Note by SIG: I belong to the last generation of clever young men who were able to receive a proper university education. Three years at York remade me. They lifted me straight out of the working class. They reinforced some inclinations and stifled others. I don’t believe what I was given can be had on-line. Sadly, the universities are no longer what they were even three decades ago. They have placed the acquisition of marketable skills above education in the wider sense. Even with my considerable abilities as a teacher, I doubt my students get much from the three hour lectures I am supposed to give them. The modern ideal is to cram as many students as possible into lectures that run from nine to five. Free time is regarded as time wasted. Free discussion is checked by intrusive speech codes that make it hard to discuss even matters like the environment and the European Union. This being so, on-line education may be an inferior substitute to what I had, but may also be an improvement on what we now have. SIG
Time to Jailbreak Online Education
Dan Friedman (โThe MOOC Revolution That Wasnโt,โ TechCrunch, September 11), expresses no little disappointment over the way online college courses measure up to initial hopes over the past few years. In terms of course completion and even viewing entire lectures, he says, โthat revolution fizzled.โ But it fizzled for good reason. The predominant online course model has yet to address whose needs it is intended to serve.
Thereโs a strong parallel between online education and the controversy over Uber and Lyft versus medallion cabs. The controversial ride-sharing services offer some cost competition to the old licensed taxi services. But theyโre only a modest step in the right direction; they still embody the same proprietary, monopolistic characteristics as the old model theyโre competing against. Theyโre still controlled by corporate headquarters outside the cities they serve and, thanks to patented apps, skim tribute off the drivers and customer who operate within their walled gardens. The next step is to jailbreak Uber and Lyft themselves with cooperative and open-source ride-sharing services.
Online learning, whether for profit or not, is a marginal improvement over traditional universities. But like Uber and Lyft, itโs still stuck between two worlds, modeled on the legacy higher education system rather than emerging as the real networked, open-source thing we need to build.
Coursera coordinates its course materials with โpartner institutionsโ (brick and mortar universities) as part of a more-or-less traditional curriculum. Udacity tailors its offerings to skills demanded by the โtech industryโ (that is, corporate HR departments). The big online course providers are firmly rooted in the post-WWII corporatist partnership between big business employers, the higher education establishment and the state, with the central goal of processing human resources to fit the needs of corporate employers in terms of both work skills and work attitudes. By processing millions of people to supply the labor demands of Fortune 500 companies, the higher education system simultaneously inflates the credentialing levels (and debt peonage) required to get work, overproduces the forms of vocational-technical labor most in need and thereby drives down the price, leaving those who learn such skills with minimal bargaining power versus large corporate employers.
Genuine free education needs to stop pouring new wine into old bottles, whether it be designing free course materials to fit the conventional university degree model, or designing curricula to fit the needs of corporate employers. Corporate employers with Human Resources departments are part of a dying economy. Some of them may struggle on for decades, as an increasingly bankrupt and hollowed out state still manages to provide them with sufficient subsidies and regulatory protection to survive. But they are obsolete and waiting to die, and will encompass less and less of the total economy as time goes on.
The future of labor is self-employment, cooperative work arrangements in small shops (e.g., garage micro-factories, hackerspaces and makerspaces and Permaculture operations), peer-production of information, and project-based work. And in the kinds of project-based work where skills and other human capital are the main source of value addition and physical tools are affordable โ a growing part of the economy โ existing precarious workers are likely to create new cooperative versions of existing capitalist temp agencies, or freelance unions and guilds that provide insurance, certify skills and negotiate with employers.
We need a new model of education based on voluntary, ad hoc, stackable credentialing outside the state accreditation system, driven by the needs of the small cooperative shops and networked workers who will dominate the new economy.
And of course where online course materials are proprietary, the open-source education folks need to start hacking the Digital Rights Management on their videos and textbooks.
What we have now is a dying university system, created by a dying state to serve the labor needs of a dying corporate economy. Let the dead bury their dead.
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Sean,
Yes, education keeps changing and mostly for the worse.
One problem in the US is that even the “private” universities are mostly driven by state funding.
They don’t get it directly, like most of the “public” universities do (N.B. — I seem to recall that in the UK, “public” and “private” mean something different with regard to schools; in the US a “public” school of any level up to and including university, is a school operated by the state).
