1. While it is certainly true that the models earlier in this century in
the UK and some other places, including in a different structure the US,
for vocational education vs. academic education were mainly a class-based
sieve mechanism, it is not necessarily true that teaching, say,
mathematics, in relation to the workplace (more obviously for literacy)
could not be a superior intellectual strategy to teaching it in a purely
abstract and "decontextualized" academic fashion.
It is also not necessarily true that the same education is most relevant to
all people's lives. By "the same" here I mean in its content, methods of
instruction, and goals. Most secondary education in the US today aims, at
least in the eyes of reformers, at a universal college-bound academic
model. This really seems unrealistic to me and doomed to failure. Esp.
since the academic model is almost universally the "decontextualized" model
(i.e. teaching of formal structures apart from relations to concrete social
functioning in an actual society), which seems useful ONLY as a passport to
higher education. Not everyone wants to be an intellectual. Society does
not need a 100% college-educated, academic curriculum workforce, or
citizenry. The jobs that exist, and the new ones coming to exist do not
call for this kind of preparation. The academic curriculum also does NOT
inspire people to critical thinking about the social order or consideration
of alternative futures for society in which there might be some point to
everyone having a different kind of secondary and post-secondary education.
WHY should society support the enormous costs of universal higher
education, given what higher education is today?
Note that this is a different question from supporting universal ACCESS to
higher education, but only for people who have some plausible reason for
wanting it and some plausible plan for using it. Note also that it is
distinct from the question of the reform of higher education to make it
into something that we might see value in distributing universally.
2. Gordon shared some notes about the World Bank's agenda -- and they're
not the only ones with it -- for privatization of higher education as a
means toward higher education reform. I frankly don't think they are as
crazy, or evil, as may seem at first sight.
First, they are supposed to be taking a WORLD perspective. There is after
all already a lot of private higher education in the US and in the past it
was the dominant mode. Its worst is pretty much as bad as the worst of
public higher education; its best is perhaps better than the best of public
higher education, or at least there is more at the top of the heap. But in
the WORLD as a whole, nearly all higher education is PUBLIC. Think Italy,
think Mexico, think Malaysia. It is also moderately elitist in most places,
at least as a statistical fact (small percentages of citizens go to
university); it does not partake of the US experiment toward universal
higher education. Very characteristically, it is also usually embedded in
astonishingly large administrative burocracies which are highly resistant
to change and innovation and very often quite partisan to particular
segments of the population (by class, by gender, by race/ethnicity, etc.).
Economically such systems are vastly inefficient, wasting a large
proportion of the budget. Leading intellectuals around the world criticize
these systems and demand radical reform. It almost never happens. The World
Bank, and in general the managers of the world economy, see this as
inhibiting global development in its next phase. They are right, and that
is not the worst thing about it.
I would note that in the US as well, systems of public higher education
tend to be enmeshed in systems of byzantine regulations by their government
sponsors regarding purchasing, numbers of staff, salaries of support staff,
hiring regulations, dismissal regulations, etc., etc. Compared to any
reasonable well-run private concern they are disastrously inefficient and
badly managed. I know, I work in one.
And then there's the faculty. The tenured, full-time, senior faculty. Who
by and large are NOT supporters of change and innovation, who are simply
more concerned about their own prerogatives and agendas than about the
institution, the students, teaching, the consequences for society of the
state of the university, the curriculum, etc. Not of course all of us, but
enough of us enough of the time that as a group we ARE in large part
responsible for the growing obsolescence and irrelevance of both our
institutions and of higher education itself in developed societies. From my
observations the situation is WORSE in Europe than in the US, especially in
the older more prestigious universities. I'd be interested to know in the
case of developing nations how this situation looks, but my guess is that
again the older institutions fit the pattern I am describing.
So tell me, what else in the real world could possible get such a state of
affairs, regarding both bureaucratic and faculty inertia, in the US, in the
UK, or in the world as a whole to change quickly and radically -- for good
or for ill -- other than a move toward privatization, or more specifically
competition of new private institutions with existing models?
I would note, by the way, that government efforts to reform universities
have mostly been ill-considered and failures because the reformers don't
understand universities as institutions. Governments can strangle
universities, but they can't by and large change them in the directions
they wish them to go. That may be a good thing, but if universities do need
to change (and in my opinion either they do or higher education does, and I
wouldn't bet on the universities) -- and relatively quickly -- how can this
happen?
What happens to high-inertia institutions that change only slowly in a
rapidly changing society? and HOW does it happen?
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------