Category Archives: Writing

Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses—and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them.

“MIT Will Offer Certificates”  Marc Parry

We’ve become so sentimental about universities– if not delusional— that we forget that the entire point of the higher education system was to control knowledge, or, better, to carefully regulate the cultural capital of the middle class.  It was a classic Goldilocks problem: if higher education was too restricted, you can’t run your high-tech economy, if it’s too open, you risk  what H. Bruce Franklin  once called an educated proletariat.

After WWII million of  people got access to a higher education– my father among them– who would normally have been locked out via the G.I. Bill. At some point, though, arguably in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the porridge got a little too cool, and so the pendulum began to swing back, shutting down access or restricting what the educated could do by forcing them into debts that border on indentured servitude.

MIT’s certificates are a rare moment of long-term thinking in the ruling classes.  The first step to change in higher education is to break the university’s monopoly on knowledge. That why open courses and open source is so important. The second, and perhaps more important step, is to institutionalize the time and energy invested in this form of learning so it can circulate as  cultural capital. That’s what MIT has begun.

We could write a history of the last 30 years as a history of rising gullibility. It ought to concern all of us who teach, since it’s the exact opposite of critical thinking. It might begin with that amiable old con man Reagan, who never seemed in any way believable but who was sold as the epitome of the effective politician. That’s when the gap between what we saw with our own eyes and what was being said widened.

It’s been on my mind because of the rise of Newt Gingrich, whose career marks a key turning point between the delusional but somehow gentile lies of the Reagan era and the wildly unbelievable lies of the current time. Reagan and his ilk told us that if we give our money to the rich it will come floating back down to us like manna from heaven;  Michele Bachmann suspects FEMA is setting up concentration camps.

The real question is how the right has managed to successfully use the nonsense of supply side economics as a kind of foundation for an entire empire of nonsense that huge numbers of people find persuasive. It’s an ethos based gullibility, a belief that if the (right) person in authority says something it must be true, combined with a certain palette of pathos appeals, from fear to anger to paranoia and victimization.