On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 2:47 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Currently, the amount of debt required for working class students to
> attend university, makes it very hard to kick back and think of values
> other than money. And those who can afford to kick back and reflect,
> unencumbered by student debt, are much less likely to care about values
> other than money.
>
This. We (by which I mean, those of us in academia who get frustrated with the utilitarian values of our students and their parents) have to not forget this. Which is one of the reasons I love Doug's plug for free higher ed in his LBO article about the expense of it a while back.
>
> The radicalism of trust fund babies is very limited.
>
> Still, his point made me think about how much interest there would be in
> Free University. Just ad hoc, free classes, aimed at enlightenment,
> reflection, and conscious direct action. There would be no accreditation of
> course. I wonder how many people would be interested in anything like that?
>
I have been thinking about this kind of thing for a long time, in a variety of ways, thinking about various modes of delivery, and so on. There are times when I get all optimistic and think the days of the accrediting bodies will eventually come to an end when the institutions who don't need them abandon them, but more often I think about the ad hoc, free, educating/thinking program and the forms it might take. And like Andy I think there are a lot of us who are interested in this. It's what most of us who got into education got into it for, and we wind up working against our institutions in important respects to try to accomplish it, and in the meantime remain utterly complicit in the things these institutions do that we deplore.
it drives me nuts.
but, yeah. I mean there's the open u in the uk, right? But afaik they basically do everything online. this stuff would have to be local and ad hoc wouldn't it? that is, unfortunately, it's not clear to me how to coordinate at larger levels, or how useful it would be to do that.
thinking out loud, and mostly off the top of my head. forgive the self-indulgence. but . . . there it is.
j