Dr. Pearson's comments on how we are taught or pressured to think of ourselves as human capital resonate deeply for me this year more than any other. I retired this year after being in the classroom since 1969. Let me explain.

In 1985, when I applied to the school district where I spent my last 24 years, I applied at an office called the "Personnel Office." When I filed my retirement papers this year, I went to the district's "Human Resources" office.

Sometime during my 24 years in the district, I had ceased to be a person and had become a resource. According to my Oxford dictionary, a resource is "an expedient or devise," "the means available to achieve an end, fulfill a function," or "a stock or supply that can be drawn on, available assets." As a "human resource" for the district, I was not so much a teacher as an asset, a means to an end, just part of a "supply" of teachers to be used to execute the corporate and political goals that had replaced real education.

Without getting into the details, I refused to accept this role. I considered myself a professional; I was not content to be, as one administrator said, "professionally compliant." To make a long story short, within three years, my health had deteriorated to the point where I had to take a medical leave of absence, and then retire completely.

Unfortunately, the educational system is doing the same thing to many students that it did to me (and other teachers). Too many schools are conditioning students to think of themselves as commodities, as products to be "marketed" in the corporate job world, when they should be, in Pearson's words, "educating them about how to be fully human" by finding and taking their own journeys.

Much of my master's degree work in psychology focused on living authentically, to use an existential term. To live authentically is to recognize one's potentials and, in a sense, to make our choices on what could be, not what has been or what others expect. I include here a short section of my thesis that relates to the excerpt from Dr. Pearson's book and to my comments above.

Living Inauthentically*

by Reg Harris

Copyright © 2004 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Updated October 2009. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.

Just as we have the potential to act authentically in our lives, we also have the potential to act inauthentically by failing to manifest our being through our choices. According to Heidegger (1974), we may behave inauthentically in several situations.

One of the most common ways we slip into inauthenticity is when we allow an external situation to force us into a role determined or dictated by someone else. One example of this might be teachers who drift away from being educators to accept the role of facilitators for corporately-driven curriculum changes and standardized testing. This often involves relinquishing authentic, engaged instruction to adhere to the timetables, themes and limitations imposed by policy makers.

Another way we behave inauthentically is when we no longer seek achievement and settle for the anonymity of sameness. We abandon our own potentials and settle onto an “everydayness,” where we surrender choice and eschew the opportunity to change. Even successful people can fall into everydayness when they become followers or functionaries of a system.

We also slide into inauthenticity when we surrender our independent self for a public image that conforms to the preconceptions and opinions of others. Teenagers, for example, are subjected to almost constant pressure to be the kind of person someone else would like them to be. The pressures range from the subtle messages of parents and peers to the requirements of a "good" college to the almost irresistible forces of our marketing and consumer economy.

Psychologist Erik Fromm wrote extensively on the power of the consumer-oriented, market economy to push the individual into inauthenticity. He saw the individual falling into various orientations, or ways of being in life. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore all of these orientations, one of them is especially relevant in this discussion of the heroic journey: the marketing orientation.

People living in the marketing orientation focus on selling things, even to the point where they can successfully package, market and sell themselves (Boeree, 1997). Everything about these people is an advertisement and every interaction is a transaction. The goal of the marketing character is to fully adapt to outside needs so that it will be desirable to the maximum extent possible. Such a person “is not concerned with his or her life and happiness, but with becoming salable” (Fromm, 1998, p. 22). Their motto is, “I am as you desire me to be.” According to Fromm, the marketing orientation is the predominant mode of being in the modern industrial society.

Sadly, public education is guiding many students into this inauthentic mode of being, both directly and indirectly. Directly, schools, teachers, counselors and administrators encourage students to develop the skills and attitudes that will get into the best universities or high-paying jobs. Few schools encourage students to explore and unfold their own being, to develop a strong sense of self and personal identity . Instead, they see their job as molding students into marketable packages which will be attractive to both businesses and colleges. Indirectly, standardized curriculum and testing encourages students to see themselves as being measured in the same way that products coming off a factory assembly line would be measured. “You must meet our standards, not yours,” students hear.

In this atmosphere, students see themselves as commodities to be produced and marketed. Their measure for self image comes from outside, rather than inside. When their own perceptions and understandings are subjugated to these normalizing “truths,” children sense a loss of efficacy and significance in their own lives. What’s more, they are taught, indirectly, that their life goals should be income, security and consumption, which is ironic because the economic environment makes these goals increasingly difficult to achieve.

As students focus more on becoming "desirable," they sacrifice their primary journey in adolescence: building a strong identity and sense of self-worth. When this happens, they are alienated from their own sense of being. As adolescents turn themselves into products, they can see their lives lose personal meaning and they may lose faith in their own future. These feelings, according to Fromm (1998), can result in destructive tendencies. It is little wonder that many students feel repressed, alienated and subjugated in such an environment.

A person immersed in the marketing character might have difficulty relating authentically to others. In the marketing orientation, we don't interact with people genuinely because we’re motivated by our own needs and we see others as a means to help us fulfill those needs. This attachment to self and to outcomes makes our behavior inauthentic. Again, we can see this inauthentic mode of being encouraged in schools. Often students have difficulty relating authentically to teachers because they must make themselves (and their skills) “marketable” so that they will earn favor or a good grade.

Even teachers may fall into this mode. With the advent of standardized testing and school and teacher “account-ability,” teachers may begin to cultivate a marketing character as they become more concerned on their own “performance”—as measured by the products (marketable students) they are producing—than on mentoring their students.

The marketing character, which molds itself to stasis or the demands of “the way things are,” discourages our pursuit of our individual stories. Jean Houston recognized this tendency: “Resistance to Story is a great and present reality for many. The seductive lure of homeostasis . . . is supported by your culture and your tribe, which are often quick to remind you to follow the tried and true” (1987, p. 97).

The marketing character is only one of the many modes of inauthenticity encouraged by our modern culture. But, whatever its mode, inauthenticity is a way to avoid the responsibility for choosing our own lives by focusing on the things in our lives. Even when we work for success, fame, happiness, altruism, or even to be a “real person” we are being inauthentic because these concepts are abstractions, “not actual things. They are the by-products, the flavors and atmospheres of real things—shadows which have no existence apart from some substance” (Watts, 1951, p. 63).

References 

Boeree, C. G. (1997). Erik Fromm. Retrieved on February 20, 2003, from http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/fromm.html.

Fromm, E. (1998). Marketing economy and its effects. In R. Funk (Ed.), The essential Fromm: Life between having and being (1st ed.). New York: Continuum.

Heidegger, M. (1974). from Being and time. In R. Solomon (Ed.), Existentialism. New York: Random House.

Watts, A.  (1951). The wisdom of insecurity. New York: Pantheon.

This article is an excerpt from:

* Harris, R. (2004). The eternal circle: A hermeneutic model of the heroic journey. (Unpublished master's degree thesis). Sonoma State University, Sonoma, California. (pages 56-59).