Education Electronic, Like the Dissolution of Monasteries

There is much discussion about how to “save” education costs by making more classes and degrees available online. Advocates, such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, have been aggressively pushing this notion. One claim is that it is cheaper and more interesting for students to learn online, than to have to drag into a lecture hall and listen to some stodgy professor drone on. Students would have more access to education in an online setting, and it the education would be of a higher quality.

How interesting.

The US Department of Education even released a study claiming that higher education students studied online “performed better” than students who physically attend classes. Never mind that the Community College Research Center later found the analysis to be flawed, due to an improper selection of student populations used in the assessment, the USDE study is cited all over the place as evidence that online education is better. The CCRC study did not find in the USDE study any evidence to support the notion that students learn better in an online environment. In fact, the CCRC study found that students were more likely to withdraw from an online course than from one offered in a  traditional classroom setting.

How interesting.

In Britain, meanwhile, Lord Browne et al put out a report, last October, with the windy title “Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education: An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance.” Stefan Collini reviewed this document for the London Review of Books November 2010 edition. Collini is disturbed by many assertions in this so-called independent review. I quote from the article:

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as a provision of the public good… Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e., universities)… Britain’s universities, it is proposed, should henceforth be operated in accordance with the tenets of perfect competition theory.”

How interesting.

There is a lot to be said about all of the above. There are many pages to read of reports. But here is what I will say, in short, on all of this:

The gutting of higher education is underway. The rhetoric is hot and furious, and coming mostly from people who either benefited from publicly funded education or who are independently wealthy or who are capitalists on the prowl for the next drill down site.

Education costs money. Does it cost less money to attend class online? Well, that depends on whether you are getting the class through a for-profit “university” or a state funded institution. University of Phoenix has probably set the bar in for-profit education, and we are now seeing the idea spread like an infection.

Do you have a computer? Do you have internet access? All of these things cost money. When I attended university, I did not have a computer. I read books; I listened to lectures; I wrote papers. Amazingly, none of this happened with a computer! I paid for music lessons, books, paper, pens and pencils, as well as student and course fees. Today, you cannot even attend college classes without a computer. Why is that? Because it is “so much easier to do the work with computer access.” Well, that is as may be, but I have a friend who is a college professor; she spends most of her office time battling with her own computer set-up because the network is constantly down. If it is a time saver, it is an expensive one, not to mention a troubleshooting time suck.

Choice, do you like choice? Do you know what you want? If you are an 18 year old college bound youth, do you have any idea what you want to do with your life? HA! "Consumer driven education" has got to be the wackiest capitalist myth ever! The brains of most undergraduates have not fully developed to the point where critical thinking is possible, and most people need to be taught how to think critically through a course in the Philosophy or Psychology Departments.

Quality education, how is it to be determined or regulated? Can one teach Socratic Dialogue by email? Biology Labs from home? Does one learn better without benefit of group discussion or even the barest human contact?

The gutting of higher education could be compared to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, which, under the cover of Reformation, slid a great deal of wealth into a relatively small number of undeserving pockets, but did not benefit the average person one whit.

Look for more noise about choices in education. Expect fees to skyrocket. Expect your education "service provider" to be raking in a lot of money, but don't expect that you will be able closely examine who might be teaching your internet courses or that you will be able to "critically assess" whether your class is doing to do you any good. 

This feigned concern about how best to "deliver" education is not about providing a lasting cultural gift or benefiting society; this is about greed and it is about money. Once the universities (indeed, all bastions of public education) are dismantled, and once the unions are broken, drill down begins and the great divide continues. Those who can afford to will pay, because there will be no other choice. As for the rest of us…

Well, now, that should be interesting.

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http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/04/critical-thinking-and-mastery-of-child_2194.html

http://www.independent.gov.uk/browne-report

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/17/pawlenty

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/16/online

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n21/stefan-collini/brownes-gamble

Boredom, Mother of Invention

When my kids sigh and exclaim “mom, I’m bored,” I clap my hands and respond, “Yipee! So what are you going to do about it?” And I return to whatever it was I was doing; probably something exciting, like folding laundry or cleaning out the cat box.

They want me to find something to entertain them, but I won’t do it. It is up to them. Just like it was up to me, when I was their age.

Long before I was married with children, I began seeing middle school kids with Palm Pilots and Blackberries. I wondered what kids would need those for. Finally, someone told me what it was all about. “Their parents have overscheduled them. These kids have so many activities, they have to keep track of them electronically, and sync them with the family calendar.” I was shocked. 

When we got married, I made my husband promise that we would not over-schedule ourselves and make our child carry a Palm Pilot. I'm sure he thought I was getting ahead of myself. And I was. But not by too far. 

Now, twins and ten years later, I am still shocked, even though we have moved on to Smart Phones and the iPhone and Droids that seem poised to evolve into yet more complex items. Just for the sake of example: does it make sense that some of us have as many as four different contact numbers and/or addresses? That means we have to wade through double, triple, quadruple the messages when people try to get in touch. 

I have a cellular phone, but I don’t text. I had a Palm Pilot, but gave it away years ago, and returned to having a calendar I can write in with a pencil. I have a laptop, but not the latest model or operating system or applications.

You must be thinking I am a Luddite.

Not so, not so. No, not at all. 

I think all this technology is fabulous and grand and totally gizmotic! --(I am totally looking forward to getting my very own Dick Tracy HoloTeleporTextoGraph wristwatch, as soon as they roll off the assembly line!)-- I just don’t happen to think we need to be tied to it every minute of the day and much of the night. I don’t believe that we are required to have every moment of our day filled with some sort of electronic transaction in order to feel useful and productive. In fact, I believe we are making ourselves sick with the constant influx of messages that require response. This is not productivity, people, this is overwhelm, leading to a short-circuit.

I won't even go into the shoot-em-up video games and the vapid television content, running along the lines of Beady Eye for the Con Guy, Trailer Court Cookery,America's Got Trash, Touched by a Zombie, Project Informercial and CSI Bell, California. My husband and I don't want to watch this junk, and we sure as heck don't want our kids watching it either. Whether it is television, video games or email, screen time sucks at you with constantly programmed stimulation and message intervention until your mind is not free to roam. Hours go by, empty of you and your thoughts.

Anna Quindlen wrote a lovely essay for Newsweek in 2002. She, too, had noticed all the children with afternoons full of scheduled and structured time, being chauffeured around by harried and resentful parents, and it disturbed her, as well. Reflecting on her own childhood, she said, 

How boring it was. Of course, it was the making of me, as a human being and a writer. Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

In a 2005 keynote speech about hyper-parenting and creativity, Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D. said, 

Boredom can stimulate kids to think, create, and hear the soft murmurings of their inner voice, the one that makes them write this unusual story or draw that unique picture, or invent a new game. It is diminishing free play’s importance and eliminating time to reflect that damage imagination because they do not treat as precious children’s natural joy in discovering.

I propose that what is good for kids is probably also at least equally good for adults. 

I have seen my husband sit at the computer, grinding away at a problem related to what he is working on, getting more and more keyed up and farther, it seems, from a solution. If I drag him away to play with the twins, he grumbles, but always finds the solution while he is away from the computer. Why? Because he let go long enough to think outside the boundaries he had set up for the solution—that is creativity. And it was not found sitting at the computer, it was found while flying kites with the kids. He was not bored by the kite flying, but it was time frivolously spent.

Author Aimee Bender spends two hours a day working at boredom, just sitting around, waiting for some odd thought to pass through her mind. 

I feel like sitting through boredom is a major piece of being a writer. There's this intense restlessness that comes up when bored. I have this interest in skewed storytelling, so it makes sense that the ideas would sometimes show up in these strange ways.

Susan Sontag observed in an essay: 

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

So, here’s an idea for all of us, whether we are little kids or hyper-connected big kids:

Take some time to turn off, tune out, and twiddle those thumbs! Get out, get restless, go fly a kite--and see what happens!

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Keane, Erin. Courier-Journal.com, 10/26/2010. Acclaimed writer Aimee Bender's creative process begins with boredom.

Quindlen, Anna. Newsweek; 5/13/2002, Vol. 139 Issue 19, p76:  Doing Nothing is Something.

Rosenfeld, Alan. Hyper-Parenting the Over-Scheduled Child, keynote address for the Association of Children’s Museums, Indianapolis, Indiana. April 30, 2005.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography: America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly." Penguin, 1977.