Roy Buchanan & Albert Collins – Further On Down The Road
Competition and Education
Competition is one of those magical thinking words that economic conservatives evoke whenever they don’t have a solution to a problem. In education, this little bit of alchemical cognition brought us the idea of the charter school as the solution to class inequity– oh, wait, I meant “the poorly performing public schools.” I think, though, that in a narrow sense the proprietary education industry could really benefit from increased competition– within regulatory limits.
The first limit– and it should be a limit that applies to all higher education– is a cap on student debt. (Here’s an NPR piece on the clearly misguided efforts to stop this reform.) Commercial media, as well as NPR, makes this problem seem unique to proprietary education but in fact this has been a social blight for at least twenty years. I doubt that the legislation will go as far as I would like it to go, but at the very least we should accept the principle. We can make it tougher next.
I think the proprietary education industry has fooled itself into believing that it needs the current student loan system to survive. We do need the moral credibility– crucial in education– that supporting the limit would provide. I have a feeling, though, that the industry won’t wake up until it faces real competition in the form of large-scale non-profit online education. We see ourselves as the hare, but as a piece from Philadelphia suggests, the turtle is moving steadily and slowly forward ($500K grant marked for cyber learning in Beaver, Allegheny counties).
The Opposite of Liberal
The Conservative complaint about liberal bias in everything from the media to academia is so long standing it borders on empty cliche. A new study, however, deeply rooted in the ironic enterprise of looking for bias in a biased fashion, has found yet another liberal bastion: the relatively new custom of having all freshman read the same book as a part of orientation (“What Freshman Will Read” The original study summarized in the article is here).
Some of the conclusions of the study are silly. They complain that there are too few classics and the classics used, Huckleberry Finn and The Communist Manifesto among them, are not substantive. I think both Marx and Twain, opposites if there ever were opposites, must be rolling in their graves. Even sillier, the authors don’t seem to realize that many of these programs are coupled with visiting lectures by the authors.
Schools use contemporary books becuase it is so much harder to get dead people to come for to campus. What always fascinates me, though, is the way these sorts of studies try to create a kind of black and white, liberal and conservative, picture of the intellectual world. Twain deals with race; that’s a liberal book. Approaching the Q’uran isn’t critical enough about fundamentalist religious violence; that’s a liberal book as well.
Every book is liberal and conservative in different and often contradictory ways; it might make sense to talk about liberal or conservative readings that seem to dominate different campuses or classes, but that would be complicated and unlikely to produce headlines for the conservative media the study is designed to feed. Even more interesting is the complaint about too many books on racism and too many on multiculturalism.
We need more white supremacy and mono-culturalism, apparently. It’s not easy defining the opposite of liberalism. The study complains about books on Africa; that bias can only be corrected by books on Europe. It complains about too many books on global warming, which it apparently sees as a more of a liberal issue than a scientific fact or set of facts. I can’t help but wonder if they would also complain about evolution, if that were a reading trend one year…
Louisiana Red: Live at the N9 Club