Right and Left against the state: education without classes
Education reform, whether promoted by the Left or Right, often fails to deeply address the class-based issues driving the alleged "failure" of the educational system.
Right
"...we used to have all these individual performers who would sing before we had pre-recorded music and it’s very sad now that you just listen to this performance that’s a hundred times better." --Bill Gates [1]
A while ago, on NPR's "Fresh Air" I heard about 20 minutes of Terry Gross's interview with New America Foundation corporate education reformer Kevin Carrey. He was promoting Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) which he believes will level the educational playing field, eliminating the existing hierarchy of educational opportunity by creating online access for all. [2] Carrey earnestly griped about the ways upper tier and Ivy League colleges favor white people, and rich people, admitting students based on factors such as which elite high school they attended, or what legacy family they come from. Carrey could not claim that MOOCs will get rid of these elite institution's expensive tuitions, or alter their function as networks plugging wealthy students in to top financial, political, managerial, and tech/science jobs, with a smattering of lower middle class and poor included to make it look "fair."
It is not realistic to expect a format featuring canned lectures (which Carrey says are superior to brick and mortar university lectures because you can pause them and go get a coffee) and class sizes up to tens of thousands of students, to do away with the inequality in the social and economic system at the heart of educational inequity. That's the problem. Carrey's "solution" looks at a _function_ of capitalism-- the reproduction and maintenance of social class, in this case both supported by and expressed in the unequal access to education and opportunity, and treats it like a malfunction. He pretends to advocate an end to this two-tier system, but is really outlining a different two-tiered division within this same social system. One educational tier will be cheaper and more efficient, and this will somehow level the currently existing opportunity hierarchy within society. It's absurd on it's face, by design.
The "cheaper" part happens when you have a world-class professor, super-star author or uber-researcher tape his or her lecture series once. At this point, says Carrey, you've covered the base cost of producing the content (there are other expenses to getting a class online) and it doesn't cost any more to add one, or one million more students to the class.
Ignore the fact that this implies dismantling the teaching profession and automating positions via pre-recorded superstars, thereby destroying tens of thousands of present and _future_ jobs in education. It's no coincidence that this dovetails with ongoing austerity-driven attacks on public sector unions, of which the teaching profession is a stronghold.
Such efficiency comes with high social costs.With fewer teachers, you narrow the perspectives within education, eliminating differences in life experience, local knowledge, and professors' connections to regional student populations. The now redundant professors would have otherwise interacted with each other developing relevant curriculum, and they would also have, or at least they used to have, a democratic say in how their universities are run. In that older model, when it was functioning, the driving concerns focused much more on the quality of educational experiences, and the quality and direction of research, than the business model of education's narrowed focus to the University's financial portfolio and investor returns. It's not that this model was impervious to distortion by state and market forces. It wasn't. It's more that the new direction toward online super-stars is the wrong one. Providing a "cheaper" privatized version of whatever the college experience used to be--which could have included community experience, a place of criticality, and even resistance to governmental or private tyranny implicit in critical thought, is a way of dismantling a public service. The new structures are designed to facilitate the flow of capital first, and learning as a byproduct of the streamlined product.
Carrey was clear that the University model is 800 years old (old is bad) and based on "scarcity," a critique which sounds almost Marxian. So now it won't have to be. Everyone can have the computer version for "free." Included in the cost of "free" is a massive victory for the private educational companies that are positioning themselves to take control out of public hands and into their own. [3]
Scarcity of educational opportunity currently exists largely because funding for public education is under attack, not because the private sector has been barred from creating the kind of efficiencies that austerity is currently implementing on the global workforce. Market forces are making huge strides in restructuring Universities in a business model of education that is top heavy with overpaid manager-administrators, and bottom heavy with precarious temp-adjunct staff with no supports.
Carrey wants us to believe he is against standardization, noting that college admissions are based on standardized tests which are a "blunt instrument," and besides "who knows who wrote that college admission essay?" And yet, it does not seem likely that it would be easier to tell who wrote an essay or took a test when dealing with students online, whether a small class or thousands of people in a MOOC. Reducing the learning experience to MOOC platforms is certainly a shift toward standardization.
Left
“Far from contesting this historical process, which is subordinating one of the last relatively autonomous sectors of social life to the demands of the commodity system, the above-mentioned progressives protest against delays and inefficiencies in its implementation. They are the partisans of the future cybernetized university, which is already showing its ugly head here and there. The commodity system and its modern servants — these are the enemy." [4]
The saddest thing about all of this is that we expect this ironic concern for the dispossessed from the Right, from corporations, and the ruling class. It is less expected from other quarters, especially ostensibly radical ones. The Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) has its own critique of the University from the Left.
The Center wants to go "beyond hierarchy, and beyond the antiquated 'great man'" [5] model of professorship. Yet, in the fight against this plague of elitism, "GCAS is the first higher education institution to bring together the most publicly-engaged, theory-informed faculty members in the world." In other words, the great men and women of such theory. One imagines this could eliminate the need to attend classes with mediocre professors who might not even have a book out.
The bar that GCAS sets is rightfully high, but it's tough to separate believing in the reality of one's desires from delusions of grandeur. In a Huffpost interview, Founder Creston Davis gushes that the Center is a "venue in which the leading theorists, artists, architects, etc. and students can explore and create new futures and worlds." Co-Director Jason Adams defines the problem of both private and public colleges:
"The problem with current institutions, at least in the U.S., is twofold: first, you have elite, private institutions like those Creston and I taught at after graduating (and that he studied at prior to graduating); second, you have popular, public institutions like those that I attended before graduating. In the age of advanced neoliberalism, these are, really, becoming two sides of the same coin, and it's Right and Left against the state: education without classes: