More on the Tortoise and Hair Front

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There’s a pair of stories on the Online Learning Update blog this week that point to the slow but steady evolution of the online learning system. Step by step, we are moving from a system dominated by rapid growth of the proprietary schools to a more complex, shifting landscape in which public schools will grow more rapidly and the for-profits will begin to focus on more substantive issues related to the quality of their programs and the value of their institutional capital.

The  proprietary schools have to catch up on the respectability front, in other words, and the public online schools need to catch up on availability. One industry study, conducted by DeVry (“Online education gaining credibility in labour market: Survey“) suggests that perceived quality and accessibility, are closely related and that proprietary schools’ reputations are improving precisely because they allow students to pursue an education while working.

On the tortoise side, the California State system has announced plans for a California online school (“CSU plans for online university education“). The California system, of course, has an enormous advantage in institutional capital and if they can get a large enough system up and running in a reasonable amount of time, they can compete successfully with the  proprietary system.  They have some time: it’ll be  years before any for-profit has a comparable reputation.

Posted in: Writing

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

The End of the Fact as We Know It

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Like a lot of writing teachers, I use Anita Garland’s essay, “Let’s Really Reform Our Schools” in my class. I like it because while it proposes something no on can argue with– better schools– it does so in a way that is rhetorically quite dubious. It’s basically a Fox News kind of argument, in which one group– “we”– is pitched against another: the “they” or “them.”

Even worse, the “we” or “us” is a very vague group of people “who only want the best for our children” (who wouldn’t want to be a part of that group?) and the “they” are both the so-called trouble makers (students who don’t want to be in school) and teachers, administrators, and policy makers who emphasize extracurricular activities over what Garland defines as academia.

In a nutshell, Garlands solution sounds simple: end the prom and minimize sports and other extracurricular activities, make attendance voluntary, and kick out the kids who don’t want to learn. It’s a mean-spirited, ugly set of ideas couched in a disingenuous populism. What I find fascinating is that my students seem unaffected by the essay’s scapegoating tendency or its complete lack of facts.

I can’t fault Garland for these strategies; they are a part of our cultural heritage.  We all, to one extent or the other, create enemies in our arguments and too often we neglect facts. At times, we don’t need or want objectivity. Still, informed readers need to be able to understand that these sorts of arguments have strict limits. They don’t include the facts we need to make good decisions.

Garland’s style of argument has been carried to the extreme in Republican rhetoric over the so-called debt crisis. A certain amount of cheer leading is all part of the process. We need some reference to the facts, too.  Even worst, what’s was once a Republican strategy has now become the political norm– the Democrats as just as guilty. Where are the facts on the size and history of the debt?

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics