The Persistence of Idiocy

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I just drove from Louisiana to my home in Illinois; it took about 14 hours, divided over two days. It’s not too bad of a drive but it’s all on the Interstate system– it saves a lot of time– and so it’s exhausting, but not just physically. I find long drives on the Interstate, especially that stretch on I 10 between Baton Rouge and Lake Charles, emotionally trying if not spiritually depleting.

Stupidity– sheer, crude idiocy– is so common on the highway that it eats away at my faith in the human race and in the future. I can’ t figure what it is they need to learn. Hour after hour I watch people pull up to within inches of each other and happily drive along at 75 or 80 miles an hour. If one would suddenly have to stop, as sometimes happens, several cars would crash.

Is it that they don’t understand inertia? It’s common to use tailgating as a kind of communication: if you want to go faster than the speed limit, or even faster than the traffic or weather would permit with any safety, you simply pull up to within a foot or so of the car ahead of you and stay there until they move. Imagine if someone did that, say, in a line at the movies.

People race you to the end of the entrance to the freeway. Or there’s the guys in the old top heavy SUV’s careering from lane to lane, almost on two wheels. Or the truck drivers who believe ‘might makes right’ and suddenly decide to change lanes right on top of you. You can’t slow down too fast, of course, because there’s another car two feet behind you.

It’s not just driving. The University of Illinois hired a new president at a salary that’s more than $150,000 than his predecessor, despite the state budget crisis. They only get “embarrassed” when it’s revealed that they are spending $100,000 on a sculpture to honor a former president. And, of course, while the Gulf goes down the tubes, Tony Hayward cheers on his yacht.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional

Technology and Common Sense

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We all want that silver bullet for learning. In the movies it’s that computer input thing that you watch and quickly absorb the history of a civilization or maybe it’s a pill that allows you to instantly speak a language. We all want a short cut but it may be that the more or less laborious process of learning is exactly what makes learning so effective. Our brains may be structured to learn and change slowly, over time, in a a kind of trial and error, or at least non-linear, fashion.

Those of us who teach online need to be skeptical when it comes to the latest technological innovation or tool. The hype is usually louder than the reality. A recent piece in the New York Times (“Mind Over Media“) seems to have no other point but to bring us back to a kind of biological reality: our brains evolved into their current shape over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years and nothing that Steve Job invents is likely to change much of that quickly.

An excellent case in point might be the introduction of electronic book readers, which many– including myself– hoped might break the back of the textbook industry and trim down some of the costs of education. (My school is going to electronic books, which may have similar issues, but are a slightly different matter.) As it turns out, at least according to one report (Amazon Kindle flunked by college students), students felt stymied by the new technology.

Creating that messy, inconsistent process–so easy with a traditional textbook– is turning out to be hard. Fast searching, apparently, is no substitute for flipping back and forth; you can’t scribble in the margins of an electronic book– yet. Once again, the generational theory– the younger you are the more used you are to new technology and so more able to adapt– is proving to be more complicated than we thought. How long did it take for the book to take over from oral story telling?

Posted in: Language, Professional

Competition and Education

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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).

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

What New Media Can Do

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The Education news from my old state (perhaps my new state too) is not good. The Texas Board of Education has apparently approved a Taliban style social studies curriculum, designed to reflect a narrow Christian ideology rather than a consensus of historical opinion (“Texas Board Approves New Social Studies Curriculum“). I don’t think calling this Taliban-like is inappropriate, either. Religious fundamentalism hates change and debate, above all else, in Texas as much as in Afghanistan. This is a form of religious belief that’s dependent on enforced ignorance. You can’t believe, apparently, in the face of knowledge.

I think this sort of fundamentalism represents a particularly despicable form of cowardice. It’s one thing to want to disagree with everyone who knows anything about a subject. If you want to believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, or that banana peals soaked in lime juice will cure cancer, that’s your own business. This form of fundamentalist thinking, though, fears open debate as a threat to its very existence. It’s as if they worry that we have such a strong natural affinity to credible argument it’s dangerous to expose us to it.

If their beliefs are so strong, why not let them compete openly in the “market” of ideas? In Southwestern Louisiana (where I’ve been staying) local religious factions squeezed out National Public Radio (hardly a communist cabal). As anyone who travels around the country knows, wherever there’s a public radio station there’s a Christian right station that’s so close it can interfere with reception. Choking off debate in public schools and on the radio are all old media strategies; they are sure to loose their efficacy as new media matures. That’s the good news. We have history on our side, as they say.

Posted in: Professional, Writing