A new report from the Center for American Progress deals with online education and its potential disruptive impact on systems of higher ed. While I’m still digesting the report, my initial reaction is this: the most disheartening conclusions of this, and most other reports of the “what’s wrong with higher ed?” variety that seem to be proliferating these days is that they seem to be based on a one-dimensional, inhuman philosophy of education. While it might seem a naive stance in these troubled financial times, I became an educator because I believe that the value of learning can’t simply be measured, as the report suggests, by some formula “composed of the 90-day hire rate plus change in salary over some amount of time divided by total revenue per conferral plus retrospective student satisfaction plus the cohort repayment rate indexed to credit scores.” This is why I find the recent “limiting by way of financial starvation” of the mission of the California Community Colleges so disturbing, not to mention intellectually dishonest. In other words, there’s more to education, to learning, than its ability to make a person a better wage earner. Maybe I’m old-fashioned – I suppose educators don’t read Paulo Freire anymore?
