Classic Note Entries

Privitazation of the University

Cutting the throat of the University
Dr. Guy Bensausan Lookup 'Hexadigm'

And: so long as professors refuse to work as part of top-flight educational teams, more or less competently managed, their achievements will be eclipsed, over time, by teams of skilled professionals producing top-flight educational materials. And when professors, teaching alone in a classroom, are widely recognized as an inferior (not to mention expensive) form of education, the call for privatized education will take full flight


Aside from some very broad choices (will I study engineering or philosophy?) students have very few choices in a university. Having selected a program, they are routed to a faculty, given a small selection of options and a bevy of required courses, and are assigned professors (if they are lucky, they will learn about and manage to avoid the particularly bad professors). Inside the classroom, they have very little choice about the course content, nature and number of assignments, criteria for passing, time and place of course offerings, labs, workshops or seminars. They have no choice at all regarding their classmates, limited choice in assigned texts and readings, and are unified in their quest for a single (obligatory) goal, the university degree.


The above come from Stephen Downes