Foresight 20/20; A Commencement Address for our Graduates

Parents, Friends and Neighbors, we stand here today to honor our 2020 graduates. 

It cannot go without saying that 2020 has been a strange year. I don’t think any of us was, nor could have been, prepared for the sudden arrival of a pandemic. Our lives have been turned upside-down. The norms and expectations of everything, including and particularly celebration, have been curtailed. The globalized economy has collapsed like a house of cards, and the highest levels of leadership have proven themselves to be insubstantial, even unfit, but certainly unready to meet such a crisis where it needs to be met – often treating this environment as though human needs are not an integral part of it.

Suddenly everything came to a halt, and we were mainly limited to being at home, really only going out for essential procurements or essential work. It doesn’t take long for people, so used to social commerce, to become bored, isolated, sad. On March 18^th, I awoke from a dream and these words lingered from it, so I wrote them down and gave them a title: 

Together, Alone

We hike along a way
we’d usually share abreast,
but right now, we each move
together, alone.

The distance is forced and,
as two pendulums in motion would,
we try to match our steps,
try to meet in mind,
mindful of the gap.

A contagion we can’t see
threatens to separate us;
to divide and conquer
by means of infection
is the metaphor of this age.

This disease might save us,
if we could embrace a truth
writ large by the threat:
we live webs of intersections;
as we go, it is together, all one.

© 2020 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

A year of promise begun in the Fall got the wind sucked out it in February and March. To borrow a book title from Judith Viorst, for many students this has been a “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad” year. It is of little consolation that a year such as this is not unprecedented in the history of our nation and our world.

In 1918, the world, already in the grips of World War I for a full year, was hit by an avian H1N1 virus that came to be known as the Spanish Flu. Troop movement is thought to have been the primary means of spreading this virus, and there were three primary waves of infection. Then, as now, public heath officials recommended the wearing of masks, proximal distancing, and quarantine as the primary methods by which to slow the spread of the disease and allow it to play itself out. 

In his commencement address to the 1918 graduating class of the University of Indiana, Mr. Rough and Ready, Theodore Roosevelt, nine years out of office as our 26^thPresident, said:

We need institutions of technical teaching, of technical learning in the country; but in my judgment, we need more the institutions that teach broad, cultural development, which this nation needs more than it needs anything else. We need the kind of learning acquired not because it can be turned into money but because it is worth so much more than money.

Let [each person] remember that no nation ever yet amounted to anything or ever will amount to anything if it consisted simply of money-getters, and if the trophies and proofs of its success consisted merely in the symbols of successful money-getting. The money must be there as a basis, but by no means as broad a basis as most of the very successful… among us have made it in their lives. [Money] is only [a] foundation, and the foundation is worthless unless upon it you build the super-structure of the higher life, the life with ideals of beauty, of nobility, of achievement of good for the sake of doing what is good, the life of service and sacrifice in any one of a hundred lines, all directed toward the welfare of our common country.

I hope it isn’t trite to say that though this year has been tough, we’ve all learned that doing good, in the simple way Roosevelt defined it, is something that can be done by going to work or school, or even by staying at home—doing the best we can, whatever any specific circumstances demand. We’ve seen what works, and what doesn’t work has been unmasked– as façade or out and out fraud – for all to see, if they are willing. We’ve learned that “Being together, all one” is part of our social contract, an act of cooperation we agree to do as a group even if we are self-isolating.

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That you have arrived at this day is not, per se, a miracle. You’ve been nurtured and encouraged by parents, grandparents, neighbors, teachers and coaches, ever since the day you were born. But that you have arrived at this milestone is an accomplishment—your accomplishment, a result of your hard work. Even, sometimes, boredom, contributes to growth, being the parent of invention.

You’ve spent so much of your life in school but, let me just say, school’s not over, yet – life is what some would call “Continuing Education.” I’m sure you’ve survived any number of “group projects”, during your time in Middle and High School, even College. When asked why students thought they were being given such assignments, at least 85% percent respond, “In order to lower my GPA.” As hated as these exercises are, there is a point to them; they are short experiments in the realities of cooperation. In these “controlled” experiments, the group you end up with must work together to produce a result. You get to choose who you hang out with at lunch and after school, but you mostly never get to choose who is going to be working with you on such assignments nor in any job setting. You and several or a bunch of others are thrown together to solve a problem and deliver a report or a product. Some members of the group have skills; some can organize, some are smart but flaky, while others might be excellent at avoidance all together. You have to find someone willing to take the thankless lead, and then together you have to plan meetings, benchmarks and goals, and each person has to agree to Do Their Part. This is nothing less than a social contract. Sometimes the results aren’t that great, but you can breathe a sigh of relief when your presentation is over, even if you were up until 2am making the PowerPoint presentation because you had to wait for one of your partners to email the data and another partner to email the text. This is a microcosm of real life; we all muddle along just like this, and every such experience offers an opportunity to observe people, and this contributes to your developing critical thought process. One thing you learn is that even people with the best of plans encounter issues that can cause them to change course. If there’s one rule of thumb you can live by, it’s this: Everything takes four times longer to accomplish than you think it should, from simple chores on up. And yet, there is art and grace to be found in all of this, and joy.

Perhaps, during our shelter-in-place, in our quiet meditations, we have made some important observations. Perhaps we’ve been able to breathe cleaner air. Perhaps we have been able to actually hear the birds singing without the continuous hum of traffic and construction to dampen their songs. Perhaps we have been able to see the moon and stars more clearly at night. Perhaps we have discovered – and maybe to our surprise – that a lifestyle of rushing around and being artificially busy is not required in order to live fully and productively. Perhaps we have thought about how much energy – personal energy, as well as resource energy – is wasted when everything and everyone is constantly turned on and in motion. Perhaps we have concerned ourselves with how isolation might be impacting others, because we know how deeply it has impacted us. Perhaps we have observed that all are not treated equally or based on truly demonstrated merit. Perhaps we’ve finally heard and identified divisive rhetoric and platitudes, and been upset by them. Perhaps, in thinking about all these things, we have thought of solutions to certain problems. 

What ideas have you had during this time that you think are worthy to pursue? Ideas that can help us do more than just muddle along? Such ideas are the capital on which every former society has been, and any newer society, can be built. 

In the words of a Fleetwood Mac song from my generation:

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be, better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone

Right now, we are still in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting for the pandemic threat to be “yesterday,” and some of us marching to demand greater social justice. As difficult as it is to be missing out on shared celebrations with your peers, I hope you realize that you are experiencing history first-hand, and that this moment is but a spring-board to the next phase of yours and all our lives. You are on the ground floor, and everything goes up from here. In the parlance of business, disruption is the fertile ground for innovation. Carpe diem, seize the day! This historic moment contains the seeds of opportunity that you and all your classmates can cultivate toward holistic and positive change so desperately needed in our world, changes that don’t treat humanity as if it is detached from the environment or subservient to money, changes that honor individual personhood. 

As we slowly return to a “new normal,” I hope that you will be able to safely rejoin your classmates and extended family in celebration of your collective achievements, and that those celebrations will be all the more fully experienced and cherished because of the crisis we have lived through. 

In the meanwhile, we congratulate you and the entire Class of 2020, and hope that the springboard of current events will catapult all of you to success in the fields of your choice, with the best wishes and continued support of all of us. We are confident that you and your generation have and will further develop and employ critical discernment, and with it the capacity to concentrate on those issues pertinent to the “common good,” and we have high hopes that every new construct you have imagined can be realized to make the world “better than before,” where each person has a place and a vital role. You have heard the phrase, “20/20 hindsight” – it is our hope that you and everyone in your generation will look on the year 2020 as a challenge to look ahead, to make leaps forward and to lead, leveraging your knowledge of the past and, now, new perspective and energy toward building a better, safer, more loving world for us all, a world with just a touch of 20/20 foresight.

Best to you always, 

Elisabeth Eliassen
your neighbor and fellow citizen

© 2020 by Elisabeth Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

This address is for all students who were unable to partake of a commencement gathering with their fellow students and families. I wrote this specifically for a young man, a neighbor, who grew up with my kids. I want all our graduates know that they are special and that they live in a special time, and that they can shape the world. I pulled out the more personal comments directed toward our young friend, but the message is the same for all.

Advancement Day

Warning: Political statements abound throughout, indicated by the presence of asterisks.

It is the very merry month of June, and we just celebrated advancements in the form of High School Graduation (times two). The twins, now 18 and having already voted in their first election, have completed High School, and their futures lie yawning ahead on the vast lawns and landscapes of time, as still do ours.

While I won’t, on this occasion, prognosticate on what lies ahead, I can reflect on what has happened to bring us to this springboard moment, perhaps offer a prophetic statement on where we are today.

Our babies, in addition to entering the political landscape of the world in the year before 9/11, were born at the digital crux, right before cell phones evolved into smart phones, just before the departure of analog ubiquity. Technology has been ever-present and ever demanding of their time, and ours, since the day our children were born.

Society cares less about children now than at any time in recorded history*. Let that sink in, for a moment.

I have always believed in public education. During the 1960s and 1970s, due to an explosion in population due to the post-war economic boom, there was such a demand for educated people, as well as a growing social ethos that dictated “bring everyone up,” that it was difficult to fill all the available teaching positions. Educating a generation of educators became extremely important. But the struggle to pay educators has not changed all that much from the one-room schoolhouse days, has it? Despite the fact that the public and industries of all types demand an educated populace, government (no matter what party is in power) shies away from providing for education, paying teachers a living wage, and maintaining school campuses. It is easier and more lucrative to sell guns and put people in jail.* Poorly educated people can be cajoled by charismatic demagogues into voting for anyone.*

But, still I believe in public education. I was educated in public schools. I turned out okay.

Private schools are well and good, but do they train our young people to question?

This is a genuine question, one that must also be asked of public education.* I am not actually bringing this up to suggest that public is better than private school. Do the students that come out of any school realize that there is a political or religious worldview and agenda predominating the information that has been taught?* Are students really given the opportunity and freedom to think for themselves, even if it goes against the grain of the institution?* 

Administrators at the public high school from which I graduated in the late 1970s turned off the microphone on this year’s valedictorian speech. They did that because the young woman dared to mention that one of the challenges students had to overcome was sexual assault on campus. As a graduate of that school, I am personally enraged that this occurred, and proud of the young woman’s courage to say what needed to be said, and that the incident made the news throughout the state, and was even reported in the Washington Post.**

Our institutions, public and private, do not own our knowledge, nor do they own our experience.* What they must own is their culpability in all the things that can and do go wrong, and how these wrongs are redressed.* We, and the young people we raise, are only as strong as our institutions. Right now, all our institutions are weak and hamstrung, too often self-serving, and as a result they fail too many families.* Institutions, public and private, that cannot redress wrongs or see where improvement is necessary, will bring us all down. Let that sink in, for a moment.

We are proud of what our children were able to accomplish from within a flawed and partisan system.* It was not easy for them or for their peers; they managed to do well despite a system that is rigged to highlight frequently questionable outcomes.* Ever-newer curricula provides a money machine that enriches someone who is not a student, rather than providing better tools for teaching, I have observed.* Technology, donated or purchased or otherwise forced into the schools, looms in every classroom, but often without proper IT backup, and as a challenge to families who cannot afford computers, creating a division.* Bullying is but one factor in the lives of our young students. Favoritism is but one other factor. Incompetent and/or biased teaching, yet another factor.* Entitled, bullying, helicopter-hovercraft parenting is another factor, oft paired with the demanding and argumentative, entitled student-child who “does not work well with others” to complete group projects.*

Health and wellbeing issues are said to be catered to at most schools, but if you look closely, all sorts of students fall between the cracks. How can I say this with assurance? It was reported to me by my own children. Some of their peers were sent to school without having had breakfast, with no lunch or lunch money. Some students had other issues at home. When we parents were made aware of a few situations with regard to our children’s friends and acquaintances, we went to the school on their behalf. Although we were told that the administration would solve the individual problem, we discovered later that they did not do so, and that nothing had changed for the student. Meanwhile, nothing could be done by the administration for the dozens of students who slept through their classes exhausted from all night videogame bingeing or from sheer boredom. 

Possibly, it is the same in every generation that many students just don’t give a damn about school or the importance of education. Student engagement must be inspired; this has always been true.* Not every teacher is inspiring, engaging or nice; that’s also always been the case. Perhaps also not every parent is inspiring, engaging or loving. We are all challenged, as we are all challenging*; we parents need be strong enough to advise our rising youth in how to ford the streams of characters, charlatans and crackpots, rather than interject with a lifeboat or leave them to their own devices, uninformed. But we, as a society, must demand more from our institutions, and give more toward their upkeep and evolution.* We must be better equipped and enabled to offer help beyond our own family units*, if we are able to do so. We need to bridge gaps so that no one is lost in the cracks.

I can honestly say that my children sat and stood with the bullied, fed the hungry. I can say this with pride, but the flipside of pride is shame, and I feel both in equal measure. I have found that society lavishes on, even worships techno-materialism, while not lavishing our children with proper care and proper education, and in no way “brings everyone up” in terms of housing-, healthcare- and food-security.* A great deal of practical knowledge has been removed from education*; this puts many young people at a disadvantage right away. Intimate engagement with issues of environmental degradation is lacking, but I applaud those parents and students who do engage and who advocate and demand that their elders do better, and who mentor and are role models.* (The future depends upon you!) When the institution looks away from the problems, this teaches everyone to look away, to avert eyes, to avoid asking questions or engage civically. This is a way to describe corruption.*

We had a party for a few friends and neighbors, over this weekend. We told them, “It takes a village to raise a child; you’ve been our village.” This is by no means cliché.

There are so many people who have touched our lives and the lives of our children in positive, if not in memorable, ways. We wish we could thank you all! The twins baked cakes for their favorite high school teachers during finals week. Some of the wonderful teachers they’ve had over the years have retired from their elementary and middle schools, but we remember you. Technology will never replace humanness; it cannot teach what it is to be human and humane or empathetic.* Education is not at all about machines and is less about books (although books can be excellent tools) than it is about humans caring enough to pass on human knowledge and humanity by example and by speech and by writing.

Our children have been gone from being Pisces Fish to Otis Owls to Lincoln Lions to Alameda Hornets, and now they Advance to the Next Thing (which is hopefully not Twitter Twits*).

Our institutions are flawed, weak and hamstrung, but we and others have persevered, and we hope all others will persevere, better yet thrive. We need to uphold and improve our institutions for the coming generations; there is so much work to be done, in this regard. The world of appearances, where it is more important to preserve the outward face of the institution than it is to own the realities, redress wrongs and make corrections, needs to be shed.* Schools are political tools; they should not be.* We cannot afford to be swayed by lip service, jerry-rigged statistics and cherry-picked “facts.”* Our children are not gadgets, and we cannot treat them like statistics or like things.* We need to care about and ensure that all people are recognized as unique and valued individuals, and accordingly need to be treated individually in the ways that best address, best resonate, best communicate to their individual needs.* 

“It takes a village to raise a child.” If we cannot care about other people’s children as much as our own, how can it truly be said that we care for our own?* If we truly believe the world is a better place because our children exist, we must be willing to model, teach and uphold goodness, fairness, peace and wellbeing for them and for others, and indeed the whole world, and we must improve and empower all of our institutions to support this at the highest level.*

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** https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/06/09/this-valedictorian-began-to-talk-about-sexual-misconduct-at-her-graduation-then-her-mic-was-cut/?utm_term=.523f34200f8d

"A Terrible Thing To Waste"

Sporadically, over the course of many months, I’ve been helping a friend to clear her late husband’s library and organize his academic work. I brought home a notebook of his from 2004, because I happened to leaf through it and was reminded, by notations found within, of wonderful, deep and sometimes difficult conversations we’d had over the years.

The library is a mirror to the mind of the man, and yet contains only a fraction of what is in the mind. This individual was a “big picture” kind of person – probably one reason we got on so well – and his lifetime of reading and interacting with his books, colleagues and students is an example of a life well lived, a life of mind well and truly explored. I think he chose the academic life because he loved to read. He was always reading, always writing, notating, diagramming, referring, inferring, questioning. The library, the papers, the notebooks are what is left of a magnificent mind. They are also an example of all that is precious that we lose because we can only hold onto so much, as time moves unrelentingly onward.

The books, what will become of them? He would have wanted them to find good homes; we’re working on that. He was constantly purchasing duplicates of books he thought were important; he knew where to send them, though he didn’t always get around to doing so. Hundreds and hundreds of books; a dizzying array. Book-sellers are difficult to find, apparently, for such a highly specialized, while varied, collection. My friend said, “Everyone is going to the internet, to Amazon, they tell me.”

This was of grave concern to her husband: The retention and the sharing of knowledge. The assumption made by people is that everything is digitized. If one can call up on the computer all the records from the past, who needs a book?

Or, for that matter, who needs a printed sheet of paper? Going through this professor’s teaching materials, I have been finding his own typewritten notes and cards, tying one subject to another like a spider web across a world of thought. I’ve also found photocopied pages from innumerable books that have been out of print, some of them, for over well over a hundred years. Am I confident that the materials I have been letting slip through my fingers into the recycle bin are all digitized?

No, I am not in the least confident. I am quite sure that the assumption of digitization is incorrect, and that things are landing in the recycle bin that will never be seen again. The photocopies are from books that may no longer exist as physical artifacts.

This is how generations lose sight of what prior generations thought about and understood, correctly or incorrectly. Someone decides for us what information is of value, and lets something (or even everything) else go. “Oh, that old thing; Oxford published a modern study last year, we don’t need that one from 1925.” These days, people who write papers now find all their supporting references on the internet, and they do not question these sources. (I know this because I proofread and edit such papers for clients all the time.) My old friend, the departed professor, would shake his head in dismay; the only proper way to interact with your subject is to question everything that is written about it and, further, to question your own thinking about it. Do people question their own thinking, these days? I wonder about that, as he did – he felt that most people believe there is an “inevitability” or “fate” to everything in their lives (“It must be God’s will,” for example).

Nothing is inevitable, but a people that harbors such defeatist thinking is a people that can be easily led, lied to and manipulated, just as the digital data in which they put their faith can be manipulated. The digital world, at the touch of a button, can disappear.

Who gets to choose what we keep and what we let go? Are they authorities on the subjects, or administrators with quotas? What are the criteria for retention? Is access to the resulting digital data free, or available only through privatized subscription portals? As I go through someone else’s lifetime of study and thinking and work, I remember the many discussions we had about this very topic, in light of the trends we were seeing.

Ultimately, there is a price to be paid, a freedom that is lost, when we capitulate to the notion that we don’t have to know and we don’t have to think, and that we can find references on the internet to support our beliefs. There is a price to be paid when others tell us what to think and feel about what is happening in the world around us, and we let them do it and follow what they say, without asking questions and doing our own research.

In the case of this collection of papers, I am mainly the one who is choosing, and I there is so much that am reluctantly choosing to let go.

“A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste,” the slogan of the United Negro College Fund for more than 40 years, popped into my head, as I was sifting through file folders and baskets. My friend worked his mind until it could not work anymore; he was a walking encyclopedia of the history of political ideas, civil society, and collectivism. Every page of the notebook I brought home has a note of something just read, followed by notes referring to other books, articles, podcasts or other media that one needed to review (many authored by colleagues, friends or students), in order to gain a more complete picture of the problem, or a wider view of the question. I could draw Venn diagrams from the notations on most of these pages, Spirographs of overlapping themes and disciplines.

I can preserve the man’s papers, but no matter how much I wish that I could, I cannot preserve the man’s mind.

If I cannot preserve someone else’s mind, I can at least tell you a little of what the person said:

“Nothing is inevitable.”

“Question authority and everything that is illogical.”

“In a free society, there can be no double-standards.”

If these thoughts of my friend are all I manage to carry forward in this world, know that they are his legacy, bequeathed to you.

© 2017 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Is There Life Beyond The Jetsons?

The future blurs before us now, blazing a trail we have initiated and will perhaps be unable to halt or even slow. It is also possible we will not be able to follow this trail. If Prometheus has been unbound, what kind of future has been unleashed?

C’era una volta, an individual who embarked upon and completed a university education was considered a person of the world, one who had encountered a sufficient breadth of knowledge and had developed the ability to think broadly and critically. By critical thinking, I mean the ability to embrace life’s questions as an entré to a lifelong journey of discovery, where answers are more likely to be provisional, rather than arrival points. Such an education was meant to encourage independent thinking.

In the twilight of the humanist Enlightenment ideal of the university, we see that the corporate commodification of education has presented as the new ideal (indeed a new product for consumption in a marketplace that vaguely resembles a high-priced flea market) that education must be goal-oriented, the goal being, of course, career preparation. This model university is universal only in that it allows one universal opportunity to sacrifice the mind for an idée fixe, that of entering the job marketplace with a specialized knowledge.

If any trend has made education elitist, this is it. Where for hundreds of years, academia was able to engage with the corporate world without compromising independent thought, now this may no longer be possible. The public has been sold on the corporate advertising myth: education is too expensive to publicly fund. Now we will all have to pay more for education, so that we can learn less and ask fewer questions.

Technology, the primary tool of the captains of industry and finance, has contributed to a state of affairs whereby the average person, rather than being served by technology, is forced to run after it. Technology has not freed the human for contemplation and rest. Technology has become the equal opportunity slaver. Quite simply, if you don’t have it and don’t know how to use it, you are useless and will be left behind. If you don’t have the very latest, you are passé.

There was a time when auto repairs could be done by most everyone, with a few parts and tools. That time has been gone for decades, since the advent of computer components. While people are expected to know how to use computers, for the most part they do not know how computers work, much less how to repair hardware or applications. Where there was had always been craftspeople to repair watches and other items, there are few such people left—they are dying at an alarming rate, and there are no young people willing to learn their arts. There has been a revival in the art of handmade paper and books, but there any people left who do hand engraving? No, but there is a technician who can run a machine that will do a flimsy sort of engraving that has no character or depth. The computer technician can diagnostics on your machine and maybe (though sometimes not) solve your difficulty, although you will not learn what the problem was or how it might be avoided or remedied should it occur again.

With technology has come the expectation that humans can and will perform work at greater speeds, and for longer periods of time. People have been trained to answer their calls, rather than allow the automatic features to take messages for them. People have been trained to work through lunch and dinner and vacations. Business, because it has been globalized, is transacted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In short, people have been and are being trained to live for work, not work to live.

There must be a breaking point. Where will it show itself? Probably the fruits of this will be marked by increased illness and individual dysfunction and inability to cope, but also in greater division and divisiveness among individuals and societies.

A computer can make millions of computations per minute, but it does not have life independent of the user. A computer is capable of diagnostic functions, but not of self-examination. The liberal arts university education promoted free thought that was directional outward, but also intended the ability for self-reflection. The blur of a future blazing beyond the Jetsons seems poised to obliterate independent thought, as well inwardly directed contemplation.

There is a remedy for this dilemma: we must remember that computers and other electronic devices do not live. We can turn them off. We must remember that the human mind is capable of self-reflection and abstract, expansive, outwardly directed thought. We must remember that thought does not cost money; our thoughts cannot be owned by anyone. We must remember that our minds are worth more than technology, and our thoughts will outlive the relevance of technology. The computer stops when it is turned off, but the mind at rest is still alive, awake, and at work during sleep, even if that work is only apparent as a dream.

Further, education never need end at a degree. Too many people stop reading and thinking, once the degree is in hand. A degree is not the key to your potential, not the key to your mind nor, these days, necessarily the key to a career.  

When the years of formal education end, the lifetime of informal education begins. A public library card is your free ticket to lifelong journey of learning, free association of ideas and free thinking. 

Take time, each day, to turn off all your machinery. Then, turn on your mind.

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