But a US student going to a “private” university is, in most cases, subsidized by the state through things like Pell grants (“free money from the government”), state-subsidized and state-guaranteed student loans, the GI Bill (money for military veterans to go to school), etc.
And that money comes with strings attached. It has to be spent at schools accredited by state-approved agencies and on degree programs approved by the grantors/loan guarantors.
So to an extreme degree, the “private” college/universities function along the same lines as the “public” ones because if they don’t do so they and their students are ineligible for that money.
My personal view is that things on the “education for employment” end are changing and that one of the main causes, as with so many changes over the last couple of decades is that the technological requirements of industry large and small are changing faster than those state-approved schools and programs can keep up with.
I know people who dropped out of university “computer science” programs, studied and got their industry-specific certifications (e.g. Microsoft Certified Network Engineer) and were off and running while their university classmates were still messing around passing courses in already obsolete computer stuff, graduating with degrees … and being unemployable until they went and got those industry certifications.
So I think that Kevin is seeing things correctly when he predicts a future of “ad hoc, stackable credentialing outside the state accreditation system.”
As far as the kind of education you’re lamenting the passing of, things don’t seem to be as bright there. These days when one refers to a “liberal arts” degree in the US, that just means that the field of study wasn’t scientific or technical. A “liberal arts” education USED to mean the kind of university experience you’re talking about.
The universities did a good job when they were frankly elitist organisations with stiff entry requirements. When I was there, for example, York had only 3,000 students. Even I could know everyone by face, and I knew perhaps a quarter of the student body by name. Sex was something that some people did, but anyone who let it get in the way of academic work was seen as a fool. As for the academic work, attendance at lectures was voluntary, and most study was alone in the library or by informal discussion.
Nowadays, I think, York has 15,000 students, and remains one of the smaller universities. In general, a university education has become a combination of mind-rotting toil and sex and drugs and drink. The space vacated by political discussion has been filled by radical Islam – not that I’d knock my Moslem students: at least they do the work and appreciate my efforts. Oh, and lecturers are increasingly expected to spy on their students, to see if they are plotting to blow themselves up somewhere, or are too vocal in their disagreement with some part of the hegemonic ideology.
The only thing to do with the university system as it has now become is to cut off all state funding. On-line courses are an inferior substitute for what I had, but are better than what everyone else now gets.
Sean,
Yes, “frank elitism” produced some interesting and positive academic results and what has replaced it is not always good.
I’ve always thought it a shame that the yelling over Murray/Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve concentrated on its claims about race and IQ rather than on its general theme of the effects of “cognitive sorting” in which formerly elitist institutions decided to open up, pulled all the smart people out of their poor neighborhoods, sent them to college and then they never went back “home,” leaving those neighborhoods poorer not just economically but in other, just as important ways.
And now they’ve basically turned universities into skilled trades training assembly lines. Not that we don’t need training for skilled trades, but universities used to produce THINKERS as well.
Thomas – I see your point. Indeed, since I believe that IQ is largely hereditary, the cognitive sorting of the mid-20th century in both England and America has increased average stupidity at the bottom and increased the demand for skilled and semi-skilled immigrant labour beyond what it might otherwise have been. However, I’d rather be me than the electrician that I’d have become without a university education.
I have to admit here to being quite profoundly emotionally opposed to the formal education system, partly because I really despise the bourgeoisie (or “middle class”) at an emotional level and the Universities are basically their madrassas. If I were doing the art for the Libertarian revolution, rather than the Nazis’ Aryans or the Soviets’ industrial and agricultural workers, my heroic figures would be various depictions of Essex Man, the proudly working class petty capitalist who is largely immune to the values of the middle class. He would be standing next to his white van with his chiselled profile staring off into the distance heroically, clutching a pint and a ciggie, with his fake-tanned WAG standing next to him, in front of the tastelessly decorated home they purchased on the proceeds of the business he built from scratch. And neither of them would have a degree in anything.
Formal tertiary education largely developed as a justification for the power of the ruling class. The primary virtue of it in older times was that it taught things that were useless rather than dangerous; Home In The Original Greek was no use whatsoever other than as a means for the ruling class to show off to each other, but there were not very many of them and most of them could be found wandering around the Colonies in pith helmets and doing no great harm[1], whereas millions spewing from the campuses with heads full of social justice codswallop is a cultural tragedy.
But that comes down to my belief that the genius of the West lies neither in the Judaeo-Christian nor the Greco-Roman cultural overlays that the bourgeoisie always go on about and which are the business of the universities, but in the native vulgar culture. So far as I know, I’m the only person who believes this.
[1] Unless you were a native, I suppose.
Peasant!
And proud!
>:)
ฮแฝฮบ แผฯโ แผฯฯแฟณ ฮผฯฮฝแฟณ ฮถฮฎฯฮตฯฮฑฮน แฝ แผฮฝฮธฯฯฯฮฟฯ, แผฮปฮปโ แผฯแฝถ ฯฮฑฮฝฯแฝถ แฟฅฮฎฮผฮฑฯฮน แผฮบฯฮฟฯฮตฯ ฮฟฮผฮญฮฝแฟณ ฮดฮนแฝฐ ฯฯฯฮผฮฑฯฮฟฯ ฮฮตฮฟแฟฆ.
I’ll have a doner with the garlic sauce, and a portion of chips please.
I find your lack of faith disturbing
Sean,
Murray/Herrnstein’s point, as I understood it was this:
You have a poor neighborhood. Into that neighborhood is born a smart kid. As long as the universities remained elitist, that smart kid was likely to stay in his neighborhood and make it a better place.
Sure, he wouldn’t end up being a nuclear physicist or a professor of literature or whatever, but he would probably do better than the average guy in his neighborhood. He’d end up opening a market or going into a skilled trade where he made enough money that he spent around home to increase everyone’s standard of living.
Instead, he goes off to Harvard, never comes back, and the poor neighborhood is poorer than ever.
Of course, Murray/Herrnstein also made the controversial claim of correlation between race and IQ, the latter of which stood in for “cognitive ability.” And due to that correlation, they came up with the “cognitive sorting” phenomenon being especially damaging to poor BLACK neighborhoods in particular.
Thomas – The problem with modern higher education is not the cognitive sorting, which I regard as a good thing, but:
1. In the short term, the collapse of standards at the top; 2. In the longer term, the restoration of standards at the top, but without the ladder for people like me.
Sean,
I don’t think Murray/Herrnstein’s point was that “cognitive sorting” is necessarily a bad thing, but that it does have negative unintended consequences in the way it changes the distribution of cognitive ability in society.
I’m not entirely with them. It’s been damn near 20 years since I read The Bell Curve, but my recollection is that I disagreed with some of their findings on race (in the way they handled the data to get the results they claim they got) and with their prescription for dealing with the consequences of “cognitive sorting” (they advocated an “improved” welfare state; my impression is that Murray still does, while Herrnstein died before the book was published).
The normal Kevin (and Sean) obsession with “corporate employment” which (at least in Kevin’s case) is a Rousseau like hatred of private employment in general. In reality American companies are among the most over taxed and over regulated in the Western world (this was not always true – but it is now) and this is a BAD thing not a GOOD thing.
As for universities – yes indeed they are corporate (a college is a body corporate). Were fully independent scholars and going to study with them (paying them directly) better? In some ways yes, in some ways no. But in the 13th century (the 1200s) there was a move to corporate (a college) system.
Is the government subsidy of universities (via government backed “student loans” and so on) a bad thing? Clearly it is a bad thing – it has led (as with the subsidy of medical treatment by Medicare and Medicaid – and so on) to an explosion of costs (student tuition costs).
Also it gives the government a foot-in-the-door – so they can demand all sorts of PC stuff (race, sex – whatever). Hillsdale (to give an example) found it could only maintain real (as opposed to nominal) independence by not allowing any student (not even one) who got a government backed loan to study there.
I think the thing here though is that the Universities are not pushed into PC by government. Quite the opposite; as in the USA, they are madrassas for its promulgation.
This in my view is one of the primary reasons for the current obsession with pushing everyone through university. It is to indoctrinate them with “acceptable” values. We must remember that academics invented PC, in their nests of vileness within the tertiary education system. Universities are their power base and heartland.
“I think the thing here though is that the Universities are not pushed into PC by government. Quite the opposite”
Actually it goes both ways.
“We must remember that academics invented PC”
Not really.
It does work both ways – some universities are anti P.C. (such as Hillsdale) but they are as hated by the mainstream of academics and university administrators as they are by government (perhaps more so). Hence the Orwellian named academic freedom campaign tending to hit Hillsdale more than other places. The idea goes back all the way to Richard Ely a century or more ago – who thought that “academic freedom” sounded a lot better in PR terms than “I want all universities to teach my political view of the world – and to utterly crush any university that teaches an opposed view of the world”, by the way Richard Ely and his Progressive followers were not exactly friends of business, and neither are the politicians and media people who have followed their education. The main target of Progressives like Ely – were people such as Jane Stanford (of Stanford University) who objected to academics teaching collectivism (including a rather nasty form of racial collectivism – aimed at wiping out asians) in the university her family funded. Ely rushed to the defence of “academic freedom” as long as the academics in question were teaching stuff he agreed with (as part of his desire to make all universities the freaking same).
The old American Progressive movement was a lot closer to the classic Hegelian form of German statism (either by studying in Germany itself – or by going to Johns Hopkins or the University of Wisconsin or…) than they were Marxist (Marxism was not important in American universities till much more recently). The ideas of Hegel (and Herder and List) were far more important (in the old days) than the ideas of Karl Marx.
This did not stop them (the mainstream Progressives) wanting to replace Germany – taking up a (form of) the ideas of the intellectual class of a place does not mean you have any sincere affection for that place (or the ordinary people of it). Indeed Richard Ely (like Woodrow Wilson) was vicious in his attacks on anyone who showed sympathy for flesh-and-blood German Americans during the First World War (even the Progressive Governor of Wisconsin got it from Ely – who wanted him imprisoned).
On P.C. – well it was invented by the Frankfurt School of Marxism (a lot of whom ended up either in New York or California), most of them were academics but a some of them were more independent writers and activists.
“On P.C. โ well it was invented by the Frankfurt School of Marxism”
A lot of bad things can be traced back to the Frankfurt School.
PC isn’t one of them.
Thomas – you are wrong.
“Political Correctness” arose in the 1930s among party socialists, not academics. It was a mocking/derisive term applied to Communist Party “Moscow line-toers.”
It came back in the 60s among American leftist students to describe the same sort of phenomenon among the left parties.
It had absolutely, positively nothing whatsoever to do with the Frankfurt School.
When it came back into use in the late 1990s on the RIGHT, it was used to DESCRIBE academic behavior INFLUENCED by the Frankfurt School, but that’s a different thing entirely.
You don’t have to like these facts. The fun thing about facts is that they remain facts whether you like them or not.
Thomas, we are using the term as it is used now, so we’re not interested in its historical origins; just as in America one must these days be aware that “liberal” means a PC social democrat, not what “liberal” meant historically.
It is like mincemeat. Mincemeat these days is a mixture of fruity stuff. It originally meant minced meat. But if I order mincemeat today, I expect the fruity stuff, not a pound of minced beef because that is what it meant in 1500.
The actual etymology of Political Correctness is somewhat disputed anyway. It didn’t have a formal widespread definition until it came into common usage to describe what others call cultural marxism. The point is, it now defines an identifiable cultural and political phenomenon and identifiable suite of beliefs and policies, and we can usefully use it to mean that, regardless of what it might or might not have meant in 1935, if it meant anything at all then.
“The point is, it now defines an identifiable cultural and political phenomenon and identifiable suite of beliefs and policies”
If so, I wish someone would, um, identify those things.
Right now, the primary usage of PC is “I am a conservative and you just disagreed with me.”
Not so; some parts of PC are agreed with by many conservatives, particularly the sexually puritan parts about suppressing pornography, prostitution, etc. Most anti-sex conservatives now use PC terminology regarding objectification, exploitation,etc. There is obviously on the other hand disagreement about homosexuality. PC is more accurately anti-libertarian than anti-conservative in tone.
But I think you are being disingenuous again Thomas, because you know full well what the term means and applies to.
Ian, at this point the only thing that I’m pretty sure I know full well is that you seem to have no idea whatsoever what “PC” refers to — at least in America. Perhaps there’s a trans-Atlantic disconnect in definition.
Well, we actually have two terms; “Political Correctness” refers to an analysis of society predicated on a Gramscian analysis of class struggles between variously defined groups, in which one group is declared hegemonic and the other (or others) as victim groups, particularly applied to race, sex and sexuality, and also disability.
The other is “Political Correctness Gone Mad”, which is a catch-all term for any policy based on the above which seems particularly absurd; for instance the (probably apocryphal) policy of local councils changing the colour of rubbish sacks from black to other colours to avoid causing racial offence.
