Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Education wants to be free


Zero Tuition College strikes me as an idea whose time may have come. It is an envisioned online community of self-directed college-age students, designed to be not just a supplement to but potentially a replacement for university education.

I am a strong advocate of "alternatives" to accepted educational channels, though I would like to see them become less alternative. My intuition (and that's all it is, not a well-thought-out position) is that the devil's-bargain by which higher-ed has sold itself to what passes for "capitalism" these days is one of the main symptoms and causes (both) of the malaise that stymies social revolution (or even reform) in the west. Without implicating anyone else in my half-baked radicalism, I commend, as a partial liberation from the gatekeepers of education, Salman Khan's Khan Academy. The ZT College, brainchild of Blake Boles, may be the next step.

As an anarcho-autodidact who makes his living slumming in the margins of public education (and volunteering at a very different school), I spend a lot of time thinking about how to apply the principles of free- or un-schooling (which work astoundingly well for pre-college age students), to students in an ordinary public-school setting; and also wondering how this approach applies to college and post-college education. This is more or less the haphazard road I pursued. I educated myself, if that is the word, by following my nose; by always chasing down the interesting-sounding references, always tracing the trail back to primary texts, and by giving myself permission to ask irresponsible-sounding questions. I did audit a number of classes (and even paid for some), because the truth about philosophy is that you can't do it all by yourself all the time (Socrates spent his time in the city). But I had the good fortune to be advised early on (by a professor who gave me straight A's) to steer clear of the academy. "It's a world in which dull dogs tend to rule," he sighed. He may have just been being nice with the A's, I suppose, but I think he guessed that it would have ruined my soul. I probably would have turned into one of those self-congratulatory PC professors or one of those self-congratulatory anti-PC professors.

Not that my soul is especially beautiful. I feel twinges of jealousy of friends whose careers are beginning to rise; I feel insinuations of smugness over reports of people with doctorates who can't find jobs. And I am of course hampered to some degree by a dearth of letters after my name, and sometimes blame myself. All (perhaps) pretty venial, but unbecoming nonetheless.

On the other hand I have no college debt, no craving for tenure, and no departmental politics to deal with. I have work that is as rewarding as it gets and no illusions that I am trapped in it when the inevitable frustrations arise.

All of this not-very-interesting autobiographical material is just by way of accounting for my own interest in Boles' proposal. After all, given the widespread dismay over rising tuition (in my state of Washington some tuition costs have risen as much as 28% in two years), and the terrifying lack of job security, or even job prospects, for people with (advanced!) degrees, what exactly is the attraction of a university education?

I am assuming here that one really is aiming to acquire skills, breadth, learning, proficiency, exposure to ideas, experience, accomplishment. Since the university will not guarantee one a future income, and increasingly seems not even to make one more likely to be hired, all practical or mercenary motives seem moot.

Since I am not an aberrantly intelligent observer, I can't be the only person to ask these questions. In fact, the projects of Boles and Khan and others make it all the more likely that in the future (assuming we have a livable planet), the lack of letters after one's name may become more and more irrelevant to one's career(s). Note, though, that the whole point of ZT College is to have a community of fellow-learners with whom to share ideas and support. Self-directed learning (and I truly believe there is no other kind) is still, irreducibly, a conversation. One learns for oneself, but one learns with others. Perhaps philosophy most of all.

ZT College is currently having a (very modest) fundraising campaign in order to get off the ground. For $25 you can be a co-founder.

13 comments:

  1. Very interesting (as often your educational theories). I do not completely share your dissatisfaction with the academia. I tend to meet many interesting students and young researchers, although most of them either leave the academia or become dull and uninteresting as time lapses. In other words: universities are still an attractive place for young intelligences. And alternatives seem not yet comparabely attractive…
    Hence, I tend to hope that it might yet be possible to enhance the academic life from within, although this is risky and often frustrating. (By the way, this is one of my essays:
    http://asiatica.wikispaces.com)

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  2. So Blogspot has been down; this post vanished for a while and with it went Elisa Freschi's comment; I don't know if it will be reposted or not; so I am pasting it in here from my own email:
    -----

    Very interesting (as often your educational theories). I do not completely share your dissatisfaction with the academia. I tend to meet many interesting students and young researchers, although most of them either leave the academia or become dull and uninteresting as time lapses. In other words: universities are still an attractive place for young intelligences. And alternatives seem not yet comparably attractive…
    Hence, I tend to hope that it might yet be possible to enhance the academic life from within, although this is risky and often frustrating. (By the way, this is one of my essays:
    http://asiatica.wikispaces.com )

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  3. Elisa,

    The risk of advocating such projects is that one will appear to be rejecting wholesale everything about the status quo to which they are the alternative. And doubtless I court a little of this risk (with talk about the "devil's bargain," and so on.) In fact, most of my interlocutors are inside the academy; it would be very ungracious of me to suggest that they are living in some kind of unremarked bad faith. My own life could certainly have turned out with me where they are, had I chosen differently. (I doubt that my soul would have been markedly more misaligned than it is now; but probably differently misaligned.)

