For those looking for more background on this I highly recommend Clayton Christensen's "Disrupting Class, How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns". With a couple of co-authors, Christensen, the HBS prof who authored "Innovator's Dilemma", takes a ground up approach at what it will take for technology-based solutions to challenge the education status quo. Unlike the focus here on higher education, Disrupting Class is primarily concerned with pre-K - 12 but many of the same opportunities apply.
And those who say that the unions will never let it happen, I wouldn't be so sure - Obama and Duncan appear to be little concerned with the unions and the new $4B Race to the Top initiative is a tremendous tool to spark innovation. Remember that the unions fought aggressively (to the point of filing lawsuits in NV against Obama's campaign) for Hilary in the primaries; Obama is not their guy. And while he isn't as reform-minded as, say, Joel Klein, Duncan's speech to the NEA would suggest that he's not willing to pander to them either.
Adrian Gabriel
· 4 months ago
I wish some of the underlying assumptions about “Education” would change. For one thing, why is it assumed that education is something you get from someone else rather than something you get for yourself? There's a fundamental difference there. However, the two have become synonymous in modernity. Doing something for yourself—don’t even think about doing something for your SELF—means going to school and following someone else's dictates about what is or is not true; factual; right; worthy. We know we are in agreement because we have the test scores and grades to prove it.
I’m here to tell you getting good grades is not a skill and neither is doing well on tests. After college, a great many individuals find themselves in the position of having few marketable real-world skills. They begin at low-level, marginal jobs that they could have just as easily done when they were in 9th grade. They work their way up from there. Some feel obligated to get an advanced degree and start doing work they were already capable of doing, but the role called for an advanced degree.
True skill mastery, knowledge, and understanding are easily measured. It’s either there or it’s not. I can look up virtually any fact if I have an internet connection. I can cross-reference the fact. I can look up historical context. I can find differing viewpoints. Our “Education” system has recast education as a series of closed-book tests to measure how the student compares to “standards.” Knowledge is reduced to discreet pieces of information drilled and tested at pre-defined intervals. These tests—the “good “kids are labeled “gifted” and the bad ones are labeled “special”—then determine what social and economic reality awaits the soon-to-be adults.
With everyone telling you how “special” you are or how “gifted” you are, why bother trying to divine your own self worth? So, the kids go play their video games. Yet, the much-maligned video game harbors a secret about learning that "Education" does not want you to know. It’s actually very easy if you’re motivated to do it.
Just think of the facility with which most children pick up the video game. There’s the hardware, certainly. Kids learn the purposes of the buttons and joysticks; determine how the cables connect and how to power on the system. Then there’s the software. They read and interact with the menu; make decisions about maximizing rewards and minimizing losses; concentrate for hours at a time on achieving their goals. The funny thing is that most of them learned by watching and then picking it up on their own. Most instruction comes from informal requests when they are stuck or don’t understand how something works. A long explanation is never necessary. This is how it works. Go. These are not simple concepts. The stereotypical baby boomer or senior has very little facility with learning video games.
But that’s just kid’s stuff. Schools, colleges, and universities teach what is worthy of learning.
Schools, colleges, and universities also have contracts with publishers—there are only really four: McGraw-Hill, Reed Elsevier, Houghton Mifflin, and Pearson—and those publishers have a strong lobby arm called the Association of American Publishers. You know textbooks are one seventh of the American publishing market? These people have mouths to feed, you know?
And if there are not standard texts, how can we have standardized tests? Educational Testing Service (ETS) is a “non-profit” with revenues of nearly $900 million a year sitting on a 376-acre campus in Princeton, New Jersey—one in five employees has a PhD. It provides the GRE and SAT as well as many state-run exams, including the California Standardized Test and High School Exit Exam. It has international branches and for-profit branches that do things like sell study guides for the GRE and SAT. ETS is one of only three companies that provide testing solutions—along with ACT and the College Board. Of course, the publishers have carved out a slice of the testing pie for themselves as well.
And what if I told you that our “Education” system actually does nothing to help the individual, but rather is only really focused on maintaining the social status quo? You see, Prussia, the leading European state until they lost in World War I, the Hitler Youth, and today’s children all have something in common: their education. It’s the same basic model. The Prussians invented it. We imported it, in 1852. The “Father of American Public Education” Horace Mann and other influential men such as Edward Everett—Massachusetts Governor when Mann was appointed head of the newly formed Board of Education in 1837 and the first American to receive a PhD, in Prussia—were so enamored that it just had to be implemented.
Horace Mann thought that schooling should be compulsory for all children. Mann once said, “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.” Unfortunately, the model he picked was designed specifically to subjugate the will of the individual to the will of the state.
The seed of the Prussian system was planted when Napoleon’s forces defeated the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena in 1806. Speaking in occupied Berlin as the head of the department of philosophy in 1807, German philosopher Johann Fichte called for an end to education that catered to individualistic self-seeking. Fichte said the state’s purposes should take precedence to a degree that the citizenry is forged “into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by a common interest.”
Fichte justified the German people’s “primordial” place among cultures because of its dynamic, living language—with only the Greeks comparable. The dead Latinized language of the French was only indicative of their inferiority. Only someone thinking in the German language could have a “true philosophy.” A strict educational adherence to the idea of German superiority would be “exalted to the ideal.” If not, “legislation should consequently maintain a high standard of severity.”
You could see how the ruling class—Prussia was a monarchy—would think this was a smashing idea. In fact, the National Socialists liked Ficthe a lot as well. In 1932, Ernst Bergmann wrote that, “It is in fact not unjustified to look at Fichte as the first great forerunner of National Socialism and even as a National Socialist.”
By the time Mann visited Prussia in the 1840s, their education system was the envy of the west. Schulpflichtigkeit—school-duty or school-obligation—was already ingrained into the national character. The children were compelled to attend school from the ages of five to fourteen. The consequences were severe for parents who did not comply with the attendance laws. Mann discounted the Prussian model’s authoritarian nature. However, the system’s critics, Mann conceded, indicted “the whole plan of education in Prussia, as being not only designed to produce, but as actually producing a spirit of blind acquiescence to arbitrary power.”
The beauty of the Prussian model is that it can accommodate and serve any political or economic philosophy. Once implemented in the United States, the system was molded to serve the purposes of corporate capitalism.
“Education” tells us that the way to success in our capitalistic society is to get as much schooling as possible so you can get a job. Capitalism, simply defined, is the private ownership of capital. The private accumulation of capital, historically, does not work well for the wage earner.
Competition is one of the greatest impediments to the private accumulation of capital. Is there a better way to ensure a lack of competition than by taking the most impressionable, energetic, inventive, easily mobilized segment of the population and subjecting them to a steady stream of carrot and stick exercises and then telling them that the only way to be successful in life is to conform to the notion that they’re eventually going to make a living by being subjected to someone else’s carrots and sticks?
According to John Taylor Gatto in “Weapons of Mass Instruction,” more private money was spent on U.S. education “reform” in the first part of the twentieth century than public funds. John D. Rockefeller—the wealthiest historical figure—had a place at the table. So did our friend Andrew Carnegie. There cannot be too many Carnegies about, you know? Centralization and standardization were beginning to take shape. By 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act, despite relieving desperate conditions for many workers, effectively handed control of children to the schools. The glorification of childhood became orthodoxy.
Right now, the top one percent of households in the United States controls about a third of the wealth. This is roughly the same percentage as 1933, 1965, or 1989. From 1983 to 2004, the bottom 80 percent of U.S. households have seen their share of net worth—assets minus debt—drop from 18.7% to 15.3%.
There have always been, and continue to be, pockets of resistance. However, each successive “reform” only brings more centralization and more standardization. More bureaucracy means more politics. Palms are greased and favors are called in. The budgets continue to grow. Profitability affects curriculum.
What do you think mainstream media has to say about all of this?
McGraw-Hill owns Standard & Poor's and Business Week. Pearson owns Penguin/Putnam, Financial Times, and The Economist. Prentice Hall and Scott Foresman are also imprints. Reed Elsevier owns Harcourt Education and myriad other publications including Publishers Weekly and Variety. Vivendi Universal briefly owned Houghton Mifflin.
Nevermind. The publishers are the mainstream media.
We are now so inculcated, so inured to schooling that we mistake it for real education, learning, skill mastery, and accomplishment. There's no debating the point. Official orthodoxy demands it.
“Education” is free as we speak. You just have to challenge your assumptions about what “it” is.
nabblogger
· 4 months ago
Not until one of them gets recognized enough to make it to the top 100 list.
universityparent
· 4 months ago
I don't agree with this article at all. I think that universities should continue to make resources available in areas such as iTunesU & youtube/edu - but one of the most important parts of the college experience is actually interacting with others. The most effective classes smoothly blend in-person & online interactions.
Josh Catone
· 4 months ago
I didn't mean to argue that there is no value in face-to-face education, or that the university system will be replaced by online courses. What I'm talking about is how social media can drive the cost of education down far enough to point where lower income students can have the chance to get a quality education that was previous unavailable to them.
This is social media as an equalizer.
universityparent
· 4 months ago
You write, "...social media can drastically reduce much of the overhead involved with higher education — such as administrative costs and even the campus itself." If you shut down campuses, what forums will exist for these interactions to occur? Most costs driving tuition increases like dining facilities, new gyms and concert halls - cannot be reduced by an increase in social media use - these are non-academic tuition drivers that universities purchase to compete with each other. Yes, you can watch a MIT lecture on You Tube - but then what?
leliathomas
· 4 months ago
"If you shut down campuses, what forums will exist for these interactions to occur?"
So the way you're talking to someone over the Internet now doesn't count as a form of interaction?
If it's truly about learning, dining facilities and gymnasiums really shouldn't come into the equation, unless we're talking about "party schools."
Josh Catone
· 4 months ago
But I'm not saying we should shut down any campuses. The point is that social media, open source software, and free/CC-licensed course materials are allowing universities like U. of the People to potentially deliver a high quality education without the need for a campus -- which means they can offer that education at a very low cost to people who couldn't otherwise afford it.
I'm not arguing that these methods and tools will replace MIT and Stanford and other traditional institutes of higher learning. Or even that they'll drastically reduce the cost of that model of education (though they probably could reduce the cost a measurable amount). But rather that social media tools are allowing the cost of education to be driven down to the point where people could in theory get a high quality education for free or nearly free.
Ola Rynge
· 4 months ago
Well, some countries already have understand that a well educated population is good for the country and are providing tuition for free at the Universities. Some countries even let foreigners study for free, like Sweden (http://www.studyinsweden.se)...
I do however support the online educational efforts of the parties in this post, as well as http://www.ted.com.
Robert Dagnall
· 4 months ago
The cost of education should include the time invested as well, or 'opportunity cost' of that education. It'll never be zero--unless someone develops a way to download knowledge instantaneously, Matrix-style. "Whoa."
keith
· 4 months ago
While I think there are definitely some interesting technological innovations that will potentially provide more access to higher education to broader populations, I also worry about the lack of face-to-face interactions that are an indispensable part of the learning process. I would like to see innovations that problem-solve around issues of FULL access to higher education (and quality k-12 education for that matter) for low-income communities in the US and around the world. This includes opportunities for learning that necessitate physical learning communities that dominant groups will surely continue to build for themselves. We also need to emphasize the merits of education that go beyond the values of human capital production, but that understand the important social benefits that would inevitably stem from system of true equal access and opportunity. Some of the things in the this article can help provide more access to real, live campuses or learning communities by lifting some economic barriers (i.e. free textbooks, or even MIT lectures that a group of people might be able to use to learn from together, collectively!)...but I fear that those with the resources to take these innovations to scale will focus their energies around notions of campus-free learning to the detriment of those whose only economical option might be such incomplete learning opportunities, thus dangerously perpetuating a tiered system anyway.
dm60462
· 4 months ago
"...drastically reduce much of the overhead involved ... such as administrative costs ..."
IMPOSSIBLE! The unions will fight to the death to keep their administrative positions, and even more foreboding is the patronage armies in places like Chicago. They will NEVER allow overhead to be trimmed. These jobs represent too much power held by aldercreatures and their like who use them to secure "donations" (bribes) in exchange for cushy no-work jobs. Have you learned nothing from Rod Blagojevich?
chi
· 4 months ago
Free education is wonderful, however, higher education doesn't only revolve around the transfer of knowledge. Institutions are also setup to certify and give accredit the quality of material an individual is able to retain and apply after learning it. Automated tests are possible solutions, but automation can only go so far. Law or medical exams involving complicated logical essays, or oral exams for a PhD defense simply cannot be evaluated by a machine. People are hired to create and evaluate these exams. Costs associated to this also act as a barrier to entry.
It is a great idea to say that education will be free, and that everyone can learn from an open source website. However, the cost around accreditation & evaluation still needs to be addressed.
Paul Richardson
· 4 months ago
chi is absoluttely right. Universities will always have something to sell, namely degrees. MIT's Open Courseware Inititiative demonstrated an understanding on their part that the value of their courses lay not in the content but somewhere else. Arguably this is primarily in the accreditation. As chi has pointed out, machines cannot currently assess all the necesssary skills for a degree. Also, as some other respondents have asserted, much of the value of a degree course lies in the interaction (student-student and student-teacher). While I don't agree that this requires a campus (not in all subjects, anyway), I think that it does always require a teacher - at least I haven't seen any exceptions to his yet (the UK Open University's OpenLearn comes as close as any). However, in plenty of online courses the teacher mediation happens mostly or entirely online. One thing that you can safely assume is that teachers will require payment for their services. Of course, a free online university is perfectly possible, but the costs will have to be transeferred elsewhere. (e.g. Government subsidy, advertising, sale of related products, etc, etc.).
Virtual Miss Friday
· 4 months ago
This is great. I truly believe a lot of students will benefit from this. This will not only help them learn, but more importantly it provides hope for a brighter future.
Jean-Francois Belisle
· 4 months ago
Thanks for this post, I enjoyed reading it but I personally think that “free” is a metaphor and that the structure costs of education should be taken in consideration. The idea of “free” in education is nothing new. Top tier universities are already “free” for top students. In some top tier universities, up to 80% of students get their tuition fees paid by the university via scholarships, so tuition fees are as we can say "free" for them. These universities get part of their revenues via private fundraising. Thus, the idea of “free” tuition fees for universities is a metaphor. With the recession, we are still far from these so-called “free universities” in terms of tuitions fees, and the growth in tuition fees for top tier Universities will continue to raise for sure.
idnapper
· 4 months ago
I think we are about ready for EVERYTHING to be FREE but in the meantime, What about intellectual property and trade secrets etc these are knowledge in a rival good format. It's easy enough to mine what's already in the public domain but if there are no revenue streams to the producers of new knowledge, how will they survive?
Lori Hoeck
· 4 months ago
You write: " ... the nature of information is such that it can be created once at cost and distributed and consumed over and over again for free."
Mary Pettibone Poole: "To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it, requires brains."
Heaven help us if higher education get's boiled down to a few online educational sources.
film izle
· 4 months ago
thank you..
iTbay
· 4 months ago
The #economics of #education will never approach zero as it always takes time to become educated. However, that time is decreasing fast given the abundance of resources out there. Without a doubt, it is the PENSIONS & wages of professors that R greatly at risk. Beyond the cost elements, the research & innovation that is produced is one's Government issue as Universities are a major catalyst of generating output & revenue for a nation.
See the thing is, when I went to University, I supplemented a lot of my education with internet resources which people do today - so it didnt really matter who my profs were cuz I would just corroborate what they were saying on the internet and even go above and beyond. The problem with no having an education is the EXPERIENCE, the struggle, the face to face - the independence...a lot of learning comes from this.
However, all in all, the cost of information, technology AND education, will approach zero - it is the knowledge and the time it takes one to harness such value that will make one a differentiator in the future, not the educational instuition one has attended - in the past, one's ability to question can now be answered within a matter of seconds compared to hrs with a prof per an email. All in all, these institutions R as risk per Singularity!
I was shocked when I discovered the Opencourseware MIT resources 6 mths ago! A lot of the countries from the EAST, who R hungry for knowledge, will utilize these resources.
Great article nonetheless.
Jamie
· 4 months ago
Textbooks (or their electronic counterparts) will always cost something to update. Nothing is for free and someone always has to pay. These online universities will always cost something to someone if only to insure that the information that they are sharing is correct and up to date. I'm sure Obama will get the american taxpayer to pay for his U of the People. Just watch--When MIT starts handing out degrees to online students--and they will eventually-- it's not going to be free.
iTbay
· 4 months ago
Hi Jamie,
Textbooks R dead like the paper mills that develop them. Wikis can absolutely kill what ur describing; however, these Universities will have to adapt and differentiate in order to ensure that their degrees have value that the market recognizes.
Robert Dagnall
· 4 months ago
Wikis are not a reliable source. Any idiot can alter the information there, and many idiots do. They might be a starting point, or good for a quick fix for curiosity, but research and knowledge requires reliable sources.
iTbay
· 4 months ago
Robert,
#University - - - I agree with you in that #Research, and the building blocks of #knowledge it creates, is an asset which must be protected to ensure its value. The only way to do this is through verifiable sources which is the essence of reliability. However, Wikis can be private and stored on University Servers, however, this limits innovation (it limits something called crowd sourcing which a lot of Twitter users are developing intelligence by harnessing the crowd). Another alternative would be to have the Wikis on networked servers through a collective agreement with a group of Universities - harnesses a taste of the crowd. The taste of the crowd can then be supplemented with new research that can create new innovations. Think about how Google does it: there are like a Big University which uses its search engines to collect information and create new products with the research papers it develops (examine: @GoogleResearch on Twitter) - I would also advice to look at who they follow to investigate how they obtain their intelligence. Above all, the only that a University must obtain value in the future is to provide their resources for close to free and HARNESS this new intelligence these students may provide to the institution which can convert into research products for new innovations. Once the information has been obtained from the crowd, research can be performed to create reliable sources. Now Wikis are not the only alternative, there are many others...
Fred
· 4 months ago
This is the dumbest thing I've seen in the past ten minutes. Since when does the planet Earth equate with the United Shits of America?
Sandrine Prom Tep
· 4 months ago
I very well understand the point you are trying to make and I truly support access to "free" education - regardless of all the hidden costs of free education on all sides...but one thing I am sure of, is that social network - one of the very crucial thing education comes with - will never come for "free" or part of the "free bundle"...I am talking about the student's alma matter's belonging and what it does truly mean in professional life...How worth is it to be one of Havard's alumni? Do you really think that any OpenCourseWare will come along with such tacit exclusive VIP membership? No matter how free education will become with social media or anything else, its true monetizable value relies on how much and how easy your University's student social network can be converted into flat right money...
The IT Skeptic
· 4 months ago
What idealistic twaddle. Real education is the formal and informal interaction of intellects. Socual media and Web is so far away from being an effective forum for learning compared to a campus as to be just silly. I've done six years of real university on-campus and I've done remote adult learning from a university. Remote is crap. We can shovel low grade pap at people over the internet but they'll never properly understand the subject, nor develop their intellect. then again developing intellect is so out of fashion nowadays in post-modernist education perhaps nobody will notice the difference
I"m an OCW junkie. MITWorld.MIT.edu is where it's AT, cuz.
smm
· 4 months ago
*Sigh* As an equity in education researcher, I am ALL for making quality education available for all people. But c'mon, really? There's a familiar adage in the ed field: Everybody thinks they know all about education because they've been through it themselves. But it's not that simple!
If this were a socialist nation, sure that would be possible (ahem, Sweden). But in our society, ideally, education should provides everyone with opportunity that isn't available otherwise and can be an equalizer. Without a doubt, the cost of higher ed should decrease but for the US to remain a competitive nation, it should continue to be high quality. If the system were totally free, how would we provide excellent instruction? Give the teachers some love. Teaching requires training, research, experience, and an impetus for improvement. Anyone can go read stuff online, take a test, and think they've mastered material, but true understanding of subject matter doesn't typically happen that way, if only for a lack of different perspectives.
I know many people think of teachers and professors as space fillers but that's not the case (as I'm sure you'd realize if you think back on both good and bad educators you've had yourself). In all of my study, I've never seen it demonstrated that online instruction is a widespread, viable option...and not because educators are saving their asses (with the "unions" protecting "no-work jobs": enjoying your education, dm60462?). The sharing of information from a knowledgeable source and further expression between a variety of individuals makes mental changes possible. To put it all online for free just dumbs down the system. And dumbs down what it truly takes to improve lives of the lower income students you think this would help.
pimpam
· 4 months ago
It's awesome stuff, just think of all the people who could profit from this! Additional requirement to make this work however, is that scientific articles should become more freely available as well. (one full scientific article costs you 30 US on eg science direct). So it's great for a kid in India to be able to watch MIT courses, but if you can't access the reading material, you're unable to enjoy this service to the fullest.
newmediahire
· 4 months ago
This is an INCREDIBLE idea! This OpenCourseWare is genius. Although the costs are bit a high to implement, it allows those who all over the world who are the most skilled in the course material to add to it. Completely different than your standard classroom course. I see this catching on especially in information technology type courses and medical where the content changes while you are sitting right there. I also agree with Josh that it will allow those (especially with the recession) who are unable to afford your classroom course to participate. Using the web for higher learning is a must given the world wide reach and the ability to connect with those who are specialists in that field. You are getting A LOT more than a price of a course.
Roland Hesz
· 4 months ago
Great idea. Remove physical presence of other people, remove the possibility of learning and improving people skills by letting kids to learn from home.
I am sorry, but going to the campus, actually meeting the other students - especially those we don't like -, having to deal with them - especially with those we don't like -, having a SOCIAL life IS one of the most important parts of the education.
I do agree, math can be learned online. People can't. So if we move the education online we will lose a lot. We may will have cheaper - but definitely not zero cost - education, but it won't worth that much.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but not as the main way for educate people. It can be great for secondary degrees and such. But I would like to see people actually learn the most important lessons, not only the technically neccessary ones.
Daniela
· 4 months ago
Thanks for the article. Stop over at our web page to see the new site we launched on May 19, 2009. www.uopeople.org. Please also note- all fees have been waived (exam processing fees & registrations fees) for the first 2 terms. We have a new student blog as well- www.universityofthepeople.wordpress.com. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook or My Space or MTVThink etc...we are on all social networks working hard to share the word to potential students all over the world. Because education should be a right, not a privilege.
Lyaeus
· 4 months ago
The reason it costs MIT so much – and anyone else trying to put courses online, is not the technology needed to record it, it’s the time wasted getting clearance to use copyrighted information from the big publishers. The serials crisis http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/... illuminates the publishers’ stranglehold in all areas of academic freedom and openness, but though they’ve cut some deal with MIT (for the PR, one suspects), until the unis and the academics wise up this will continue. An alternative is students filming their own lectures on their mobiles and sharing it themselves. Let the publishers sue the students.
ldgregg
· 4 months ago
Great article! Yes, the cost of education, like many things, should decrease as technology is leveraged.
peterpappas
· 4 months ago
As the marginal cost of information (and learning) approaches zero, our students will need to be able to better process and critically evaluate information. Demand for information is rather inelastic - as the price drops to zero, you don't have any additional time in the day. Your readers might like some of my tech posts at: http://peterpappas.blogs.com/copy_paste/tech/
Author, No Sucker Left Behind
· 4 months ago
Education is already free, especially when you consider these online tools as well as regular libraries. The problem is that employers won't recognize these educational tools. Colleges do not have a monopoly on knowledge, but they do have a monoploy on credentials that employers value. And that is the barrier that needs to be breached.
Jean-Francois Belisle
· 4 months ago
Thanks for the intriguing article and for starting an interesting debate. I just posted on my blog (http://bit.ly/4tVqDo) a reply explaining why in the future education costs will not be zero.
ramobile
· 3 months ago
Stupidity will save you from going mad. One thing you have to realize that tutoring is at the same time creating teaching and learning systems. That is to say, teaching systems are in progress at all times. People involved in creating and developing such systems won't work for free. Teachers are not that stupid so that they start giving out their experience, which they have been accumulating for many years.
Parag Shah
· 3 months ago
Nice post. There is a lot of effort going into creating online universities. However, I do not think this will make traditional universities obsolote. But it will definitely change the nature of what colleges offer.
With effective online courses, colleges may change into offering physical places for labs, and for discussion oriented knowledge exchange (seminars, guest lectures, etc).
Barbara Blake Hannah
· 3 months ago
I homeschooled my son (born 1985) in Jamaica using books, selected TV and especially the computer. At the age of 13 in 1988 he was appointed Youth Technology Consultant to the Jamaican government. This article confirms what I learned through experience: educating a child is made easy by the Age of Technology and the ability to share information in so many digital formats. The MIT One Hundred Dollar Computer project that puts internet-ready laptops in the hands of students in developing countries, brings the possibility of Universal FREE Education closer to reality.
Barbara Blake Hannah
· 3 months ago
Correcting the date of my son's appointment .... 1998, not 1988....
All Comments
For those looking for more background on this I highly recommend Clayton Christensen's "Disrupting Class, How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns". With a couple of co-authors, Christensen, the HBS prof who authored "Innovator's Dilemma", takes a ground up approach at what it will take for technology-based solutions to challenge the education status quo. Unlike the focus here on higher education, Disrupting Class is primarily concerned with pre-K - 12 but many of the same opportunities apply.
And those who say that the unions will never let it happen, I wouldn't be so sure - Obama and Duncan appear to be little concerned with the unions and the new $4B Race to the Top initiative is a tremendous tool to spark innovation. Remember that the unions fought aggressively (to the point of filing lawsuits in NV against Obama's campaign) for Hilary in the primaries; Obama is not their guy. And while he isn't as reform-minded as, say, Joel Klein, Duncan's speech to the NEA would suggest that he's not willing to pander to them either.
I’m here to tell you getting good grades is not a skill and neither is doing well on tests. After college, a great many individuals find themselves in the position of having few marketable real-world skills. They begin at low-level, marginal jobs that they could have just as easily done when they were in 9th grade. They work their way up from there. Some feel obligated to get an advanced degree and start doing work they were already capable of doing, but the role called for an advanced degree.
True skill mastery, knowledge, and understanding are easily measured. It’s either there or it’s not. I can look up virtually any fact if I have an internet connection. I can cross-reference the fact. I can look up historical context. I can find differing viewpoints. Our “Education” system has recast education as a series of closed-book tests to measure how the student compares to “standards.” Knowledge is reduced to discreet pieces of information drilled and tested at pre-defined intervals. These tests—the “good “kids are labeled “gifted” and the bad ones are labeled “special”—then determine what social and economic reality awaits the soon-to-be adults.
With everyone telling you how “special” you are or how “gifted” you are, why bother trying to divine your own self worth? So, the kids go play their video games. Yet, the much-maligned video game harbors a secret about learning that "Education" does not want you to know. It’s actually very easy if you’re motivated to do it.
Just think of the facility with which most children pick up the video game. There’s the hardware, certainly. Kids learn the purposes of the buttons and joysticks; determine how the cables connect and how to power on the system. Then there’s the software. They read and interact with the menu; make decisions about maximizing rewards and minimizing losses; concentrate for hours at a time on achieving their goals. The funny thing is that most of them learned by watching and then picking it up on their own. Most instruction comes from informal requests when they are stuck or don’t understand how something works. A long explanation is never necessary. This is how it works. Go. These are not simple concepts. The stereotypical baby boomer or senior has very little facility with learning video games.
But that’s just kid’s stuff. Schools, colleges, and universities teach what is worthy of learning.
Schools, colleges, and universities also have contracts with publishers—there are only really four: McGraw-Hill, Reed Elsevier, Houghton Mifflin, and Pearson—and those publishers have a strong lobby arm called the Association of American Publishers. You know textbooks are one seventh of the American publishing market? These people have mouths to feed, you know?
And if there are not standard texts, how can we have standardized tests? Educational Testing Service (ETS) is a “non-profit” with revenues of nearly $900 million a year sitting on a 376-acre campus in Princeton, New Jersey—one in five employees has a PhD. It provides the GRE and SAT as well as many state-run exams, including the California Standardized Test and High School Exit Exam. It has international branches and for-profit branches that do things like sell study guides for the GRE and SAT. ETS is one of only three companies that provide testing solutions—along with ACT and the College Board. Of course, the publishers have carved out a slice of the testing pie for themselves as well.
And what if I told you that our “Education” system actually does nothing to help the individual, but rather is only really focused on maintaining the social status quo? You see, Prussia, the leading European state until they lost in World War I, the Hitler Youth, and today’s children all have something in common: their education. It’s the same basic model. The Prussians invented it. We imported it, in 1852. The “Father of American Public Education” Horace Mann and other influential men such as Edward Everett—Massachusetts Governor when Mann was appointed head of the newly formed Board of Education in 1837 and the first American to receive a PhD, in Prussia—were so enamored that it just had to be implemented.
Horace Mann thought that schooling should be compulsory for all children. Mann once said, “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.” Unfortunately, the model he picked was designed specifically to subjugate the will of the individual to the will of the state.
The seed of the Prussian system was planted when Napoleon’s forces defeated the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena in 1806. Speaking in occupied Berlin as the head of the department of philosophy in 1807, German philosopher Johann Fichte called for an end to education that catered to individualistic self-seeking. Fichte said the state’s purposes should take precedence to a degree that the citizenry is forged “into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by a common interest.”
Fichte justified the German people’s “primordial” place among cultures because of its dynamic, living language—with only the Greeks comparable. The dead Latinized language of the French was only indicative of their inferiority. Only someone thinking in the German language could have a “true philosophy.” A strict educational adherence to the idea of German superiority would be “exalted to the ideal.” If not, “legislation should consequently maintain a high standard of severity.”
You could see how the ruling class—Prussia was a monarchy—would think this was a smashing idea. In fact, the National Socialists liked Ficthe a lot as well. In 1932, Ernst Bergmann wrote that, “It is in fact not unjustified to look at Fichte as the first great forerunner of National Socialism and even as a National Socialist.”
By the time Mann visited Prussia in the 1840s, their education system was the envy of the west. Schulpflichtigkeit—school-duty or school-obligation—was already ingrained into the national character. The children were compelled to attend school from the ages of five to fourteen. The consequences were severe for parents who did not comply with the attendance laws. Mann discounted the Prussian model’s authoritarian nature. However, the system’s critics, Mann conceded, indicted “the whole plan of education in Prussia, as being not only designed to produce, but as actually producing a spirit of blind acquiescence to arbitrary power.”
The beauty of the Prussian model is that it can accommodate and serve any political or economic philosophy. Once implemented in the United States, the system was molded to serve the purposes of corporate capitalism.
“Education” tells us that the way to success in our capitalistic society is to get as much schooling as possible so you can get a job. Capitalism, simply defined, is the private ownership of capital. The private accumulation of capital, historically, does not work well for the wage earner.
Competition is one of the greatest impediments to the private accumulation of capital. Is there a better way to ensure a lack of competition than by taking the most impressionable, energetic, inventive, easily mobilized segment of the population and subjecting them to a steady stream of carrot and stick exercises and then telling them that the only way to be successful in life is to conform to the notion that they’re eventually going to make a living by being subjected to someone else’s carrots and sticks?
According to John Taylor Gatto in “Weapons of Mass Instruction,” more private money was spent on U.S. education “reform” in the first part of the twentieth century than public funds. John D. Rockefeller—the wealthiest historical figure—had a place at the table. So did our friend Andrew Carnegie. There cannot be too many Carnegies about, you know? Centralization and standardization were beginning to take shape. By 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act, despite relieving desperate conditions for many workers, effectively handed control of children to the schools. The glorification of childhood became orthodoxy.
Right now, the top one percent of households in the United States controls about a third of the wealth. This is roughly the same percentage as 1933, 1965, or 1989. From 1983 to 2004, the bottom 80 percent of U.S. households have seen their share of net worth—assets minus debt—drop from 18.7% to 15.3%.
There have always been, and continue to be, pockets of resistance. However, each successive “reform” only brings more centralization and more standardization. More bureaucracy means more politics. Palms are greased and favors are called in. The budgets continue to grow. Profitability affects curriculum.
What do you think mainstream media has to say about all of this?
McGraw-Hill owns Standard & Poor's and Business Week. Pearson owns Penguin/Putnam, Financial Times, and The Economist. Prentice Hall and Scott Foresman are also imprints. Reed Elsevier owns Harcourt Education and myriad other publications including Publishers Weekly and Variety. Vivendi Universal briefly owned Houghton Mifflin.
Nevermind. The publishers are the mainstream media.
We are now so inculcated, so inured to schooling that we mistake it for real education, learning, skill mastery, and accomplishment. There's no debating the point. Official orthodoxy demands it.
“Education” is free as we speak. You just have to challenge your assumptions about what “it” is.
This is social media as an equalizer.
So the way you're talking to someone over the Internet now doesn't count as a form of interaction?
If it's truly about learning, dining facilities and gymnasiums really shouldn't come into the equation, unless we're talking about "party schools."
I'm not arguing that these methods and tools will replace MIT and Stanford and other traditional institutes of higher learning. Or even that they'll drastically reduce the cost of that model of education (though they probably could reduce the cost a measurable amount). But rather that social media tools are allowing the cost of education to be driven down to the point where people could in theory get a high quality education for free or nearly free.
I do however support the online educational efforts of the parties in this post, as well as http://www.ted.com.
IMPOSSIBLE! The unions will fight to the death to keep their administrative positions, and even more foreboding is the patronage armies in places like Chicago. They will NEVER allow overhead to be trimmed. These jobs represent too much power held by aldercreatures and their like who use them to secure "donations" (bribes) in exchange for cushy no-work jobs. Have you learned nothing from Rod Blagojevich?
It is a great idea to say that education will be free, and that everyone can learn from an open source website. However, the cost around accreditation & evaluation still needs to be addressed.
Mary Pettibone Poole: "To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,
requires brains."
Heaven help us if higher education get's boiled down to a few online educational sources.
Without a doubt, it is the PENSIONS & wages of professors that R greatly at risk. Beyond the cost elements, the research & innovation that is produced is one's Government issue as Universities are a major catalyst of generating output & revenue for a nation.
The University I Graduated from, Lakehead University, did this article a couple of years ago: http://www.benedictionblogson.com/2006/08/30/no...
See the thing is, when I went to University, I supplemented a lot of my education with internet resources which people do today - so it didnt really matter who my profs were cuz I would just corroborate what they were saying on the internet and even go above and beyond. The problem with no having an education is the EXPERIENCE, the struggle, the face to face - the independence...a lot of learning comes from this.
However, all in all, the cost of information, technology AND education, will approach zero - it is the knowledge and the time it takes one to harness such value that will make one a differentiator in the future, not the educational instuition one has attended - in the past, one's ability to question can now be answered within a matter of seconds compared to hrs with a prof per an email. All in all, these institutions R as risk per Singularity!
I was shocked when I discovered the Opencourseware MIT resources 6 mths ago! A lot of the countries from the EAST, who R hungry for knowledge, will utilize these resources.
Great article nonetheless.
Textbooks R dead like the paper mills that develop them. Wikis can absolutely kill what ur describing; however, these Universities will have to adapt and differentiate in order to ensure that their degrees have value that the market recognizes.
#University - - - I agree with you in that #Research, and the building blocks of #knowledge it creates, is an asset which must be protected to ensure its value. The only way to do this is through verifiable sources which is the essence of reliability.
However, Wikis can be private and stored on University Servers, however, this limits innovation (it limits something called crowd sourcing which a lot of Twitter users are developing intelligence by harnessing the crowd). Another alternative would be to have the Wikis on networked servers through a collective agreement with a group of Universities - harnesses a taste of the crowd. The taste of the crowd can then be supplemented with new research that can create new innovations. Think about how Google does it: there are like a Big University which uses its search engines to collect information and create new products with the research papers it develops (examine: @GoogleResearch on Twitter) - I would also advice to look at who they follow to investigate how they obtain their intelligence.
Above all, the only that a University must obtain value in the future is to provide their resources for close to free and HARNESS this new intelligence these students may provide to the institution which can convert into research products for new innovations.
Once the information has been obtained from the crowd, research can be performed to create reliable sources.
Now Wikis are not the only alternative, there are many others...
I've done six years of real university on-campus and I've done remote adult learning from a university. Remote is crap.
We can shovel low grade pap at people over the internet but they'll never properly understand the subject, nor develop their intellect. then again developing intellect is so out of fashion nowadays in post-modernist education perhaps nobody will notice the difference
http://blog.iseesystems.com/education/physics-f...
If this were a socialist nation, sure that would be possible (ahem, Sweden). But in our society, ideally, education should provides everyone with opportunity that isn't available otherwise and can be an equalizer. Without a doubt, the cost of higher ed should decrease but for the US to remain a competitive nation, it should continue to be high quality. If the system were totally free, how would we provide excellent instruction? Give the teachers some love. Teaching requires training, research, experience, and an impetus for improvement. Anyone can go read stuff online, take a test, and think they've mastered material, but true understanding of subject matter doesn't typically happen that way, if only for a lack of different perspectives.
I know many people think of teachers and professors as space fillers but that's not the case (as I'm sure you'd realize if you think back on both good and bad educators you've had yourself). In all of my study, I've never seen it demonstrated that online instruction is a widespread, viable option...and not because educators are saving their asses (with the "unions" protecting "no-work jobs": enjoying your education, dm60462?). The sharing of information from a knowledgeable source and further expression between a variety of individuals makes mental changes possible. To put it all online for free just dumbs down the system. And dumbs down what it truly takes to improve lives of the lower income students you think this would help.
I am sorry, but going to the campus, actually meeting the other students - especially those we don't like -, having to deal with them - especially with those we don't like -, having a SOCIAL life IS one of the most important parts of the education.
I do agree, math can be learned online. People can't.
So if we move the education online we will lose a lot.
We may will have cheaper - but definitely not zero cost - education, but it won't worth that much.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but not as the main way for educate people. It can be great for secondary degrees and such. But I would like to see people actually learn the most important lessons, not only the technically neccessary ones.
With effective online courses, colleges may change into offering physical places for labs, and for discussion oriented knowledge exchange (seminars, guest lectures, etc).