The huge cost of putting a price on education

This blog is about the University- and much more. It is about how we as humans understand ourselves and what it means to be humans. It is about what we have come to believe is valuable compared to what we should truly hold most dear. This entry is about the disaster, the big lie, we’ve been sold, as a result of a 50 year project constructed by a group of ideologues and financed by some of the wealthiest and most self-interested people in the world. They insist that all things should have a price and that those things should be owned and bought and sold on the “market” because that is the fairest and most efficient way to allocate the resources of the world. Oscar Wilde, I am reminded in this moment, said that the definition of a cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Here we are in the world that these people wanted, a world dominated by cost-benefit, productivity, efficiency, in other words, dominated by Wilde’s cynics. Rather than it being the utopia the “cynics’ promised, it is a world divided by those with and those without. It is a world hurtling towards annihilation while the masses spend their lives with their eyes and their minds fixated on screens, big, but mostly on small ones, anesthetised into accepting the current order or worse, obsessing about becoming one of the fortunate few believing it will come without work, without effort, without years of dedication, because that is the fantasy the big lie sells.

Instead of a world filled with opportunity, the future is bleak. Technology should have unlocked the potential of the future. This has not been the case. I don’t blame technology. I blame neoliberalism and I curse the culture of having, rather than doing that it has produced. As a student, only 30 or so years ago, I learned in a system before knowledge and education was commodified and before students became customers and schools and universities were converted into businesses. I remember fondly, actually I cherish, those days where learning was valued for what it did to the learner. The transformation that came with learning was the aim of an education. It was the journey that was valued so much more than the outcome. If AI was introduced into that environment, I speculate that its impact would have been very different. It would have truly been a tool of learning, not a way of evading learning. AI would have enhanced learning, building better ways to teach and learn. Today, most of my students use it to short-cut learning, they aim on getting the task done as quickly and as efficiently as possible and not on the task itself. The results of this are devastating. Students aren’t learning. They aren’t forming their own opinions on the big questions of the day, or the small ones for that matter,. They are not thinking critically. All because they are not reading, reflecting, forming their own answers because AI is doing this for them.

I still recall the days, and some nights, I sat around for hours by myself or with others, contemplating the existential and metaphysical, speculating on what a better world- equitable, peaceful, just- would look like and how to bring it about. I read, devoured, books and articles, trying to understand myself and the world I inhabited. It was the most enjoyable and transformative period of my life. That this joy and chance to grow has been taken away from so many young people today is without doubt one of the bleakest results of a user-pay education system designed to churn out workers instead of developing young people into thinkers, scholars, into citizens and into better people.

The fixation on skills over knowledge is the newest of the marketing fads universities intent on chasing student dollars are now peddling. In 20 years of teaching, I’ve never seen a student excited or impassioned about skills. I’ve never had a student ask me at the beginning of a course what skills they would learn. I’ve not had one student come up to me at the conclusion of a semester and say thanks for the skills they’ve learned. I had countless positive end of semester exchanges with students about knowledge though. Many, many times, students thanked me for what they learned about Africa or the Middle East, about neoliberalism, about racism or about the legacies of colonialism. In reality, they were thanking me for getting them excited about learning. For eons, teachers have known that if you get students enthused about the content, they’ll acquire skills by osmosis. But now, we’ve been told that the content matters less than skills. Why? Because that is what the economy wants.

Well, here we are in a world dominated by the economy. The world the neoliberals wanted they have largely got. Education is now a commodity and determined by, and dedicated to serving, the market. In this conversion of education from a public good to a commodity, the market may be better served (I’m not quite sure this is the case, but that is a discussion for another time) but we the people, our society, teachers and especially students are much worse off. I entered university believing it could change lives. In some cases, it still will. My observation is that for many it no longer does. We should all reflect for a moment and think about what has been lost for the current generation and maybe, just maybe, a little push back on the endless privatisation of schools and universities might mean the next generation of students gain a bit back of what I, and countless others my age received from being at university. I hope so.

I’m off to the gym now. Yes, gyms are businesses and people pay to go there. But the physicality of the gym, the muscularity, the sweat and the panting and the sense that before the barbell or the pull up bar stand only ourselves as humans and our effort. Here technology can not replace our human capacity in the way it does elsewhere. And, while gyms are businesses, good gyms are also places with soul and integrity. Sadly, I can no longer say this for the university in the way that I once did (an important proviso is that many people who work for universities, remain soulful, committed and what they do they do with integrity).

Until next time, focus on the journey not the outcome, delight in learning for learning’s sake, keep working out and convey to others the message that not all things should have a price on it.

Until next time, be Herculean.