While I certainly agree that there are a lot of dangers in thoughtlessly
mixing the profit motives of the corporate paradigm with academic ideals of
serving the interests of students first and foremost (ideals, not
realities, of course), I think that for me there are longterm issues that
are more pressing (another example of scale heterogeneity?) than the
current wars over these matters.
I simply do not believe that higher education, its institutions and its
culture, will survive the infotech revolution. I believe that absolutely
radical transformations, of the kind that divide the dominant system of
today from that of the pre-industrial period, are inevitable.
Unfortunately, I do not mean that I know which transformations are in
store! they are not pre-determined. But I think that the scale of the
transformation is fairly certain already.
In very general and rather vague terms, this tranformation has to include a
complete alteration of the economic basis of advanced learning. It has to
include radical changes in who controls the content and manner of such
learning, and in the content and manner as such.
I think it would be very naive and dangerous to defend the status quo
against radical alternatives that are emerging. Only equally radical
alternatives, with viable economic bases, but with more desirable
concomitant features, can compete with what David Noble is warning us against.
Our present system of higher education is a contradictory mixture (as what
historically evolved social institution is not?) of aristocratic ideals of
scholarship as leisure avocation (disinterested research, emphasis on
classic texts and traditions, free-thinking eccentricity, disdain of
commerce and the practical professions, philanthropic endowments, etc.), of
bourgeois institutional economics (pay-as-you-go tuition, commodified
course units, marketable learning, faculty productivity, etc.), and a tiny
bit of proto-socialist progressivism (government-subsidized education and
research, intellectual watchdog-ism, belief in uplifting the masses through
education, etc.). It seems fairly clear that the present renaissance of
laissez-faire capitalism, epitomized by the new infotech industries, is
going to fit best with the bourgeois parts of our academic heritage, and
work against the other two strands. In many ways universities are still in
part pre-capitalist institutions, and their assimilation to the capitalist
political economy is incomplete and still in-progress. The aristocratic
thread resists capitalism by depending on proto-socialism, and the latter
is at the moment relatively weak. I have always found the alliance between
aristocratic values and socialist ones in bourgeois-dominated cultures
quite fascinating, but now the common enemy is relatively ascendant --
hence the crisis in the future direction of higher education.
There are a lot of internal contradictions in our present models for higher
education which are going to be exposed by the crisis. It is, for instance,
highly economically inefficient to try to deliver aristocratic standards of
higher education (liberal education) to the total population, when that
population has been polarized by capitalism into groups with more vs. less
favorable habitus for traditional methods of higher learning. In fact, I
think it's pretty clear that in higher education particularly, there simply
are not enough 'professors' in the population to staff universities to
serve all the people on the present model. That is, we could always call
people 'professors' and put them in these jobs, but that does not mean they
would be able to do what the role calls for. US higher education, the most
extreme mass-scale experiment, has already resulted in a tremendous
dilution of learning at many institutions (whether by 500-student lecture
classes, or by employing less able faculty). Other nations are facing these
problems as they try to expand capacity. At present there are barely
enough, probably in truth not enough, people capable of doing the job of
secondary school teachers, given market competition for their services. It
would take an enormous restructing of the labor market to change that; and
the situation for university teachers and researchers is far worse. If
everyone who attended high school graduated and went to college, it's just
not possible that we could find enough high-quality faculty members to
accommodate the numbers.
So even the socialist dream of universal higher education is caught in a
contradiction with the present model of how advanced learning is done. I do
not believe in a total socialist revolution to resolve these
contradictions, because no one actually has a clue how to make a socialist
society that would meet the criteria. Legal justice and genuinely
democratic governance do not provide specific models for an alternative
political economy. The former could be achieved by revolution, but the
latter would still have to evolve over long periods of time from present
institutional models.
What we can innovate relatively quickly over the next couple decades is a
completely new model of mass higher education, or as I have been calling it
'advanced learning'. It can be independent of age-grading. It can radically
reduce dependence on having a brilliant intellectual at the other end of
every student's learning log. It can scrap normative curricula in favor of
testable models of how to get from here to there in 'know-how space'. It
can give learners more control of the content and manner of their learning
(they will not be free of the need to find a place in the socio-economic
ecology of global society, but their choices can reflect other priorities
in addition to that one). It can abandon the project of creating ideal
national citizens at the same time it avoids the trap of moulding ideal
multinational workers.
I am not imagining that our existing cultures and institutions of higher
education will disappear over this same time scale. Of course they will
persist, probably smaller and fewer and more elite and more expensive, but
they will play a smaller and smaller proportional role via their system of
classroom instruction, at least in undergraduate education. I imagine much
smaller full-time faculties, engaged more predominantly in research and in
membership in various consortia for the production and operation of on-line
(or 'Open')learning systems as a side-line. What will be critical to the
political direction of this brave new world will be the capital costs of
being producers of competitive on-line learning systems. If the technology
makes them low enough so that there are very large numbers of successful
producers, rather than resulting in monopolistic or oligopolistic
conditions, then there could be an incredible intellectual and political
renaissance in our global demes as ten thousand schools of thought contend.
The modernist project of producing cultural homogeneity will wither, and
with it the nation state (on a much longer time scale, of course, say a
century or two). These broader consequences assume that the alternative
educational model reaches down to younger age-grades, of course, but also,
and realistically I think, that it reaches out to a higher percentage of
the population.
If this vision is not radical enough for you, consider exactly the same
issues at the level of secondary education. This is where the modernist
nation-state makes its bid to control the national identity. There is
almost no curricular diversity of any fundamental sort even in the US where
legally there could be. Are we going to defend the monopoly of the state in
secondary education against the bids to break that monopoly by private
enterprise? Most of us might immediately think, yes, of course. But
breaking that monopoly is desirable and necessary to most of what we would
like to see happen in the future of society. We just don't want to turn the
monopoly over to profiteers to any greater degree than it is already
dominated by them (indirectly, but effectively). But if consortia of
educators and scholars (and artists, writers, etc.) could compete
effectively in the post-monopoly market ... then I think I would strongly
favor ending state-control of secondary education. Primary education is of
course an even more difficult case. There we can identify, changing in
time, a (to some degree necessary) basic curriculum; and we can agree on
some compromise proportions of control among students, parents,
professional educators, and representatives of larger communities. But even
there, there is much room for greater diversity of choice among learning
materials and methods.
Finally, imagine the Microsoft Total Grade 6 Multimedia Curriculum. Imagine
it based on Encarta and their existing CD-ROM products. Imagine it with
video, animated simulations, links to the web and on-line communication,
with chat groups, with global exchange, with 3-D bulletin boards and
collaborative distance learning software ... or even imagine it as it would
be if it were produced in the next three years realistically. And now ask
how many classrooms and teachers in the US (and many other countries) do
not provide anywhere near that GOOD a learning opportunity ... and which
schools in which neighborhoods those are ... are who those students are ...
and what realistic chance there is in 3-10 years of providing an equally
rich educational opportunity under the present political-economic system?
(xcma-ers unfamiliar with US education may not realize how totally devoid
of resources many schools for poor students are here, or how staggering are
the inequalities between state-funded schools only kilometers apart in
higher and lower income areas of the same city or state.)
So far in the US, privatization in education has meant only shifting from
the evils of a bankrupt public monopoly system to the evils of a
profit-driven private (local) monopoly provider. But if monopolistic
conditions end, then among the diversity of private (including scholarly)
educational providers students may be able to find some genuine quality,
and learn to recognize it.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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