At the end of last week’s podcast, I threw out a few stories about the quirky origins of some of America’s best known universities to demonstrate that the institutions of higher ed we now consider symbols of the mainstream began in ways that seem strikingly familiar in today’s age of educational entrepreneurship.
Technology enabled learning environments such as MOOC Campus/Black Mountain SOLE, or programs that provide an alternative to a traditional four-year degree like Uncollege might seem strange to those who went through a standard residential four-year undergraduate experience sometime in their lives.
But given that mandatory public education is just a century old in the US and the notion of college for anyone who wants to go just recently became a political goal (or at least a slogan), we may want to step back and think about what constitutes a college before deciding what doesn’t belong in that category.
Even things that those who had the experience take for granted (such as residential college as a first experiment in living away from home) today applies to barely half of students enrolled in higher education (the other half being commuters, online learners or non-traditional students such as veterans and older returning students).
And even residential students who might have once left their high school world (and friends) behind when they moved to campus are today bringing those friends with them via Facebook and other social media outlets, further blurring the notion of college as a break from the past.
Looking at what my kids will be studying at the fairly high-powered public high school in the town where I live, I can also see the line between high school and college academics blurring (especially given the number of colleges specializing in vocational subjects such as business and computing, which means high school may be the one place students continue to be exposed to liberal arts subjects such as history and literature).
MOOCs and other free learning resources simply add to a growing list of options of where and how education takes place, given that they provide students of all ages (from young smartypantses bored with high school subjects to those aforementioned non-traditionals who may want to study science, art, engineering or philosophy without having to quit their jobs or pay tens of thousands for the privilege).
When the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he marveled at the scale and variety of civic institutions in the still-new country, a phenomenon that only increased during the 19th century when any individual might be a member of a baseball team, 2-3 marching bands (at least one possibly tied to militia), an amateur theatre company, a church, a volunteer fire department and town meeting.
And even categories that demanded adherence to tradition in the Old World (such as church affiliation) were just one more arena for “start ups” in the New, with the ability to create a new church (or denomination) adding a religious vitality to the young nation that persists to this day.
I mention this history to make the case that potential disruption of the old educational order through new technologies and alternatives might be a sign of health rather than a threat. For de Tocqueville also warned of the threats aristocracy present to common civic engagement. And while our colleges and universities no longer exist just to educate the children of monied bloodlines, as the total tab at some schools creeps towards half a million dollars, all the public money and loans thrown at such expensive institutions will not prevent them from gravitating towards becoming an option only for those who can afford them.
The university as we know it has stood the test of time for close to a Millennium, so the notion that it is in imminent danger of being overthrown is nonsense. But given that universities experienced their greatest period of expansion when the way they were defined became less vs. more strict, I suspect that the interesting and disruptive options we’re seeing in play right now should be at least as productive as previous technologies that made their way into the classroom (the only ones I can think of being the blackboard and the textbook).
I agree. I went to the most mostest colleges, and from what I can see today, already and tomorrow even more, a person can get my education and much better in the ether, including MOOCs, and at used bookstores and libraries and museums and other generally available places of thinking and creativity, plus a few publications. And probably should. The internet is the best printing press ever.
Sure, if a person has the opportunity to go to college and not go into debt for it, I say go. Probably. Maybe not. College is a creepy place in many respects, and not the idyll one might expect. Too many 18 to 22 year olds in one place, for starters.
But setting all that aside, for many people traditional college is not an option from the get go, due to grades, finances, mistakes, self-perception, whatever. So to begin to see a light where a person could in real terms access the greater part of what colleges offer, and have some way of showing they did the work… this is boggling and I am thrilled.
The fly in the ointment is the moment when a person begins to be a thinking person, which is mainly inspired by contact with other thinking people, or one or two very excellent people, which is what college could be good for. But going to college is no guarantee that a student will emerge a thinking person, that they will encounter in a meaningful way anyone who will nudge their life toward bigger things and open the door to lifelong curiosity and education. Especially now that colleges sell themselves as vocational schools.
Most college graduates did not encounter this anyway. College is, and was for many diploma carrying middle and upper management home-owners, four years of avoiding doing more than they must, drinking and fucking and hanging around with equally idiotic twenty year olds, and then arriving safely on the other side of twenty-two, ideally unmarried and childless and with a piece of paper that says they did, on at least thirty occasions, do what was asked of them more or less on time, are able to read and write with some terribly minimal level of competence, and have a passing familiarity with the workings of numbers and the physical world, and a slightly deeper understanding of one subject, their “major”, to prove that they are capable of delving a bit further in one direction or another before their brain shuts off. Essentially a minimal reference to get them their first job out of college, without anyone having to suffer through employing them in the lead-up.
It is thrilling to see a real chink in the wall, opportunities for a person, any person, to become educated, to get an education, and now to be able to in some degree substantiate and prove their studies, regardless of who they are and where they start. It is egalitarian, for the moment, and again, bogglingly brilliant and generous on the part of the schools leading the charge. The more people who have the opportunity to get on the road to a thoughtful and examined life and with the tools to participate in and contribute to the culture and the economy as they will, the better. It is fun just to think about it.