ABSTRACT
We see problems with “poverty” and “wealth” as organizing metaphors in education and counseling-problems of ends and problems of means. When a primary goal of education and counseling becomes economic growth, global competitiveness, and even national security (see, e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2010; Ravitch, 2012), we risk reducing the breadth of human potential to economic output alone and learning to that which can be easily measured. To be clear, we believe education and counseling provide valuable tools in the fight against poverty in general and, more specifically, our students’ or clients’ poverty. However, education/counseling for wealth accumulation promises a false existential panacea. In practical terms, we tell young people to do well in often under-funded schools so that they can go to college and get a well-paid job, as if work and wealth were universal tickets to happiness, and education the most efficient means to wealth. The logical contortions in these ideas are rarely critically scrutinized. This is striking given that education and counseling, even in their most exalted forms, do not provide clients and pupils with paying work and that schools and counselors cannot immediately enhance their students’ or clients’ wealth. Noddings (2003) points out some major flaws in these mantras of schooling: Our schools, at their best, touch obliquely on entire realms of human life, especially those realms like relationships, cultivation of personal passions, and family and home life, that, Noddings argues, can be sources of great satisfaction and happiness or, conversely, frustration and disappointment. Rather than helping us lead better lives, education and counseling, in these well-intended narratives, can become entirely means to a consumerist end. Another problem with wealth/poverty as a guiding metaphor in education and counseling is a problem of means or what education and human services can offer in the present. Conceptualizing schooling or counseling as engines of (future) individual and national wealth generation raises questions about what, if anything, schooling and counseling-especially in economically impoverished schools or with clients facing severe poverty-offers students, clients, teachers, and counselors in the present. How does (or how can) the schooling we offer all students, especially those facing severe poverty, make our lives more humane right now? How can the day-to-day process of education-what we do and experience in schools and community organizations-foster connections, understanding, and compassion? How can schooling help us live and share across lines of perceived difference? How can education nurture imagination and spirit? Left out of our schooling or counseling as pathways-to-consumerist-ascendancy narratives, as critics like Banks (2006), Greene (2001), Hooks (1994), Meier and Wood (2004), Noddings (2003), and Payne (2008a) point out, is the breadth of our humanity that lies beyond wage labor and consumerism-including art, spirituality, compassion, humor, cross-cultural understanding, concern for justice and the environment, etc. In short, we fear that these combined problems-a narrow focus on econometric ends combined with inattention to means or the impact of teaching/learning/counseling on those
experiencing them-may contribute to alarming and well-documented attrition of both teachers and counselors (through burnout and leaving the profession; see, e.g., Borman and Dowling, 2008; Ingersoll, 2001) and students, particularly poor students and students of color (through dropout, pushout, exclusion, and incarceration; see, e.g., Orfield, 2004; Rumberger, 2011).
