Janesville - a town that explains Trump and also why you shouldn't judge or blame people for being poor

You’re put in a town that implodes when the car plant closes down and 9000 people lose their jobs. GM was a mess – incompetent management, old models, a company that failed to innovate. As if that wasn’t enough Janesville is hit with Biblical levels of rain (climate change?). Journalism at its best, by a Poulitzer-winning writer, written from the perspective of the people affected. Want to know why working America is pissed? Read this book. Told with compassion but realism, through the lives of real people in a real town.

For over 100 years they had produced tractors, pick-ups, trucks, artillery shells and cars. Obama came and went, the financial crisis hammered them deeper into the dirt but while the banks were bailed by the state, the state bailed on the people. On top of this a second large, local employer, Parker Pens, outsourced to Mexico but the market for upmarket pens was also dying. The ignominy of being asked to extend your wages by a few weeks by going down to Mexico to train their cheaper labour was downright evil.

Then the adjunct businesses started to fail, the suppliers, trades, shops, restaurants, nurseries for two income families – then the mortgage and rent arrears, foreclosures, house prices fall, negative equity. As middle-class jobs go they push down on working lass jobs and the poor get poorer.

“Family is more important than GM” this is the line that resonated most with me in the book. In this age of identity politics, most people still see a stable family and their community as their backstops. The left and right have lost focus on this. The community didn’t lie down – they fought for grants, did lots themselves to raise money, help each other – but it was not enough.

Grants for retraining were badly targeted, training people for reinvention is difficult for monolithic, manufacturing workforces. Some of it was clearly hopeless, like discredited Learning Style diagnosis, overlong courses of limited relevance to the workplace or practice. Problems included the fact that many couldn’t use computers, so there was huge drop out, more debts and little in the way of workplace learning. Those that did full degrees found that what few jobs there were had been snapped up while they were in college – their wages dropped the most, by nearly half. One thing did surprise me, the curious offshoot that was anti-teacher hostility. People felt let down by a system that doesn’t really seem to work and saw teachers as having great holidays, pensions and healthcare, while they were thrown out of work. The whole separation of educational institutions from workplaces seems odd.

Jobs didn’t materialise. What jobs there are, exist in the public sector – in welfare charities and jails. A start-up provided few jobs, many commuted like gypsies to distant factories. Even for those in work, there was a massive squeeze on wages, in some cases a 50% cut, sometimes more. In the end jobs came back but real wages fell. Healthcare starts to become a stretch. But it’s the shame of poverty, using food banks, homeless teenagers and a real-life tragedy 200 pages into the book that really shakes you over.

The book ends with the divide between the winners and losers. This is the divide that has shattered America. Janesville is the bit of America tourists, along with East and West coast liberals don’t see. The precariat are good people who are having bad things done to them by a system that shoves money upwards into the pockets of the rich. Looked down upon by Liberals, they are losing faith in politics, employers, the media, even education.

Wisconsin turned Republican and Trump was elected. The economist Mark Blyth attributes the Trump win to their wages squeeze and fall in expectations, even hope. People got a whole lot poorer and don’t see a great future for their kids.

A more relevant piece of work than Hillbilly Elegy, with which it is being compared. Final thought –why are journalists in the UK not doing this? Answer – they’re bubble-wrapped in their cozy London lairs, part of the problem and too lazy to get out and do their jobs… writing the same stories about why they don’t like social media, failing to see that they are the purveyors, not so much of fake new but inauthentic news, irrelevant news, news reduced to reporting on shadows within their own epistemological cave… one exception - John Harris.

Lifelong Learning - beware of alliteration, trips off the tongue but it’s a conceit

'Lifelong Learning' trips off the tongue (beware of alliteration) but it’s a glib, confused, if not misleading, phrase. No one describes themselves as a ‘Lifelong Learner’ – it would sound pompous, even ridiculous. To be honest, I don't really think that Lifelong Learning is even a 'thing', just rhetoric.

Extended schooling

In truth, most of us, after being put through the wringer of intense schooling, can’t wait to see the back of it. Even those who extend schooling for another three or four degree years are often weary of the endless diet of formal learning and exams. If Lifelong Learning means more and more qualifications, forget it. Lots of people are now being prompted and pushed into being academic, when they’re not, prolonging their schooling, when the evidence suggest that it “neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives”. Lifelong learning, so far, has meant extending schooling. Of course, the answer to bad schooling is always more schooling. We may even want less learning. Bryan Caplan has argued that more people are getting ‘schooled’ for longer and longer. But to what end? Signalling. Credential inflation is the wasteful result.

Academe

In my lifetime, I‘ve seen the Lifelong Learning brigade dismantle vocational learning in favour of University for all – well not really all, as they killed off support for adult learners (which is what Lifelong Learning was supposed to be about) – hence the near bankruptcy of the OU. They talk the talk but at the end of the day – the focus has been on 18 year-old undergraduates. That’s a shame. For all the rhetoric they default back to their own little world and that of their kids.

Workplace learning

Even in work, HR has a tendency to become the department that actively defends the organisation against its own employees, through an endless diet of compliance courses. Is this Lifelong Learning? Or is it sitting in a 2rd rate hotel room full of round tables having to endure some god-awful Powerpoint presentation, or worse, being asked to form groups to answer ill-framed questions, then feed your results back to the ‘facilitator’. If so, that's the opposite of learning – it’s conformity and compliance, that often turns people off training.

Re-skilling

If you mean keep open opportunities to reskill, fine. But for many that’s usually too little too late, after mass redundancies. Janesville, about a community in the US hit by factory closures, exposed the dangers of the reskilling promise. These hastily improvised projects are usually too little too late.

 ‘Lifelong Learning UK Council’

An organization so invisible, that no one noticed when it disappeared, basically a bunch of University and College administrators with a couple of librarians thrown in for good measure, who thought that lifelong meant 81-22. I didn’t come across a soul in the learning industry who even knew that it existed. Although they thought that ‘employers... will look to this SSC for the standards and qualifications of the people who deliver learning in their own workforce.’ This is what happens when Lifelong learning is actually seen as lifelong teaching. There was nobody at the wake when it was closed down.

 Life is for living, not learning

Lifelong Learning is a shallow phrase as it assumes that we need something we don’t. For many, the book group or film club is formal enough, a group that encourages you to read something new and different. But this is so often a sort of middle class affectation, like learning Italian before you go on your holiday to Tuscany. Life, for most, is for living, not learning.

Conclusion

Lifelong Learning is a phrase that appears in lofty reports, grant applications or by organisations that no one has even heard of. It’s a weasel phrase. Nobody has ever, or wants to, call themselves a Lifelong Learner. It’s a sort of educational conceit – stick with we ‘educators’, you’ll need us – for life. Adults do not want to be infantilised by this sort of jargon. They’re adults not learners. The older you get the less inclined you are to want to cram and sit exams, as you know you’ve forgotten most of what you previously learnt. I’m all for recommending that people remain curious throughout their lives but life is not a course.