    That said, I do think that the costs of a university education are fast approaching the utterly unconscionable. Why anyone who wants to, say, read books and talk about them for a living would accept the proposition of going into debt for 20 to 30 years or more is beyond me. (One of my impertinent questions.) Does this just show my poor grasp of the way the market works? I tend to think that it shows how poor a grasp the market has of real values.

    Thanks for the link to your project. I certainly believe that such efforts are worthwhile.

    Sorry your comment disappeared and that it took me so long to respond; blogger was down; your comment got lost by the software and I couldn't get anything posted.

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  4. Nothing to be sorry about. My posts in my blog also disappeared and so did comments… (how did you manage to have them come back?).
    As for money and university: I have been lucky enough to study and work in Europe, mainly in countries where university education is almost free (I remember having paid once 14 E for one semester and I never paid more than 1.500 E for two). I could very easily afford it, by just teaching Latin for a couple of hours a week.

    However, I know about a powerful argument against this kind of low-cost universities, which runs more or less as follows:
    1. Of course, 1000 E per annum are not enough to pay for classes etc. Hence, if you pay that much is only because the university is stately funded.
    2. However, most students are children of wealthy families.
    3. Hence, de facto, poorer people are paying, through their taxes, the university-education of richer ones, which seems paradoxical.
    It would be better, runs the argument, to have an expensive university, with plenty of scholarships for children of non-welthy families.

    The only counter-argument I can think of is that a higher education is an advantage not only for the one who receives it, but for the society in general, so that even a manual worker could be satisfied to have to pay for the education of the child of a lawyer. What do you think?

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  5. Elisa,

    The argument you cite -- that the costs of the university are simply higher than what is coming in via tuition (in such low-tuition settings); therefore the gap must be made up for in state funding which comes from taxes -- of course is valid no matter who the student population is. The counter-argument I would advance would urge the concrete and practical abandonment of step 2: if most students are wealthy, that is something that can change. (I don't see why lots of financial aid for poorer students is any better a lure than affordable tuition in the first place). Of course, the causes into that circumstance bear investigation. How could such a convenient arrangement (for the upper classes) arise? (My inner marxist pricks up his ears.)

    This gets to the gist of your own proposed counter-argument, that higher-ed benefits the whole society. Doubtless this is true in many ways, from the very concrete (a university-educated surgeon can operate on the ailing manual worker), to the general (a liberalizing of intellectual climate, e.g.) Such assertions make me both sympathetic and wary; I am of course a product of such broadly enlightenment-value culture myself; but I wonder how much this "society-as-a-whole" argument glosses over real class distinctions and rifts.

    Of course, ZTC is not a cheap university, but a full-fledged alternative to a university; an alternative, however, which does not assume that no one will ever take (or even pay for) classes (in the portfolio-building of individuals there is no reason at all for classes to not be included); it simply takes as granted that classes are one way, and not the obvious best or only way, to acquire expertise and experience. If such proposals were to take off, seriously, universities might seriously shrink. The intellectual classes would have to do something else besides just "go into teaching." This may seem at odds with my class-warfare rumblings above. I am not absolutely confident that this is ultimately an anti-capitalist programme. Certainly ZTC itself is simply an auto-pedagogical idea, with no commitments to politics aside from questioning a certain configuration within the status quo. One might argue that it is potentially aimed at a culture of entrepreneurship. (I think this would miss something essential, namely that it is really about personal fulfillment, but the argument could be made). But now I am veering off on tangents.

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  6. Unless this sort of education produces a credential that is recognised I can't see the point of it. Reading lists and such are available on the sites of established teachers. Guidance is there, this is the beauty of the internet. Nobody knows if you are a dog with a Phd. or the man on the next bar stool with a theory. You can raise your game by playing with people who are just a little bit better than you or loiter with intent in the shadows of the stoa. Sophists and Peripatetics abound and the curious thing is that the expert who talks up a mighty tourbillon of pansophistry will, if you wait long enough, show the rents in his gown. One such OOO savant lately proved to be an ignoramus about religion and probably should colour that area in his noetic chart with the legend - here be dragons.

    In university you are forced to study things that you don't like. That is the necessary castor oil that obviates the disjunction in the reading of some autodidacts. Everyone at a certain point however has to do the double entry and say 'no, I haven't 20 years for Sanskrit. or there's too much ontology anyway'.

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  7. Interesting point, Ombhurbhuva. Do you mean to say that it is a positive part of education that one is forced to learn also things which are not enjoyable at the beginning, but will end up being useful in the long run (such as learning Sanskrit if one is interested in Indian philoshopy)?

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  8. Elisa:
    I think that the philosophy course that one would design to go with a good survey of Indian thought and a grounding in Sanskrit would be different from the general pure philosophy degree. Sanskrit could be fitted in to the foreign language requirement for First Arts. That might be a way of getting a start in it. In a pure philosophy degree segments of linguistically based philosophy e.g. German/French/Sanskrit etc could be offered as a special subject requirement. In my time my M.A. supervisor had little knowledge or interest in Indian thought and though I wrote my thesis I did not push through to publication. I learnt a lot doing it which was quite enough for me at the time. Learning Sanskrit on ones own can be done I suppose, some people do it. There are courses in India. At what point does the knowledge of the language give an enhanced understanding of the philosophy in that language. After 5, 10, or 15 years of serious study?

    How does your institution teach it?

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  9. om.,

    I concur and rejoice that self-directed learning is possible (and indeed, all the more possible) thanks to the wonder of the web. I think ZTC only aims to be a site where those who engage in such self-directed learning can profitably exchange ideas and support. As to learning things one isn't immediately interested in -- well, I think in order to learn at all, one must awaken interest. This is why grades, or other artificial rewards, were invented-- as surrogate objects for interest (since I can be invested in getting an A even if I don't care much about Greek grammar). While suspending judgment about the prudence of this approach tout court, I do think it often constitutes an extra step that doesn't really need to be there.

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  10. Ombhurbhuva,
    I am so sorry, but I do not know what "first arts" means. As for how many years of Sanskrit one needs in order to enhance one's understanding of philosophical texts, I would say that there is no definite answer. Even a few months will start helping and much depends on one's approach to the texts (there are people who can read Wittgenstein in German and do not care about an author's *linguistic* background). If you were to ask me I would rather focus on deepening my philosophical understanding if I had less than 5 years. 5 years Sanskrit can make you ready to read even difficult texts if you focused on a training in philosophical Sanskrit (without "loosing" your time with kāvya, for instance).
    Last, we teach classes of Sanskrit language for 4 semesters (which is quite a long time). After that, students are expected to be able to read easy Sanskrit texts, such as the Hitopadeśa, the Jātakas and the Bhagavadgītā. Since the 5th semester, students start with philosophical Sanskrit and are asked to take part to Raffaele Torella's and Bruno Lo Turco's advanced classes on, e.g., Kashmiri Śaiva texts.
    What did you write about? Is your thesis still unpublished?

    Skholiast,
    I see your point and we already discussed it. Do you think it applies also to languages, in the case of people who are not primarily interested in languages, but rather in authors who wrote in that language? Does not your approach run the risk of 'creating' people who will take the 'easy' way of talking freely about, e.g., Levinas, without making the effort of learning French? In other words, how can you compensate long-run results with short-term pleasures?

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  11. Elisa:
    First Arts is the first year of a Humanities Degree (in Ireland)in which you do 4 subjects one of which is a Classical or Modern Language. As I was going on to do a Philosophy degree Logic had to be one of the subjects. (Logic, Spanish, English, Maths) Sanskrit could be inserted there.

    No I never published that thesis on ‘Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity in Eastern and Western Thought’ which was really a survey of a handful of authors and not the key to all mythologies which it sounds like.

    That’s very interesting about your approach to Sanskrit. Five years doesn’t sound so bad particularly when many key texts outside Advaita remain untranslated into English.

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  12. Thanks for the link, Skholiast. It sounds like a wonderful idea to me. I think a college humanities education is a very worthwhile and valuable thing; but is it worth $200 000 to a family that makes $50 000 a year? No, it isn't. It is a wonderful thing if people become well rounded in the way that a university humanities education provides; and I think it is easier to do that within a university than without. But it's certainly possible to do it on one's own, and I salute this site for trying to make that possibility easier.

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  13. Bad news about the closure of libraries in America:
    http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/may/18/country-without-libraries/

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