Cultural Capital Never Wastes a Crisis

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If you are unfamiliar with the idea of education as a form of cultural capital, it’s easy to think of the idea as static. You either have it or you don’t. The Open Education movement, as recently described in the New York Times (“As Colleges Make Courses Available Free Online, Others Cash In”), however nicely illustrates that education cultural capital works as a complex dynamic, an economy or an ecosystem. It’s capital, and so it doesn’t simply accumulate, it circulates, and as it circulates it changes, sometimes subtly.

In this case,the implicit question seems to be, “what happens to the educational capital of, say, Harvard or Yale if they give away their course materials.” In one sense, of course, these course materials (objectified capital) allow access to the institutional capital; if you invest the time and energy, you should be able to accumulate the same capital as any other student. It’s not so simple, of course. As the educators cited in the piece imply, the capital is transformed by severing it so radically from the setting–the classroom–in which it is accumulated.

You can’t accumulate the social capital of an elite degree from a distance, not without the development of particular systems, such as hybrid courses. Institutions risk little by making this material freely available; in fact, they broaden institutional capital by sharpening its philanthropic image, a necessity a liberal democratic society. It’s not a give away, in fact, but a form of accumulation. What’s interesting, of course, is that others– individually or collectively– might find ways to leverage the open source materials in new ways.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

The Next Technological Fix

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I bought my first ”personal computer’ in the early 1980s, when my Uncle Benson died and left me a few thousand dollars. (I won’t say what I did with the rest of the money.) I’ve been teaching using PC’s since the early 1990s; and full-time people online for the last several years. So I am no Luddite. I have to say, though, that I am beginning to get tired of the successive waves of technological change and the accompanying claims for education.

“A Is for App: How Smartphones, Handheld Computers Sparked an Educational Revolution,” is typical of the big claims for technology genre. These arguments always have two main themes. The first claim is that some capability of the new technology allows students and teachers to do things they have never done before and so accelerate learning. The second, and related claim, is that while the technology seems expensive, it will soon be ubiquitous.

Each successive wave of claims tends to either ignore or minimize the relative successes of the previous wave. In “A Is for Apps,” the writer uses television as a straw man (a passive medium, unlike the I-Phone!) while claiming that mobile phones are replacing the personal computer as the preferred devise to access the internet. My theory is that many of these writers are so immersed in the NOW of consumer culture that they never really observe how technology is used.

Is a television in a Sports Bar on the night of the Super Bowl a passive medium? If everyone is talking about the last episode of Lost, is television a passive medium? Television, like any medium, is used in complex ways, depending on a myriad of factors. Similarly, it’s just silly to claim that if everyone has a “smart cell” phone we can “finally fix” education. Again, I think this sort of view is too beholden to consumer society and to a kind of Utopian rhetoric that serves as its justification.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Language, Professional

Change

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“Today will go down in history as the day when the federal government chose to invest in college students over bank profits,” said United States Student Association (USSA) President Gregory Cendana. “By ending wasteful subsidies to private lenders and directing over sixty billion dollars of savings into financial aid programs, this legislation will ensure that millions of low-income and traditionally underrepresented students have access to higher education.”

Education is a Right, “Victory for Students as Historic Student Aid Reform Passes in Congress“

After the passage of the health reform bill, which included sweeping changes to the financing of higher education, I think it’s legitimate to ask, “How clever is the Obama administration?” If we went back in time to the FDR administration, we’d see similar sorts of political posturing. On the right, the world seemed to be ending as a Democratic administration gave in to Communist influence. FDR, like Obama, faced a hostile supreme court, war, and an opposition that seemed to have lost touch with reality.

On the left, the administartion seemed to be co-oping and watering down social democratic ideas. When the dust cleared– say, two decades or so later, after a horrific world war, we had some good (if limited) programs, like social security. A few decades later, and the Civil Rights Act and Medicare and Medicaid followed the same pattern. On the right, it was the end of the world, and on the left, the ideas were watered down and hardly recognizable. I think history has proven the left criticism correct, by and large.

If we had a national pension plan and a single payer health care system, we would all be better off socially and economically. I am not sure that we will ever get past our American propensity for frontier violence, but we might have a more just society. The contemporary right, though, seems wholly unaware that they are replaying their historical role as ugly and self destructive Americans. I honestly can’t tell if the Obama administration is equally unaware or playing some other game altogether.

Posted in: Writing