It is somewhat odd that I can connect Mark Zuckerburg to the Higher Education Report. But oh, I can.
First to Mark Zuckerburg. For my (few) readers who might not know, this is the guy who came up with facebook. I admit, I like facebook, I like being able to keep in touch with friends from college and reconnect with people I knew when I was younger. Realistically, without this medium, I would have lost a lot of these contacts. However, this whole opening to the whole world really defeats the purpose of the service. If you want to be connected to the whole world, then you go to myspace. Facebook was first for "elite" colleges, then for most all colleges, then for high schoolers, too, then for some businesses, and now... I am not arguing that Facebook was some utopian online community where there weren't weird people (oh there were and are), but if you create a niche product (which is what it arguably was), then why do you make it leave its niche when there are other products available that serve the non-niche market?
Add to this the fact that every time I hear the guy speak, I want to throw something. Perhaps he is aware of it and perhaps he is not, but his tone is really quite arrogant and frustrating. When it's available, listen to the
way he says things on his
NPR Morning Edition interview. Yes, he wants us to use our service, but he obviously *knows* better than we do what it is that we want. He can do whatever he wants with the business model, but when it comes to reading the minds of millions of college students (and now, the world!), please. Learn humility, because you
certainly don't show it.
So what, you might ask, does this have to do with the Higher Education Commission's report? There has been much written about the report in various venues, some extolling the report, others taking it down point by point, and yet others showing something approximating a middle ground. I think that the problem with the Higher Education Commission's report is that it fails to recognize what the varied purposes of higher education are. Perhaps my view is slanted, because I did attend and succeed at one of the "elite" schools. Perhaps I have higher expectations than I should of what students should know and be able to do coming out of high school. Perhaps I am bitter that this Commission appears to care more about the degree as a certification towards getting a better job without considering the vast range of motivations behind attending colleges of any kind. Again, I'm biased towards the liberal arts, learn for learning's sake form of higher education. But the idea of testing a liberal arts education mandated by the government doesn't sit right with me.
Why, you might ask, does it not sit well with me? I think standardized testing is inherently flawed as it reinforced societal biases, as well as taking valuable classroom time away from actual pedagogical exercise to teach students how to succeed on said standardized tests. Higher education, though today used as just another credential to get a job, isn't necessarily for everyone. There, I said it. Call me elitist if you well, but not everyone is suited or desires the challenges that higher education provides. In the ideal world, employers would not require a bachelor's degree if the job did not require skills and knowledge acquired through said degree. However, we do not live in an ideal world. Employers' demands and business world trained trustees and administrators have, in my mind unfortunately, changed the atmosphere of higher education as have student expectations of a product or services. News flash to the world: education is not fundamentally a business enterprise. It should not be run as such. We need to value actual learning outcomes and processes; I especially emphasize the processes as they are many times much more useful in life than the actual outcomes.
So, in this mania to quantify and assess everything, how can we assess a learning process? In my mind, we shouldn't even have to assess it, but the presence in higher education of many students who are not there to learn, but rather to get the degree, would necessitate such action. My gut reaction as someone who loves learning and had to sit in classes with people who really didn't would be to get rid of the people who don't want to learn, but that would only help the small number of us who actually appear to care about learning. To be honest, I am not sure that most higher education is necessarily "broken" right now, with the exception of the high price tag and partisan (ahem Horowitz) attacks on academics. As much as I would love to live in a world where all students wanted to learn, realistically, that would never happen. I admit, I don't have a solution. I think whoever does would be an awesome person, but that no one would ever listen. Because that happens.
Another issue brought up by the Commission's suggestion of assessment of outcomes is a placement of worth on higher education. Specifically, it deals with a single body standardizing an infinite number of varieties in curriculum and specialization. It also brings ideological issues into play much more starkly than in the current system; in a field such as my own, who decides what the canon is? This is infinitely problematic within my own field and is constantly being revisited and revised; no program has the exact same canonical list. How can a governmental body assume that a student in X literature should know A, B, and C? Would that not just reinforce simplistic understandings of material and make ideological judgments of the worth of A, B, and C, not to mention J, K, and L that were left off the test?
The connection between these disparate ideas? Both Mark Zuckerburg and the Commission's narrow view of worth in higher education are "reforms" that ostensibly democratize their areas, that is, facebook and higher education. However, these entities thrive on elitism! Removing the intellectual from both of these removes the unique identity of both. Making facebook open to everyone defeats the purpose of the service. Everyone having equal
ACCESS to higher education is key. However, the people of the US need to recognize that our country is not filled with people who want to study for itself, rather, they study for the certificate and learn nothing along the way. If we truly wish to reform higher education, it should be from within each institution (as opposed to governmentally imposed) with a focus as to the profile of student that it serves. The function of a community college is dramatically different from that of an R1 university.
All of this worry about the *quality* of higher education, in my mind, is not really important until we get our K-12 system to a better place. How can we expect students to succeed in higher education when they do not recieve the tools to do so in K-12? The answer is not to lower the expectations in higher education, for that hurts everyone involved. Hold students, teachers, administrators, parents, politicans (ugh school boards) accountable, but don't limit imagination through excessive testing. And don't forget that we don't all have to be the same thing in the end.
I am yet again experimenting in my kitchen this afternoon.
For those that might not know about my very happy relationship with potstickers - when I was smaller and we went to a Chinese buffet sometimes on the weekends, it was all you can eat, my parents only had to pay for the little kid price (because I was at that point in life a little kid), and I would clear the place out of potstickers. I just love them. Also interestingly, I remember calling them "Peking Ravioli" when we were small - and that is evidentally a term unique to Boston (thanks to Joyce Chen). I, of course, had no idea. But now I'm going to try to not make my kitchen too messy since I finally got it cleaned up from yesterday, and to enjoy whatever masterpiece might result.
