Failures of the Free Market
Posted on February 11, 2007
Filed Under Philosophy, Politics, Teaching | 6 Comments
Markets are powerful institutions that harness fundamental human drives for productive purposes. Anyone who has ever been in a village market in Mexico, or Vietnam, or a hundred other places will have seen “market forces” at work. Both the forces that allow for profits to be made & the forces — gossip, argument, supply limits — that prevent profits from being extracted beyond what appear to be some sort of natural limits. It is those limits that the ideology of the free market, as established now in the US, ignores, discounts, & ridicules. Some enterprises seem able to function in something close to a free-market heaven — the famous manufacture of pins, or engine blocks — but other sorts of human activities unravel very quickly when subjected to uncorrected market forces: health care, journalism, education. I only qualify as something like an expert in the latter area, education. I’ve been teaching in colleges for going on thirty years. The problem with the University of Phoenix is that it is founded on a business model that derives from market ideology, which is in turn incapable of describing what actually goes on between a teacher & a student. Education, because it emerges from a process — a relationship between teachers & students — cannot be containerized & sold over the counter. Or over the internet. The University of Profits educational model assumes students are passive consumers of a product. Indeed, it insists that they become so, thus eliminating the possibility of any education taking place. By the way, the surest way to see if education is taking place is to notice if the person designated as the teacher periodically & usually unpredictably inverts the binary relationship, becoming student to his/her classroom full of teachers. Finally, I think that real teaching & learning can & will take place online, but I don’t think we yet have a good description of how that will work; nor do we understand how the technologies of the internet will mesh with the institutional & bureaucratic requirements of colleges & universities.
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6 Responses to “Failures of the Free Market”
about that inverted teacher: your thought makes me feel a whole lot better about those (not infrequent) moments when i’ve found myself out to sea inside a text, only to be re-oriented by a student’s apt insight … in those times of confusion, i’ve found it most helpful to throw myself on the mercy of the room … and i usually get it …
also … it was a student waybackwhen who taught me how to set up a webpage … (& i still have pleasant memories of those pre-yahoo geocities days)
[just posted this at my blog & then thought why the hell shouldn't i stick it in yr comments too ... so i did ... after all these years i'm still struggling with some of the etiquettes of what to put where]
While the institutional bureaucracy of colleges & universities have caught on to the internet’s existence, I think it may be some time before they begin to understand its highest aim, which is, as we have been discussing on the comment thread of a previous post, to connect people to each other in a humanistic way. What it has gained in global reach, the internet has lost in richness of medium. So, face-to-face is still the way to teach, but to reach a wide audience the internet can provide a useful supplemental tool.
One of the reasons I transferred out of the computer engineering department at Berkeley during the heyday of the dot-com era was that the entire department was not only commoditized but dehumanizing itself as rapidly as it could. All assignments and projects were graded by machine, monotone professors read from proscribed syllabuses and inhuman hours in the Orwellian row-upon-row computer labs were the norm – as if minimizing contact with other human beings was the primary aim of the department.
Good thing this little cog popped out of that machine, though, since I then got to study English with the likes of Robert Hass and Stephen Booth. But now, at the apex of a hi-tech career casting backwards glances at The Academy and wondering if I might like to teach, this question of laissez faire education weighs slightly more heavily at the back of my mind.
This attitude that education is a passive and one directional activity (like pouring knowledge into a recepticle) did not start with Phoenix – rather, Phoenix was made possible as the result of this approach to education ALREADY BEING widespread at universities.
I think the role of the University is being correctly challenged, and at the heart of the challenge is an evaluation of the comparative worth of a degree from one institution vs. the next.
A terrible mess has been created due to a lack of teaching standards and student evaluation standards. How much objective feedback do teachers receive throughout the term or even between terms? How much analysis is done on teaching techniques? Who could really say what the before and after impact is on students?
Everyone’s just guessing.
Is it really worth paying one and a half times as much money to earn an undergraduate degree from Havard or Yale versus a degree from the Univerisity of Wisconsin-Madison? Is that worth a reflection of the comparitive ability of each institution to teach it’s students? Or is it more a function of a social-status and a social-club mentality?
Phoenix is if anything, causing people to question the stodgy status-quo.
