Cents and Sensibility

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The cliche is that we live in a time of rapid technological change; in fact, technological inertia is just as important. Textbooks are a prime example. A writing class, for example, can be effectively taught using only the Purdue Online Writing Lab and the Internet. That’s been true for at least five years or more, if not a decade. Yet the textbook industry plods along, almost unchanged.

There are also open source online writing textbooks available, such as “Writing Spaces.” There is no shortage of open source tools of every kind, from word processing to websites. Given the rise in college costs over the last decade, and the (perhaps overstated) death of the printed book, you would think that there would be a tidal wave of schools dropping textbooks. Not so.

It’s not surprising either, given the complex web of self-interest and money that is woven so deeply into the university textbook system. Still, Washington State University seems to have scored a victory for common sense– and the cost of college– by dropping textbooks altogether in favor of what they are calling The Open Course Library. The future is coming along, slowly but surely.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Professional

The Education of an Assassin

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We are in for a long season of bipartisan nonsense. There’s always plenty of crazy people in the world, and some of them have guns, and over the course of modern history crazy people have used violence for every reason imaginable. At this point in history, though, the people who advocate violence in the United States, however indirectly and hypocritically, are religious conservatives. The assassination of Congresswomen Giffords is no different.

It’s not a new problem, no matter what the apologists say. It wasn’t a liberal who published a map with gun sights superimposed over congressional districts; it was a member of the Tea Party who called for “second amendment remedies.” The last wave of conservative violence targeted family planning clinics and doctors. This new violence, though, recalls the militias of the 1990s, focused on the federal government. That wave climaxed with McVeigh‘s bombing.

If you want to find left-leaning paranoid nuts, it’s not hard; do a search on the Kennedy assassination or on the events of 9-11. If you want to find right-leaning nuts, look at Congress. That difference matters; the periphery has become the center. The new speaker of the house, Baener, refused to directly confront the birthers, even when they disrupted his political theater. He cavalierly dismisses the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the cost of the repeal of health care.

Congressman Issa calls Obama, “the most corrupt president in history.” There are no “death panels”: there has not been a “government takeover” of anything; the list of these alarmist fabrications is almost endless. We don’t need a “toned down” rhetoric; we need a sharpened rhetoric that is capable of identifying and squashing paranoid conservative nonsense before it grows into violence. We need to hold the Pallins and Becks’ accountable. We need to control the guns.

Posted in: Writing

Constructing Class

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Americans like to believe that we are the most mobile society– upward, we hope– in the world. In fact, we have a real problem with mobility in part becuase wages are so stagnant, unions have lost power, and higher education is so expensive. Add to that the pervasive anti-intellectualism of the culture in general and the right in particular and you have a recipe for an caste system.

I think one of the measures of the rigidity of existing caste system is the difficulty we have both in admitting the existence of poverty– the lowest caste are the “invisibles” as much as the “untouchables“– and in understanding the difficulties faced by people making the transition from one caste to the other. That’s what makes, “A New Model Community College,” so fascinating.

The articles describes the Ivy Bridge College, a partnership between a for-profit school, Altius Education, and Tiffin University, a private college. The program tries to address one of the dirty little secrets of U.S. education. As the article puts it, “the national average three-year graduation rate for community colleges is about 25 percent. ” Three quarters don’t make it, in other words.

As Diane Ravitch (among many others) puts it, the real problem in education is poverty. Her point is relevant to higher education as well as public schools. The accumulation of social and cultural capital needed for college takes time and energy; if you don’t begin early, it can be difficult to make it up quickly later. It seems like a simple, common sense idea.

Posted in: Economics, Professional