I hate this idea that we are all always either happy or sad, positive or negative. Moods and emotions are moving targets. On the other hand I do think that it’s easy to get, well, crabby about the current state of education, or the state and education. The most narrow-minded technocrats seemed to have won a decisive victory. (One of the themes of my book is the way literature and writing were seen as correctives to the objective passions of an over-confident science.)

Don’t get me wrong. Technocrats are cool: they are the ones who figured out the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and my personal computer, to list only a few of my favorites. But an overly technocratic view of education tends to believe that something as intangible as learning can be measured as fully and as precisely as, say, rainfall. They don’t recognize the limits of objectivity, in other words. The current political Zeitgeist seems wholly trapped by this idea, determined to swamp us all in standardize testing and measures of all sorts.

A technocrat emphasizes administration over teachers, seeing the school as a factory, and the classroom as a machine designed to deliver education to the student, that is, to the consumer. The more I look for this sort of thinking, the more I find it, and the more intellectually bitchy I get. That’s why reading, “Author, innovator shares vision,” about Milton Chen, was so refreshing. Chen’s idea– to paraphrase very roughly– is that learning should occur in a big messy organic network, the very opposite of the well-oiled machine.

Chen might be too optimistic– I am not sure that finding and then using an IPhone application is a good measure of technological sophistication–but he is trying to use the potentials of technology to resurrect a very traditional notion of a liberal education as a life long endeavor (“K to Gray”). I just wish that writers like Chen showed at least some awareness of our current conditions, especially in the ways that class impacts technological access. His vision can’t happen if the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing…

I think this may well be the most amazing sentence I have read all year: “At most private colleges, as well as at public colleges where faculty members have chosen not to form unions or have been precluded from doing so by state law, many faculty members work without union contracts without feeling particularly exploited.” It”s by Peter Schmidt, in a piece appropriately titled, “What Good do Faculty Unions Do“?

Schmidt’ focus on pay risks reinforcing the myth that public employees unions are greedy and over-privileged. Most universities– like most corporations– don’t have unions, and if they do, they fight them at every turn. Exploitation has become routine in too many schools. I have a better question: what would universities be like without union influence? Would tenure even exist anymore?

The current picture isn’t pretty. Many if not most faculty are either non-tenure track or part-time adjuncts. (Here’s a piece on the subject from a few years ago.) Administrations line their pockets and have no interest in economic justice within their own walls. We could all be better organized, but it’s hardly the unions’ fault that the overall trend in the economy is towards lower pay and less power.