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.

//

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

Big Money Peddling Mediocrity: Arts in the 21st Century

Today, a friend alerted me to an article in the Huffington Post, which is now a puppet of AOL, entitled, "What Is Wrong With The Arts?" I read it and chuckled to myself. The author, Michael Kaiser (who is the President of the Kennedy Center), laments that there is just not enough inventiveness in the serious arts scene. There is more inventiveness, he says, in popular culture.

I say: We get what we pay for. Period.

We are not paying for inventiveness--that is one of the primary reasons that we are left with what people will broadcast on YouTube, for free. Jaron Lanier said as much in his searing manifesto, "You Are Not A Gadget." Lanier's slant on this is that the Internet has not produced jobs for artists. He is correct. Those of us who live in and for the arts are all freelancers, these days--with an unsought emphasis on free. We, the artistically inclined, all pay a higher price for living our lives for the individual stake we hold in the arts.

The larger performing arts concerns are not taking risks, in these low flying days of staving off bankruptcy. Boards and investors are more interested in running a business than perpetuating culture.  Philanthropists are dying off at an alarming rate, and they are not being replaced by the next generation. The universities in the United States and Britain are being turned into corporate money machines that soon will no longer offer liberal arts, of any sort. Fancy that.

The big money concerns in music and film keep as busy as possible with rehashes and remakes. This is less true for dance, but not by much. And even less so for fine arts, where artists have always been starving. But, big money hammers us with sameness, festooned with special effects, or "reality" programming that is not any sort of art at all. Cute animal shows, idiotic home videos, pack-rats, and the like, with hosts that vapidly react to the subject matter they are paid to peddle. The message is loud and clear: we don't like deep art; deep art doesn't sell.

Someone on the inside, like Kaiser, knows only too well how all this works. He worries, in his article, that his facile comments will anger the arts community (does he mean artists or boards of arts organizations?), but artists aren't the people to whom his message needs to be broadcast--and he should know better. Have some backbone, man! You are blaming the wrong people. Look to the suits that hold the purse strings, not the poor artists, who would dearly love the opportunity (and funding) for their own work (to which you won't give the time of day) to find a wider audience. If you want an artistic renaissance, you must become a patron ($$$$!) to the arts, and look for art where it is happening, not within your boardroom. If you want to promote culture, you need to stop thinking like a business.

Small groups and individuals are doing what they always have done: keeping the flame of creativity and excellence alive, even while going in the red. Small groups and individuals are the risk-takers in the arts; they have nothing to lose.

As I said in a previous entry, if you want to free the arts to be inventive, deep, ground-breaking and engaging, you need to PAY! If you pay only for the same-old-same-old, that is your problem, and we the ticket buying public are sure to get bored. Bored, bored, bored. What a surprise! So, we will go home and strike up our garage band, because we know we can do better.

The geniuses are all peddling their wares in the streets. Soon, that is where all true art will reside. More's the pity.

//

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kaiser/what-is-wrong-with-the-ar_b_822757.html

Renewal

Can we wash away the darkness
of our long winter’s night?

Fitful sleep cannot shut out
the sounds of blowing wind
and flowing water.

These dream-works quicken clarity
toward an apprehension
that serenity is close at hand.

Dawn must give birth to new day;
new life will be revealed in its light.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Dedication

Water in a glass,
no mean libation,
but a broken music
out of your sight,
though fluid evidence
of an equal love.

Between now
and any next moment,
I breathe a sigh
into the pool of being,
searching for address
and for blessing.

As a chant,
as a song of my soul,
Love and Gratitude
well up and out,
quenching the waters.

Thus and simply charged,
I raise this glass,
our small cup of life,
a dedication.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Increasing Facelessness in the Facebook Generation

More and more of our customer service needs are being addressed by circuitous automated phone message jungles or internet queries that can either be in the form of live texting or email exchange. We hear that soon there will be no actual people collecting tolls on toll bridges. There are fewer and fewer local offices where one can pay local utility bills. Many cities and towns no longer have a local department for the handing of fees for fines or citations; these are being funneled to distant addresses.

What does this mean?

In “the age of connectedness and connectivity” we are losing contact with actual people. This does indicate that machines are doing more of our work for us. This also indicates that there are less jobs available to be filled by the living and breathing. But, more importantly, there is less human interaction now, and what we have of that becomes more and more fractured and lacking in the personal and personalities that make life interesting. 


Finding simple information becomes a frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare, in which one must repeat the same question over and over again to different people who answer the phone, or in which one loops through the automated message system, only to get dumped out at the other end, without ever finding the option that meets the need. Clearly, the world of the Frequently Asked & Answered Questions is a limited world of shallow concerns, the very least that providers are willing to be responsible for; any concerns beyond the FAQ, no matter how real, clearly is beyond the average human ability to solve, and therefore must remain unaddressed—for to address the concern not covered by FAQ means taking responsibility for having knowledge pertaining to unique situations. In a self-help, self-service world, nothing is unique, many real flaws and problems are not acknowledged, and we are expected to live our own lives and solve our own problems, whether help is available or not, whether we can pay for it or not.

The scripts for orderly human communication have been thrown away and they are not being replaced. The internet revolution is training us all to scream into the vastness of the universe, without expected to be answered or even heard. Eventually, no one will ask questions, because they will know it to be a colossal waste of time. Or, question asking will become the newest reality TV, where we all be voyeurs while some human becomes inhuman because s/he has been shut away from real human interaction. If such a thing ever comes to pass, will we laugh? Will we cry? What will we do?

The fabric of society has been unraveling for some little time, now, and the yarn is now bunched up in a gigantic, un-biodegradable heap. Institutions and departments and offices and businesses talk past each other, if they talk at all, developing irrational territorial practices that do not fit together, and passing blame when things, systems and people do not work or work well. We call these instances “cognitive dissonance” and we call them “dysfunctional” and we call them “disorganization”, but whatever we call it, and however much we roll our eyes and complain, here we are: it is upon us and we have to live with them all and their inevitable, frequently insoluable, consequences.

Recently, while dining at a restaurant with my family, I witnessed another family and child dining in an atmosphere devoid of interaction. [I have seen it before, and I know I’ll be seeing more of it.] After ordering the meal, each parent completely ignored the child, being entirely engrossed in something displayed on individual smart phones. When the food came, I felt sure that the gizmos would be put away, but I was wrong. The parents silently shoveled the food into their mouths while staring at, and interacting with, the screens of their phones. The child was left to play with her food, humming to herself.

I wondered to myself how children are supposed to learn conversation and etiquette, or indeed any methods of social give-and-take, when their parents, if they possess the knowledge of these things, do not pass the legacy on.

Our “smart phones”, I propose, are making us all “dumb people.” We “connect” only on the basis of the most shallow aspects of vox populi. We answer the rings of our phones while dining out, even though the technology is designed to collect messages for us. We react and overreact to text messaging, because it doesn’t carry the nuance of voice or enough depth to provide context or meaning.

We have technology, but we do not have to understand it. We believe that owning and using it gives us status and power. In reality, technology has made us slaves to aspects of human existence that do not promote beauty, culture, meaning or understanding, but that offer instead frustration, ubiquity and anonymity.

Orwell’s “Big Brother” was a single face of totalitarianism; our modern computer technology is a bit more frightening, in that it offers us whatever face we want to see, so long as we don’t expect it to speak to us, teach us, inspire us or help us to cope with an increasingly dysfunctional existence. Our gizmos draw us into complete and utter self-absorption and they suck our brains into an oblivion every bit as devastating as drug addiction.

If we become aware that we need an intervention, to be freed from the addiction, there is no one to call for help, there are no responsible parties, there is no liability, and we laugh it off, saying “no harm, no foul”.  But it is foul, and we are being harmed in ways we cannot begin to understand.

This, as I see it,  is the great existential crisis of the current generation.

At Storm Eye

Whirling winds, like loud voices,

writhe in circular emotions;

seemingly at war with one another,

they call and draw forth clouds
from far off lakes and oceans.

Rushing waves, ringing, raging,

roar in circular courses,

overtaking what lies in the way,

from here to the far horizon,
flooding with its forces.

Sacred storm blows and flows, 

driving madness round about the way,

but your wave and mine can meet;

joining within the calm storm eye may,

challenge violence to stand down.

Joining hands in friendship,

once rogue waves form a unity;
together stronger than any storm,
our choice forms a harmonious purity

that must drive stormy madness away.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Weed Patch

Fall seeds brought color to a waning year;
rains helped greenery linger through Winter;
Spring now shines on a tangled flourish of weeds.

Taller and more robust, seem they,
than all the truer plants,
as if to boldly take over the world.

Truth is, they have served the sweeter plants,
as a cover to hold in the nourishing water,
a canopy against any exceptional heat from the sun.

Pulled at the roots, they soon shall be,
to dry in the sun and be turned to mulch,
while the flowers drink water and light.

For weeds,
life is short,
but full.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen