More Sentimental Education

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I’ve long wanted to write about the notion of individual instruction, which I think is a harmful myth, a kind of nostalgia for something that never existed. It’s a scary thing to examine, though, simply because so many teachers hold this myth so close to their pedagogical hearts. This week provides an interesting case in point, in the form of a blog entry by Margate Soltan at Inside Higher Ed’s “University Diaries” (“Professormatronic“). Once agin the impersonal culprit is technology.

In this case, the idea of individual instruction arises from a discussion of a student complaint that professors no longer write on papers by hand. It’s very tempting to simply repeat Derrida’s famous deconstruction of the individuality of the signature, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. I would like to know if the student had experienced this “personal” handwriting before, or if this was simply an idea he or she had about handwriting. My guess is that there are lots of people out there who remember the sharp sting of red ink.

I don’t have any complaints about the idea that students benefit from feeling that they have their professor’s full attention, at least briefly. If you ask a question, well, you want a good answer. I can’t see much practical differance between a professor and student pouring over a written paper, or a student and profesor pouring over a paper on the laptop. Much of this piece, though, seems to sentimentalize the technology of a few decades ago. (See this piece on the myths of online education, too.)

Ironically, the technology bemoaned by Soltan is attractive exactly becuase it’s a tool that many feel (perhaps naively) counters the alienation of U.S. culture by facilitating authentic connections. The myth of individual instruction wrongly sugests to students that because all people are unique, their learning is unique. Learning is social though, not individual; we share more than we differ. That should be a source of strength. Human relationships are the root cause of any alienation, educational or otherwise, not technology.

Posted in: Writing

Tunnel Vision Tunnel Vision

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I haven’t written much about my favorite right-wing professional organization in while (American Council of Trustees and Alumni), but I feel compelled to comment on what seems to me to be a classic case of what my mom would call “the pot calling the kettle black.” The ACTA is one of those organizations that tires to create a smokescreen of reason behind which they can hide their interest in promoting a very narrow agenda supporting the current administrative status qua.

Or, rather, they support what might be called the ‘traditional or reactionary wing’ of the current status qua. So it’s fascinating to hear their support for a critic who bemoans, “Out of control tuition inflation … watered-down educational product that fails to teach graduates the skills they need… excessive hand holding — with grade inflation, deteriorating degree requirements, a growing number of non-academic degrees being offered and ever-increasing student services…”

Whatever we think about these issues, isn’t it the very policies of the members of the ACTA that have created these problems? Are we to suppose that ACTA members have labored long and hard at trustee and administrative meetings to resist tuition increases? Have ACTA members fought the ‘consumer’ model of education that has created a culture in which education is a service and grades an entitlement? Have they fought against the use of student evaluations in teacher assessment?

Posted in: Professional, Writing

Why Can’t Things Get Worse?

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“I think the state of reading and writing will be *different* in ten years as a result of the Internet. Languages evolve, and established practices for writing evolve; when books were hand-lettered by scribes, they were written very differently than they are now, but it’s hard to make a case that the practice got “worse.” The Internet and associated publishing tools — blogs, Twitter, and the like — may have an accelerating effect on those changes; the art of reading, writing, and rendering knowledge is likely to evolve more quickly than it has in the past, and there are some who would argue that that is a bad thing. I think it will be different; not better, not worse, but not the same.” – Rachel Smith, vice president, New Media Consortium

The Future of the Internet, Part 2: A review of responses to a tension pair about the impact of the internet on reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge.

This idea that literacy will be “different” but not necessarily bad fascinates me for several reasons. The traditional analogy is to the transition from oral to written culture. From the (theoretical) point of view of oral culture, the shift to the printed page was an enormous loss of individual memory, in particular. No one needed to memorize thousands of lines of poetry anymore. From our point of view, it was a huge gain in collective memory. Knowledge would not be lost with the individual. It’s a net win.

Similarly, the idea is that while there will be some loss in the transition from traditional to digital media, the losses will be compensated by the gains. I am not quite sure I buy this argument. Those scribes noted by Smith originally wrote without punctuation, standardized spelling, or capitalization, for example. It’s not just a neutral difference; those standards make both reading and writing more efficient, and so better. If change can result in a net win, it can result in a loss, too.

Predicting the future is never a winning game, but this “difference” argument seems profoundly divorced from contemporary history. “Literacy” is not a fixed concept, it’s a set of skills that persist, among other things, becuase they have real economic efficacy. “Literacy” is a form of cultural capital. In early stages of industrialization, for example, workers don’t need to be literate. Workers might resist by becoming literate on their own, as it were, but capitalist culture won’t encourage it. Not yet.

In later stages of industrialization such as our own, the future is still not quite clear. Many technologies– from icons, to international street signs, to new media– suggest that literacy may no longer be defined in terms of reading and writing per se. (Print could become a form of resistance, too.) Maybe the new literacy will minimize knowledge, in other words. Perhaps only a minority will retain the traditional literacy skills that underwrite power.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing

The Chickens Come Home to Roost

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Anyone who’s worked in U.S. higher education has heard the mantra: colleges should be run as efficiently as a business. (We’re assuming they don’t mean a business like Lehman Brothers, of course.) Business are flexible and adaptive and they efficiently contain costs. What that actually means in practice, of course, is that the system has become two tiered: on top, a shrinking pool of tenured faculty, beneath them, a growing base of adjunct with little job security.

The recent reports suggesting that the public doesn’t trust colleges (Public Agenda survey finds deep skepticism) are unsurprising and ironic. Unsurprising, becuase this has been their (conservative, administrative) calling card for a few decades, and ironic because the public sees these business values as the problem, not the solution. I haven’t read the full report yet (it’s here) but the media focus on the public perception that college ought to be cheaper only scratches the surface of the problem.

It’s hard to disagree with the general sentiment reported in the survey. The “business” model has meant, among other things, enormous salaries for administrators and bloated athletic budgets rationalized as marketing campaigns. The business model goes farther than that, though, it also defines students as consumers and their educations as services. It’s greatly expanded the use of student evaluations as measures of so-called teaching effectiveness, too.

The business model mistrusts faculty and shared governance. It sees tenure as inflexible, and promotes the myth that a tenured teacher cannot be fired, and that tenure protects the incompetent. It mistrusts academic freedom of speech. The academic business model is anti-union, and invests heavily in union busting and prevention. It’s a model that hardly makes sense, even in a business. Reform can’t happen unless the model is dropped.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union, Writing