Closer To The Ideal

John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991, explains what his job entails:

The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.

The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.

This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too — the clothing business as well — unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!

Penelope Trunk questions the economics of a college education:

The idea of paying for a liberal arts education is over. It is elitist and a rip off and the Internet has democratized access to information and communication skills to the point that paying $30K a year to get them is insane.

Ben Casnocha has one of the most thorough, self-examined discussions about the value of college on his blog. He went to college, probably, because so many people told him to. (Here are some good links on Ben’s blog.)

Ben left college. Early. And he’s fascinating, and he’s educating himself through experience, which is what the Internet does not provide. The Internet provides books and discussion, so why would you need to go to school for those things?

It’s the time of year when college students start looking for the return on investment for their education: They start worrying about what they’re going to do this summer.

Another look at the degree to which women are pulling ahead of men in regards to college education:

College admissions directors curious about the experience of touching a third rail can review what happened when the president of the University of Alberta suggested that Canadian males, including white males, needed a helping hand.

She got fried … by her own students.

Last month, President Indira Samarasekera pointed to the preponderance of women in higher education in Canada (three female undergraduates for every two males) and suggested that perhaps males could need some extra attention. “We’ll wake up in 20 years and we will not have the benefit of enough male talent,” said Samarasekera, a metallurgical engineer originally from Sri Lanka. “I’m going to be an advocate for young white men, because I can be,” she added, pointing to her Nixon-to-China status as a minority woman advocating for men.

A fair number of her students were not happy. Within 24 hours the campus was awash with posters poking fun at the notion of women taking over higher education. “Women are attacking campus,” read one. “Only white men can save our university! Stop the femimenace.”

Humorous, perhaps, but here’s why this is not funny to college officials in the United States: currently, the University of Alberta grants no admissions preferences to men – unlike scores, perhaps even hundreds, of colleges in the United States that for years have been turning down women for less qualified men.The preferences many colleges give to men are far less formal and less debated than those that help minority applicants, or women applying to some programs. But many, many admissions offices routinely look at male applicants’ test scores and grades with lower expectations than they have when viewing those of female applicants.

Ken Robinson suggests that our educational systems destroy the creativity of the students.

Cringley predicts the world of higher education is facing a revolution:

There is enough good material available for free online right now that it would be easy to create a virtual university (WikiVersity?) with the only thing missing being the granting of degrees. It’s that whole “degree from MIT” thing that allows that school not to worry about sharing its lecture bounty, because in the education system lectures are viewed as worthless unless they lead to a degree.

Why is that?

My friend Richard Miller (he designed the Atari Jaguar video game console eons ago) is one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever met yet he doesn’t have a degree in engineering. Apple II designer Steve Wozniak got his degree from UC Berkeley only after leaving Apple in the early 1980s. In both cases their employers couldn’t have cared less.
What drives the education industry is producing degrees while what drives the computer industry is producing products and services.

When was the last time any employer asked to see your academic transcript? Have they ever?

What’s missing here is the higher education equivalent of a GED. Someone will come up with one, or they should, because all the other parts of the system are ready to go.
Cushing Academy, a tony prep school in western Massachusetts, is right now replacing its 20,000-volume library with a “learning center” containing 18 eBook readers, three giant TV screens, and a $12,000 espresso machine. I wonder why they need a building or even a room at all; wouldn’t it be cheaper just to give each kid an eBook reader and a Starbuck’s gift card?

Sounds appealing, doesn’t it? I, for one, always hated school. Always. And I have long wondered why people put up with the current structure of education. But I would not be the entrepreneur that Cringley wants. I would not invest in this particular revolution, for 3 reasons:

1.) Never underestimate the shocking conservatism of the American people, and their general unwillingness to change.

2.) People who go to college are trying to reduce their risks – they want a guarantee that they will be allowed into the middle class (their parents also want that guarantee). The market for safety is not going away any time soon.

3.) The people who are willing to take risks, the true entrepreneurs, are few and far between. (And many of these people don’t bother going to college.)

In other words, so long as the universities can claim that they are reducing risk, they are immune to any challenge from the Internet. So far the Internet has proven itself capable of setting up radical challenges to existing institutions, but it hasn’t replaced any institutions and become the new status quo. The revolutionaries are not yet the new conservatives. We are at least 20 years away from the day when those of us who believe in the Internet can say “4 legs good, 2 legs better.”