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

Nearsighted Reform

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If you listen in on academic discussions– online, in electronic lists, and conferences– you quickly see the ways that proprietary education has become a kind of stand in for the ongoing problems in U.S.higher education. The destruction of tenure, rising tuition, student debt, less access for working class and poor to educational capital. These are all problems endemic to our system but too often it sounds as if proprietary education invented all of them.

The dangers of this shortsightedness is reflected in the ongoing response to new regulations designed to “rein in” proprietary education. As it turns out– no one should be surprised by this– it’s not just the for-profits that have been given a free regulatory ride (“As Costs of New Rule Are Felt, Colleges Rethink Online Course Offerings in Other States“). The public schools have flaunted regulations too and the shift to the new regulations is going to be expensive for everyone.

We don’t need rules to “rein in” proprietary education and we certainly don’t need a nightmare regulatory scenario– parallel to the history of the credit card industry–in which states “compete” to be the higher education friendly state” and so  on. We need  a federal system that addresses problems shared by public and for-profits alike: the availability of affordable, online education for working class people and the poor, the over reliance on loans, the loss of full-time positions and tenure.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Standardized Corruption

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Here’s the right-wing plan for our schools: First,  cut off as much money as possible so that schools have to fight for every penny of funding. Second, destroy the teachers unions to destroy tenure and seniority.  Teachers will then have to fight to keep their jobs from the first day they are hired until their last day of work. Third, judge the resulting competition almost solely on a single measure: the standardized test.  Fourth,  wherever possible, dismantle public schools when you can and sell them off to private interests.

Last, exaggerate  and publicize the failures of the public schools while obscuring the failures and exaggerating the successes of the charter schools. This is not a conspiracy. This is simply the practical results of a “market-based” approach to public education rooted in a system of so-called “accountability.”  It’s hyper-competition. Markets are a-moral; ethics matter only if ethics can be used to increase profits. Markets are also never free; they are shaped by the participants in that market to maximize profitability. Right and wrong is secondary.

If the participants in a market are allowed to fully maximize their potentials for profit, that is, to fully deregulate the market, corruption is inevitable. The financial markets were radically deregulated– on the behest of Wall Street– and it led to the rescission and to ongoing fiscal crises all over the world. That’s what is happening more and more in the increasingly “market driven” public education system (see here and here).  If the corruption of financial capital caused catastrophic problems, imagine the results of this corruption of human capital.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing