stimulant

Some universities are apparently now charging more for various degrees, depending on the cost of providing those degrees.

That’s scary for a lot of reasons. The most naive of which is that the sciences will undoubtedly become more expensive. But the really frightening part is what it says about the commodification of education. The policy legitimizes the

Education is a commodity. Doesn’t that scare anyone?

It means that what Freire called the “banking model” of education¹ is increasingly entrenched, to the point that we shop for packets of knowledge like candy.

Note that I’ve no elegant solution to the problem of funding pursuits that aren’t self-supporting. In general, I haven’t thought carefully about education in “the arts.” I’ve only been able to wrap my head around it [pedagogically] by incorporating it as a tool into wider pursuits. And increasingly, I’m suspicious that my denigration of the idea of a classically trained scientist² is a conclusion that was already reached by the artistic community. That is, a classically trained artist is no longer as interesting as an artist whose ideas provide a context for their technical skills.

I have to confess, I don’t know anything about education in the arts.

Anyway, I guess my point is this: giving the acquisition of skills and knowledge a context whereby the acquisition becomes incidental seems to be a strong idea. But let me emphasize, this shouldn’t be a trick. This isn’t a pedagogical sleight designed to achieve the acquisition of skills. The idea is that the acquisition of skills is actually incidental to what people should be doing. Lots of careful thought and work should be put into engineering an environment where the resources that learners need are at their disposal, and where the acquisition of skills and knowledge is streamlined. But the motivation for this is not³ the skills themselves.

Does that make sense? There seems to be a lot of thinking to do insofar as restructuring not only the learning experience, but the language we use to describe the learning experience. Language that emphasizes packets of knowledge or skills inevitably leads to a tension between a curricula’s archaeology, its compartmentalization, and the context provided for learning.

1. “[when education] becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.” [↩]
2. i.e. someone whose training focuses on the classical canon of a specific discipline [↩]
3. i.e. should not be [↩]