments going to the government.
https://thehumanist.com/arts_entertainment/books/book-review-kids-days-human-capital-making-millennials
3.
For an Education that Sees Children as More than ‘Human Capital’
By Peter Moss,
For neoliberals, the answer, the political choice, to this last question is an education to produce flexible, compliant and competitive workers and acquisitive, self-interested and calculating consumers – ensuring supplies of ‘human capital’ and consumption, fuelling endless growth. For the left, the answer, the political choice, will be very different: education for flourishing lives and societies, sustainable and healthy environments, citizens (of all ages) imbued with democratic and cooperative values, accustomed to critical thinking and working with complexity and uncertainty, and committed to working for the public good. To protest, for example, against climate change and to contribute to creating a liveable world.
"우리는 모든 아이들이 부자이고 가난한 아이들이 없다고 말합니다. 모든 아이들은 자신의 문화가 무엇이든, 우리가 생각하는 것 보다 더 풍부하고, 더 잘 갖추어져 있고, 더 재능 있고, 더 강하고, 더 지능적이라고 가정합니다. " 이 부유한 아이들은 타고난 주인공으로 다른 아이들과 어른들과 관련하여 적극적으로 지식과 정체성을 구축한다고 생각합니다.
그들은 권리와 "백개의 언어"를 가진 시민입니다. 백개의 언어란 어린이가(인간이) 그들의 생각을 표현하고 소통하고 나타내는 다양한 방법을 지칭합니다. 그들은 소묘, 그림 및 조각과 같은 많은 시각적 언어로부터, 음악과 춤, 그리고 광범위한 과학 언어, 읽기 및 쓰기, 그 밖의 많은 것들을 포함하고 있습니다
words of Vea Vecchi (the first atelierista, or ‘educator with an arts background’ in Reggio’s schools) “to the different ways children (human beings) represent, communicate and express their thinking…from the many visual languages that there are, such as drawing, painting and sculpture, through music and dance, to a wide range of scientific languages, reading and writing, and much else besides”.
But without awareness and care, this rich child can easily be impoverished – by society and education.
“What is your image of the child?”
Equally important are political questions about subjectivity or identity. These were central to Malaguzzi’s thinking and practice, and remain so today in the world-famous municipal school system of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy, which he did so much to create. The key question for Malaguzzi was “what is your image of the child?”, insisting that a “declaration [about the image of the child] is not only a necessary act of clarity and correctness, it is the necessary premise for any pedagogical theory, and any pedagogical project”. Or put another way, it is necessary to make a choice about who we think children are – for such images, our understandings, are productive of how we think, talk and act educationally.
His political choice was clear:
“We say all children are rich, there are no poor children. All children whatever their culture, whatever their lives are rich, better equipped, more talented, stronger and more intelligent than we can suppose”. These rich children, he thought, were born protagonists, actively constructing knowledge and identity in relation with other children and adults.
They were citizens with rights and with a “hundred languages”, referring (in the words of Vea Vecchi (the first atelierista, or ‘educator with an arts background’ in Reggio’s schools) “to the different ways children (human beings) represent, communicate and express their thinking…from the many visual languages that there are, such as drawing, painting and sculpture, through music and dance, to a wide range of scientific languages, reading and writing, and much else besides”.
But without awareness and care, this rich child can easily be impoverished – by society and education. As Malaguzzi argued in a famous poem, though:
children have a hundred languages: they rob them of ninety nine
school and culture
work to separate
bodies-minds
making them think without their body
and act without their head
making conflict between
play and work
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
inside and outside
Children as neoliberal “human capital”
For neoliberals, the fundamental values of education are individualism, competition and choice. The purposes of education are fundamentally economic. And the image of the child? As future human capital. As Natasha Lennard argues in her review of the recent book by John Harris, ‘Kids these days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials’, such a conception “reduces people to no more than potential earners, with their value determined by their imagined future capacity to make money based on their current skillset and social position. It’s a way of reconfiguring young life into market terms”.
Faced by neoliberalism’s attempt to deny education as a political practice, the left must reclaim education as a subject for democratic politics. It must insist on the importance of political questions like “what is your image of the child?” It must be adamant there are alternatives, and it must argue for its political choices.
신자유주의 교육을 극복하는 대안교육
community-based common public schools.
What is our image of this school? The common public school practicing democratic public education is for all citizens living in a local catchment area – children, young people and adults, a place for inter-generational learning and relations – without admission criteria except residence. In its comprehensiveness, it contests the fragmenting drive of neoliberal education, with its proliferation of competing and/or selective schools, including ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’, grammar schools and ‘faith schools’.
Rather than the neoliberal image of the school as business and ‘exam factory’, the image of the common public school is as a public space and public resource, a place of encounter for citizens of all ages where they participate together in projects of environmental, social, cultural, political and economic significance. This has much in common with Keri Facer’s image of a ‘physical, local school where community members are encouraged to encounter each other and learn from each other’, and which she sees as ‘one of the last public spaces in which we can begin to build the intergenerational solidarity, respect for diversity and democratic capability needed to ensure fairness in the context of sociotechnical change’.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-05-16/for-an-education-that-sees-children-as-more-than-human-capital/