Breaking-apart the traditional role of ‘teacher’ into two roles: a ‘teacher’ and an ‘evaluator’, I think will be an important evolution in our approach to education and I think (maybe wishful thinking) it’s coming down the pike. Teachers of course should welcome such a change because it will relieve them of the duty of grading papers etc, however it will also mean that the teacher will be held to greater responsibility for the progress of his/her students: no more one-directional pouring-out of knowledge and defensively laying the blame on the portion of students who do not sufficiently digest and regurgitate it.
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Riley, I entirely agree with your opening statement. U of P is just a symptom of a much broader failure to understand what goes on — or what could go on — between teachers & students. PU just takes the bad model to a _reductio ad absurdum_. And as a matter of fact, I’m pretty damn sure that you can get just as good an education at UW-Madison as at Harvard. Some goes for the two great state universities where I got my degrees, Washington & Iowa. Harvard & the Ivies are about credentialing, pure & simple.
But I am really not sure what you mean by “teaching standards.” In fact, when someone says “standards,” I reach for my pistol. Same goes for the word “objective.” Whose standards? Whose objectivity? To coin another phrase, I may not be able to define good teaching, but I know it when I see it.I fear your separating out the functions of teaching & evaluation would lead to a bunch of trained penguins performing to meet the zookeepers’ “standards.”
The problem is larger than the university. The US has undergone a profound social conversion over the last fifty years: most Americans no longer qualify for the appellation _citizen_, deserving only the degraded role of _consumer_. Students’ very often bring a consumer’s passive attitudes to the classroom.
jd , I agree with everything you’ve said. But a distinction should be made between the subjective judgements that we make about what to value in education, and the objective ability to measure that quality once we’ve decided. Ultimately, the best situation would be to allow students, parents and employers to decide what qualities they want to personally develope or hire – but such decisions can’t be effectively made until there are accurate and standard performance measures available.
Also, there’s a lot of unfortunate politic surrounding the term “standards”. Unfortunately the resistance to adopting standards is made worse by a U.S. president who wants to use standardized testing to bludgeon teachers and schools rather than use standardized testing as an asset to education. Fact is, that without standard measures, a scientific approach to education is impossible.
The need for a standard way of measuring skill/knowlege is inescapable. Grades and grade point averages, graduating class position, SAT and ACT scores are all attempts to compare students to a standard. The problem is not that an attempt is being made to create a standard measure, but rather that the attempts made thus far are shotty (really garbage). An overly simplistic measure of ‘success’ is what teachers are now (rightfully) afraid of being put into practice by “No child Left Behind” – but the students themselves have been subject to measures that are no less simplistic for decades. The real problem with standards is not wether or not we should have them, but wether we will put the time and energy necessary to make reliable and useful standards.
Unfortunately, testing is too often seen as necessary evil by teachers and no more than a means to build a resume (or as an attack) by students. Instead tests should be seen as an essential component to the learning process. The primarily role of tests should be to provide feedback to students and teachers – not to privide a record of student or teacher acheivement. For evey one test that gets assigned to a student’s permanent record, there should be a hundred tests given that are used *for no other reason* than to help the student train and learn. Tests can, and should be used in a safe environment for learning – which is one more reason for not including the role of grade-giver to the teacher.
An essential part of recognizing the proper role of tests, is recognizing and respecting the special skill it takes to create, execute, and evaluate the results of tests. People with real expertise and talent on par with the best teachers should be designing and conducting tests, and students should be expected to spend as much time with dedicated evaluators as they do with teachers.
Sorry for getting preachy.
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I think you are musing together K-12 education with college education & that confuses the argument. Let’s set k-12 aside & talk about higher education. You argue that students & parents ought to be able to refer to objective standards of learning in order — if I’m understanding you clearly — to make informed economic decisions. This is a classical free-market notion, the assumption being that human beings are rational actors on the economic playing field. Of course, that playing field is not level. I’d also argue that students & parents do not make entirely rational decisions in the educational market place, but are swayed by bias, poor knowledge of the facts, and a deeply flawed cultural model of what a college education actually is. Some of the effects of these biases could be minimized if higher education were free to anyone who could succeed.
Then, at least, we would be in a situation where making decisions about higher education could theoretically be based on some sorts of objective measures. But what sorts? What do you propose to measure? What sort of instrument exists that _can_ measure what you propose? Those questions need to be answered before I let anyone who is not a teacher come into my classroom with a yardstick & a pair of calipers. Until those questions can be answered, there is no “proper role” for standardized tests. College students are already over-tested, a situation that encourages intellectual passivity.