Watch that Goose

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I think that proprietary online education universities ought to see their histories, up this point, in terms of market building. It’s often a brutal process, particularly in a political climate in which regulation, indeed all government intervention in the market, is so suspect. Capitalism, especially under the sway of free market ideologies, preys on the vulnerable.  The existing system, then, owes a certain debt to the people who suffered through the years of creative destruction. I think its past time that we invest in our own reputations if not pay reparations.

It’s an optimistic narrative, of course, since the industry shows so little awareness of its history, much less any sense of public obligation beyond limited philanthropy. If our reputations continue to suffer, though, we might kill the Goose. I’d like to think for-profit administrations could learn to see themselves in a  context more analogous to service and education rather than industry narrowly defined.  That’s all too rare anywhere. It’s not any measure of public service, of course, but perhaps one starting point could be the emerging U.S. News Rankings for online education.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Fitzgerald Online

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I wasn’t sure until I looked it up, but it was apparently F. Scott Fitzgerald who first said this, in  1936, in a piece called Crack Up that he wrote for Esquire: “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”  I think that any advocate of online education, especially proprietary education, has to be Fitzgeraldian. We have to accept both the near-utopian possibilities and, at the same time, the limits of capitalist development.

On the one hand, there’s the ongoing neglect of the traditional schools in affirmative action, particularly for working people, and the huge potential of online education to reach people who have never felt they had a chance to gain this sort of capital. On this side of our Fiztgeraldian brain might be this piece: “Online learning, uplifting, efficient.”  It might be a little optimistic, but if half of the potential of online education suggested here is realized, we’d have a very different education system. We could generate a surge of mobility not seen since the GI Bill in the late 1940s.

The problem, as Marx put it in another context, is that the profit motive tends to create conditions that become “a fetter upon the mode of production.”   Proprietary education, in other words, could create institutional models that are both profitable for them and beneficial for students, just as banks can create mortgages that are both profitable and non-exploitative. As the ongoing debate over proprietary education shows (“For-Profits Colleges Draw Minorities, Stir Murky Debate on Student Success“) though, too many schools seem unwilling to take on the challenge.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Teaching Critical Thinking in an Irrational Age

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Twenty years ago, when I began teaching writing, I tried to  teach critical thinking by presenting two opposing arguments and letting students work their way through each of them. I quickly learned that with certain arguments this led nowhere fast. Reason meet faith; debate over.

Many of my students are profoundly ant-intellectual. It’s not youthful sloth or ignorance or posturing, although there’s plenty of those things, youthful or otherwise, it’s a specific set of ideas they have been taught. It isn’t every religion, and it isn’t all Christian sects, but too many are raised to mistrust reason.

The problem, in a nutshell, is the Christian fundamentalist rejection of all substantive debate as such. This rejection, often termed the belief in the literal truth of the Bible, conflates faith with reason, and makes attempts to foment substantive intellectual discussion moot. It’s apples and oranges every time.

I think most of us deal with this problem by focusing on the language of debates that are more or less off of the radar of the Christian right. No more course sections on abortion, for example. The problem of Christian fundamentalist anti-intellectualism has only grown worse in the last decade, however.

We’ve reached a point, I think, where so much right-wing thinking is so dominated by this Christian fundamentalist thinking that much of our contemporary life seems off the table, from evolution to economics. How can you debate issues in evolution when one side believes the Earth is only 3,000 years old?

One solution is to find debates within arguments that are often seen as monolithic. The debate over gay marriage hides a less obvious critical  argument over marriage,  for example, a debate epitomized by  Queers for Economic Justice. It’s a good resource for framing a productive argument.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Language, Professional

The End of the Fact as We Know It

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Like a lot of writing teachers, I use Anita Garland’s essay, “Let’s Really Reform Our Schools” in my class. I like it because while it proposes something no on can argue with– better schools– it does so in a way that is rhetorically quite dubious. It’s basically a Fox News kind of argument, in which one group– “we”– is pitched against another: the “they” or “them.”

Even worse, the “we” or “us” is a very vague group of people “who only want the best for our children” (who wouldn’t want to be a part of that group?) and the “they” are both the so-called trouble makers (students who don’t want to be in school) and teachers, administrators, and policy makers who emphasize extracurricular activities over what Garland defines as academia.

In a nutshell, Garlands solution sounds simple: end the prom and minimize sports and other extracurricular activities, make attendance voluntary, and kick out the kids who don’t want to learn. It’s a mean-spirited, ugly set of ideas couched in a disingenuous populism. What I find fascinating is that my students seem unaffected by the essay’s scapegoating tendency or its complete lack of facts.

I can’t fault Garland for these strategies; they are a part of our cultural heritage.  We all, to one extent or the other, create enemies in our arguments and too often we neglect facts. At times, we don’t need or want objectivity. Still, informed readers need to be able to understand that these sorts of arguments have strict limits. They don’t include the facts we need to make good decisions.

Garland’s style of argument has been carried to the extreme in Republican rhetoric over the so-called debt crisis. A certain amount of cheer leading is all part of the process. We need some reference to the facts, too.  Even worst, what’s was once a Republican strategy has now become the political norm– the Democrats as just as guilty. Where are the facts on the size and history of the debt?

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics