Part of the reason I’m forever pouring cold water on the idea that the internet has made journalism or commentary egalitarian is that this canard threatens to obscure how powerfully the elite nature of media colors our understanding. Education is one of those places where this really hits home.
Andrew Sullivan was kind enough to link to my earlier piece pushing back against Clay Shirky. I’m grateful for that extra attention, but as always extra attention also means more misunderstanding. There’s been a lot of pushback that is of a very familiar flavor: this reminds me of the people who said the same thing about newspapers! Don’t you know that the web can’t be placated? Get with the times! None of which represents an actual argument. It’s classic Borg Complex: rather than articulating an actual argument about the substance of a particular controversy regarding digital technology, you simply associate yourself with some vague notion of “the digital” and then go purely for an argument to inevitability. There Is No Alternative! That’s not argument; that’s sloganeering. It’s a rhetorical environment in which opportunists with promises of revolution thrive, but it’s no way to improve education.
As for the substance of the newspaper comparison, such as it is– there was never any question that you could take text, digitize it, and distribute it online. The question was whether enough revenue would continue to flow in, in the digital era, to pay for the kind of reporting that democracy requires. The answer to that question, at present, seems to be “maybe” running towards “no.” But there was never any question of whether you could actually do the digitizing. Meanwhile, in education, it’s very much in question whether actual educating— the process through which one human guides or (yes) drags another to competency in a certain realm of skill or knowledge– can be ported into the online environment. Yes, you can digitize lecture notes and you can take videos of professors. But what I and many other educators find actually works is the no-bullshit human accountability that only comes from physical presence. And we’re not the only ones.
As the President of Williams College wrote,
we’ve analyzed which educational inputs best predict progress in these deeper aspects of student learning. The answer is unambiguous: By far, the factor that correlates most highly with gains in these skills is the amount of personal contact a student has with professors. Not virtual contact, but interaction with real, live human beings, whether in the classroom, or in faculty offices, or in the dining halls. Nothing else—not the details of the curriculum, not the choice of major, not the student’s GPA—predicts self-reported gains in these critical capacities nearly as well as how much time a student spent with professors.
This makes perfect sense if you’ve actually taught real human beings before. I’ve made this point many times: education has never been about access to knowledge. For decades, anyone with a public library card has had access to knowledge. But if you leave a bunch of freshman alone in a room with a biology textbook and an internet-enabled computer for a semester, I promise, the vast majority of them will come out with no earthly idea of what the ADP/ATP cycle is. I keep pointing out: the record for educational technologies making an actual impact on educational outcomes is dismal. And that’s before we talk about the fact that these technologies are specifically endorsed as a method to spread education to marginal students from demographic categories with poor educational outcomes. As Alan Jacobs– the opposite of a technophobe– pointed out, the research we have suggests that it’s exactly the students who least need the affordability offered by online education who do best in online classes. Getting anything out of online classes takes great self-discipline and motivation; these are qualities that students who struggle typically lack.
When people talk about using online education to “scale up” education, that is necessarily saying that they are going to be giving students far less individual attention than they receive– despite the fact that individual attention, class time, and teacher investment are precisely what students need most to succeed.
This is an area where the media is particularly vulnerable to its demographic biases. So, so many people in our elite media have never been exposed to actual educational failure in any way, shape, or form. They come up through affluent suburban public school districts where all of the students come from stable and financially secure households. They go on to attend elite private high schools where the worst students are systematically excluded by test scores and an inability to pay. They attend Ivy League universities where all students were in the top five in their class and everybody was in the top 5% on the SAT. They then go to work at newspapers and magazines where everybody else is exactly like them. Of course, they think education can be fixed with apps or buzzwords or good ol’ American gumption. They literally don’t know what educational failure looks like.
What the people who are on the actual front lines are telling us– what the public school teachers in the other America, the America where nobody goes on to write for The Atlantic, are telling us– is that this stuff is not working. But because there is so much money in pretending it is, and because the demographic elite of America have such a stranglehold on the national conversation, it doesn’t filter through. Shirky doesn’t want to hear; Salman Khan doesn’t want to hear it; Arne Duncan doesn’t want to hear it; Michelle Rhee doesn’t want to hear it; Davos Man doesn’t want to hear it; and the people who want to sell all that wonderful revolutionary disruptive educational technology certainly don’t want to hear it. And they are part of the class that gets to dictate these things, so they won’t hear it.
Years ago I worked at a public school for kids with severe emotional disturbance. There was no particular reason that they all had to be poor; the school district had plenty of middle class and affluent kids. But they all were. I remember working with a kid on his multiplication tables, and he could not do it. Couldn’t. Teacher worked with him endlessly. So did I. His parent reported the same thing. Couldn’t do it. Moved him to tears every time. That mattered for the school and for the district; despite what you might assume, many kids in special ed get their scores thrown into the standardized testing data just like any other. I would go home from working with that kid, and seeing his bubbling sadness and frustration, and go online and read some ed reform screed about how all he needed was a laptop and a teacher who could be fired. I didn’t know then what to do with that kid and I don’t know now– certainly not give up. But I knew then and I know now that those ed reformers in the media, safe in their elite enclaves, had nothing to offer to that kid. Nothing at all.
I am fairly new to your blog, so please pardon if you have already addressed this, but what is your attitude toward the “education as signaling” vs “education as human capital” debate?
I am predisposed to think that to the extent that demand for education is increasing, it is because of signaling, not because of human capital per se — that most students are more interested in becoming or remaining middle class than they are in coursework. I am still working out what I think this means for online education. I think your argument presumes that a GOOD education, a human capital enriching education, is the desired outcome. I’m not sure that that’s so. On the other hand, scaling up just the credential-awarding part of education (1) encourages an arms race for education and (2) probably means weakening standards for credential completion, both of which reduce the signaling value of, say, a bachelors degree.
I don’t know. I can’t seem to find a way to look at any of these trends that helps me understand why people think education is an equalizer. It seems to me to be in our labor system precisely to differentiate. I have been a student forever, and have if anything benefited from that function; but it sure makes me uncomfortable.
Personally I’m very torn on this issue. There’s a part of me that’s very tempted to write off the racial discourse police as ineffectual and say that the real goal should be to get more people on the right side of the policy debates. After all, substantive changes in the law are a lot more likely to help oppressed people than pressuring everyone to be more polite about race and structural inequalities. The problem of course is that dismissing them as such as opposed to engaging isn’t likely to convert many people. Granted this is all based on the assumption that there’s a real desire for policy change..
Total fail this was supposed to be in your previous post.
I can delete it if you’d like.
That’s really not fair to Shirky, since he didn’t defend the new stuff because he thought it was fantastically great in that post – he defended it because he didn’t see any realistic alternatives other than to keep on trying with it. As he pointed out, we’ve been waiting 40 years for state governments to start putting more money back into the public school and university systems with little luck, and the federal-level assistance doesn’t come with nearly enough money. “Solutions” like drastic reductions in administrative staff and wages don’t help much either – the cost savings are far too low.
I can’t speak for the others, and I agree that this stuff is over-hyped and usually unintentionally aimed at the type of auto-didacts who don’t represent most students. I don’t like having it as the main option.
“They attend Ivy League universities where all students were in the top five in their class and everybody was in the top 5% on the SAT. They then go to work at newspapers and magazines where everybody else is exactly like them. Of course, they think education can be fixed with apps or buzzwords or good ol’ American gumption. They literally don’t know what educational failure looks like.”
I think the other side of this is that they may not know what educational success looks like, either. There’s often a pretty bitter hatred of the academy in these writers’ stuff. How often do you read something about education by a member of the media elite along the lines of “I loved college, and am profoundly grateful for the life-changing learning I did there. Here are my ideas for bring that experience to more people”?
Exactly so. And of course, what they likely found the most moving and the most useful was precisely the part of that experience that they blithely assume marginal students don’t want or don’t need.
Keep on fighting the good fight, but it’s also total classist/sexist bullshit that this conversation takes place in the court of higher ed. I can’t think of any single k-12 teacher who would say anything other than what you’re saying here.
…actually, now that I think about it, I have colleagues who are really blown away by Sal Khan and Khan Academy. But, push comes to shove, they agree this only works for highly motivated students.
Okay; I can get behind this iteration with Brett’s caveat regarding Shirky. I can be disappointed that Shirky can’t/doesn’t imagine alternatives, but I don’t fault him for taking his head-in-the-sand and hoping-against-hope colleagues in the academy to task.
Given that the demand for higher education as a “union card” into the work force is real – and, I believe it’s very real – then I wonder why someone like Shirky doesn’t try to imagine many majors in higher ed as a form of vocational education. After WWII any number of engineers graduated after 3 years in accelerated programs on the GI Bill – my Dad being one of them. Rather than having students extend a 4 year degree into 5 (or more) years, why don’t we imagine directing those “credential seekers” into compressed programs, and boot their happy fannies out where they would prefer to be anyway? I can see lots of “structural” positives for for that line of thought.
Twilight of the elites, indeed.
The story about tutoring the kid in math reminds me of a time when I tried to help a friend, who was then 28, try to pass a math course at a community college so she could finish there and transfer to a vocational BA program (one that wasn’t going to involve math, as it happens). The course required some simple algebra, and it was just Waterloo. There seemed to be no way to explain it that worked; not the book’s, not the professor’s, and not anything I tried. It was like asking a color-blind person to copy a Renoir. And this was not a special-needs kid, it was a high-functioning, creative and very articulate adult with enough experience of the world to have encountered the kinds of problems that simple algebra was designed to solve. But her brain just didn’t work that way. (I don’t remember how, but she did get through eventually.)
I suppose the point I take away from such experiences is that education is even more monstrously complicated and (if done well) labor-intensive than you’ve indicated — meaning, you’re right about all this and then some. I suppose if the MOOC world has anything to recommend it, it’s the possibility that it points to a future in which people’s educational pursuits can be better individualized and tailored to their wants and needs. Maybe we can just admit that not everybody needs to learn algebra, not everybody needs to write papers on Shakespeare for no actual readers, and that 90-plus percent of those seeking postsecondary education are in it for vocational reasons, meaning they just want job-specific skills and the relevant credential. Let a saving remnant learn the higher math and the interpretation of literature and leave everyone else alone. That’s an elitist vision that I instinctively dislike, but what we’ve got now is also a huge mess, so I really don’t know what to suggest.
It seems to me that the biggest problem with so many of these discussions of “online” learning as a panacea is the fact that they ignore the fact that they simply cannot substitute for real vocational training and apprenticeship programs. It is not coincidental that Germany (for example) still has a vibrant manufacturing sector when they take vocational training really seriously. We do not. I’d be curious to know your thoughts on that (perhaps you’ve addressed it elsewhere, and if so I apologize for the oversight).
Dear Freddie —
Third time I’ve read through this; I just find it so good. After 35+ years teaching and realizing how completely wrong and misguided the technophile answer for “saving” education is, I just can barely listen to the conversation at all anymore. It’s clear the educational policy leaders you name not only mostly haven’t but most could never run a classroom of 30+ children longterm. Considering their deep understanding about how human children actually learn and why. Nonetheless they completely understand how the technology will fix these complex human emotional and social intelligence (and its developed lack) problems.
Unfortunately, so many of even the educated elite didn’t have those kinds of “intelligences” taught in their own classrooms and thus for them the empathy level of a computer is sometimes higher than their own, and thus good enough. In my experience, though many exciting educational enhancements in already transformative classrooms of diverse, inclusive human problem-solving can be facilitated with technology, what it cannot do is create that key interpersonal bond that creates truly transformative education. But one thing I have found about our most “elite” and highly-educated educational policy experts — they are rarely themselves willing to learn how to truly empathize and understand those who have different, perhaps even more now necessary, types of intelligence/learning and real life issues.
The kind that you and I have seen close-up and know that technology will never fix.
Thanks for the great read.
June