PJ Harvey on The Andrew Marr Show (October 2, 2011)
Why the Right Hates Teachers
I was reading yet another piece about Republican efforts to demonize college professors– in this case, by targeting Labor Studies professors– and thinking about why the right-wing hates teachers so much (“Groups Investigating E-Mails of Professors in Michigan and Wisconsin Produce No Evidence of Wrongdoing“). Luckily, this particular witch hunt has so far failed to find anything that might be used to drum up the sorts of fear and anger that have made the right-wing so effective in recent years.
At one level, this is very straightforward hardball politics, similar to the ongoing efforts to restrict voter registration. If you can demonize government officials, you can by extension make it easier to destroy the last real bastion of organized labor. If you can destroy or undermine organized labor, you can undermine the democratic party and so retard social progress. Social progress, of course, is anathema to the right because it by definition shifts wealth away from the rich and powerful and to the rest of us.
It’s also a part of the right’s embrace of anti-intellectualism, which it confuses (perhaps deliberately) with populism. You can’t believe in global warming, or evolution because that would suggest support for the people “behind” these things, the intellectuals, that is, the scientists and teachers who develop and teach these ideas. That would mean support for the public schools and that would mean support for the public school unions. All of that reduces profits. It’s a Matryoshka doll of nested craziness.
Coming in from the Cold
The ongoing consolidation of the online higher education system, especially in the for-profit sector, is one of the most important developments in the last twenty years. Yet, like the emergence of the internet in the early to mid 1990’s, it remains almost completely invisible in the mainstream– I am tempted to say lamestream— media. I think it’s under-reported even in the education media.
There’s a lot to be concerned about the emerging online system– arguably, the most transformative development of the internet so far– yet the emergence of the new institutions seems to be happening without much public discussion, much less scrutiny. The discussion that is going on, such as in Inside Higher Ed (“Going Off on Online Rankings“) seems so lost in the trees that it never considers the forest.
The U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of online schools are significant because they signal the first stages in the maturation of the online industry, led by for-profits, but increasingly joined by public schools. The final shape of the system– it’s ratio of for and not for profit institutions– has yet to be determined, mostly because the online system so radically widens the pool of potential students.
We need answers or at least a debate. Will the new system make life-long learning a practical reality? It’s not a part of the Republican or Democrat deadbeats’ agendas, but ironically that absence may signal its significance. Just as importantly, is this emerging system going to reproduce the traditional system’s exploitative labor policies, massive debt, and alienating mass consumption?
Our Latest Myth: Adaptive Learning
I’ve long been fascinated with what I can only call (pardon my Marx) the ideology of bourgeois individualism that underlies so much of U.S. education. It really shows up when you talk about grading and commenting on papers. Students need, it is said, what is called “individual” help. Of course, students are members of cultures, and so the help we give is often as collective as it is individual. There’s nothing unique or individual about the conventions of writing. Most students need “collective” help with their writing; they need to understand that it’s not all personal expression.
Facebook writing has it’s conventions as much as college writing . We don’t always teach individual expression, as often as not we teach the collective traditions and standards that transcend individuals and that make communication possible. Yet acknowledgment of our collective existence is one of the taboos of pedagogy. It’s not simply pedagogy, either, it’s morality, too. If we don’t use “individualized” instruction, we are teaching poorly, or so it is said, but more importantly, we are doing something wrong. We are denying a student’s humanity.
Our humanity, of course, is more than individual. Americans, though, don’t like to be thought of as members of a class,although we don’t mind putting others into categories or groups. If current politics teaches us anything, it teaches us that we fear our collective identity. These were my admittedly cranky thoughts as I read, “Why You Should Root for College to Go Online.” The public universities do need to move more quickly into more substantive online programs. They don’t need to get bogged down in the bourgeois muddiness of so-called adaptive learning.