Paul-
My point is that without the academy to promote it, Cultural Marxism would not be any more than some vile rantings in forgotten essays and books. The universities were the ones who made it mainstream and turned it into the force we see today.
OK, then. In common usage in the US, “political correctness” means nothing of the sort. It’s pretty much just a catch phrase for “I’m a conservative who just said something really stupid; now I’m going to shift the blame for it to those who are offended by it.”
Yes, cultural marxists over here use “conservative” as a perjorative, too.
I wasn’t using it as a pejorative. I was simply stating that conservatives are the ones who use the term here in the US, and they use it to shift blame when they say stupid things, e.g. “Todd Akin’s ‘legitimate rape’ comment was really stupid.” “Oh, lighten up. You’re just being politically correct.” When a “liberal” says something stupid and a conservative is offended, the “liberal” will usually turn to the actual Frankfurt School/CT/pomo lexicon for condemnatory terms.
Yes, the Left do that here too, where they deliberately misunderstand or misinterpret a statement in order to feign outrage and score political points. It is very commonplace tactic of the politically correct mobs, although it is not specifically PC, in that it is a common tactic of dishonest people generally.
Left and right both do it, pretty much everywhere.
I probably tend to take Frankfurt School/CT attributions over-seriously. I’m appalled whenever I see infiltration of e.g. “privilege theory” and such at C4SS. As a paleo-left libertarian, I naturally oppose both of the first two major right deviations from leftist originalism (aka libertarian class theory). The first such major rightward deviation, of course, was Marxism. The second was Frankfurt School critical theory. The third was probably Stalin’s adoption of nationalism (“socialism in one state” and so forth), which pretty much completed the intersection of the mainstream left and right (I’m sure if there’s a hell, Uncle Joe is gazing up from it with approval on British cultural Marxists like Sean bellyaching about “mass migration”).
Thomas – I’m currently too busy with other things to be so easily trolled.
It was worth a try ๐
Next week
Yes you are correct Ian.
Although business people are also to blame – even back in the Progressive Era the university types stated their mission was to make young men (few women in those days) as “unlike their fathers as possible”, but the fathers (businessmen) fell over themselves to give money to people who privately DESPISED them (and taught their sons to despise them).
Cultural cringe – and a witchdoctor type faith in the academics (those followers of Plato long before they were followers of Karl Marx).
Not always, but often academic intellectualism is snobbery – and a sneering assumption that anyone who has built up a business must be a crook.
Thomas – as you know perfectly well…..
When people today (not in the 1930s) talk about “political correctness” (P.C.) we mean using race or sex (or whatever) as a weapon in Marxist identity politics.
The Frankfurt School (which in America became the Columbia University crowd of the new School for Social Research, and the California crowd as well) held that the German working class had failed Marxism – so new victim groups had to be found to be used as fodder for the cause. Race, sex, sexual orientation (whatever).
When people today (not in the 1930s) talk of “PC” they do not mean keeping to the strict Moscow line – they mean the Frankfurt School stuff (the race, gender, sexual orientation, whatever…..) stuff.
You knew all this before I typed a word – and have just got me to waste several minutes of my life.
So what you’re saying is that 130 years after the Frankfurt School, rightists expropriated a term to describe the Frankfurt School.
But what you were saying before is that that term and/or its meaning originated with the Frankfurt School.
You were wrong. And you know you were wrong. And now I’m going to go back to not trying to teach the pig to sing.
Thomas, stop doing this nonsense. It is quite clear from Paul’s original comment that he was not refering to the term “PC” but the political phenomenon which we now call PC.
Rubens invented Rubenesque painting, but he did not invent the term Rubenesque. Come on, it’s not hard to grasp. There are more fruitful things we could all be wasting our time arguing about.
Paul-
Unfortunately, far too many businessmen were historically “shamed” into feeling they should donate to organisations and causes who despised them. A lot of successful enterpreneurs with a genuine philanthropic impulse were tricked into digging the grave of the free market.
Thomas – you know what I said was true, but (like so often) you choose to write a load of nonsense.
Ian – YES.
One thing I should have mentioned is that there is a third position on universities. Have the academics paid (or not paid) directly by the students – but still within a university structure. Adam Smith argued that the system in most Scots universities (where students paid, or did not pay, lecturers for their lectures) was better than the Oxford system where academics paid whether students turned up or not.