Yesterday's post, ?Save the interns: Part 1,? noted that higher education is frequently complicit in, and occasionally precipitates, the misrepresentation as ?internships? of mundane, tedious jobs to be staffed by unpaid workers. Universities lend their credibility to employers?who seek?to conceal the true nature of such faux-internships; in return, these schools are able to collect tuition money from students while avoiding the attendant chore of educating them.
Ross Perlin, who covers this ground in his new book Intern Nation, believes that ?some in the Academy? have assisted in mixing ?the cocktail of ideological motivations, justifications, and half-hearted excuses behind the internship boom.? And they have done so not only by dispensing pro-internship propaganda but by drowning the internship idea in syrupy education-speak, ?using philosophies such as ?situated learning' and ?experiential education' to present internships in an appropriately educational light.? The former, situated learning, is founded upon the notion that knowledge is?passed on?socially, in certain environments, between individuals; Perlin quotes professor Paul Hager, for instance, who has written that the traditional ?learning-as-product? view is outdated, a relic of a ?mass production mindset reminiscent of the industrial era.? It seems likely that most education school professors would not reject classroom teaching as wholly anachronistic but would concur that situated learning should be a seminal part of the academic experience.
And while most students probably would profit from directed situated learning, it and theories like it have been broadened beyond usefulness. They have, Perlin writes, often ?proven to be an invitation to cost-cutting,? because learning?is?presumed to?occur anywhere, in any situation. They have also encouraged the prevailing internship ethos, which holds that any experience, regardless whether it is targeted or structured or fully haphazard, is useful. George Washington University, for example,?is quite up-front, almost boasting,?that 50 percent of its students do not remain in the field in which they intern. ?Exposure? becomes the ultimate ambition, and so an intern working in any field doing just about anything is convinced that his time has been smartly spent.
Perlin thinks internships have?turned sour. He wants to trash them and the system in which they operate and start over. But maybe we're too far gone. The term ?rat race? comes to mind. It describes the undergraduate admissions process; it describes the frantic groping for more degrees, more credentials; and it describes the quest for internships, no matter if they're lousy and unlawful. Only the most confident or hard-headed young people eschew this rat race. Most simply shrug glumly and then get on with it, noses to the ground,?squirming through society's labyrinths and hoping, always, that when it's all said and done, at the end, there will be cheese.