[lbo-talk] Free online courses

[Carrol Cox]

Alan Rudy: Even in the realm of self-education, I prefer to do it with other
people...
whether as a means of tapping into what they bring to the issue that I
can't/don't or as a means of enriching both/all of our learning by means of
open-ended discussions.  With respect to the issue of teaching/mentoring, my
dad always seemed to have five or six ways to approach math and science
problems - each incrementally reformulated, taking a different tack, or
drawing on other images/metaphors/examples/cases - so that one of the
approaches would, in the end, work for me or that the combination of
different tacks would accumulate/be synthesized in my mind in my own way.

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I agree with this, but I see it's going to be difficult to find the
vocabulary for what I've been fumbling towards  in my thought. I want to
claim that Henry Adams uses "education" in a non-ideological sense in the
title of his book. Here "education" is very close to synonymous with "the
history which constitueds Henry Adams." It is redundant, then, to speak of
"self-education" since "education" itself means t he total activity, that is
the total web of social relations, of a person over his/her entire life.
What I call "schooling" then has only a limited relationship to education;
less, probably, than family and friends outside schooling have. (This is an
arbitrary vocabulary, I know, and I'm going to have to find a different way
to formulate what I'm after.) As I use the term, however, such a title as
Whitehead's "Aims of Education" is utter nonsense: education is not a
process which has "aims." The concept of "aims of education" is implicitly
authoritarian: it assumes the 'individual" is an empty receptacle in which
one can pour the attitudes and information appropriate to the citizen of a
bourgeois republic. It assumes, for example,  that "values" (e.g., fairness,
progress, critical thinking) are teachable and the schools 'should'
inculcate them.

This was the source of my irritation at almost all posts in the thread on
"critical thinking," which naively thought that "value" was favorable to
left politics, and that the failure of colleges to inject it inot the veins
of students was a defect from a left political perspective.  I would assume
that the overwhelming proportion of that 40% who were so injected are solid
Republicans, perhaps libertarians or devoted listenertes to Rush Limbaugh,
who is the very essence of "critical thinking." Well, not quite: the most
noticeable "critical thinkers" are those who deny the validity of evolution.

Even within an "ideal" system of schooling, schooling would play a minor
role in "education," and even within that schooling the parts probably most
relevant to education are social relations among the students, the
conversations that go on aomong them.

It more or less follows from this that any "National Education System" or
any "Theory of education"  is reactionary. The disadvantages (and they are
deep) of local funding are, in a federal system such as the U.S.,
counter-balanced (or were in the past) more than compensated for by the
failure of attempts to institute a National Education System. We are not
going to get a decent schooling system under capitalism; so what we aim for
is not really to "improve" the present system but to resist efforts to turn
it into a National System! In particular we must resist all efforts to
establish a national system of 'evaluating' and rewarding teachers.

Carrol