In a recent column, Greg Kesich takes aim at the prestigious college classroom, understandably asking, “What are we paying for?” This is a great question. While Kesich focuses on Harvard, he could also look closer to home, where private colleges pull in a hefty $40,000 to $60,000 a year in tuition and fees.
But his droll answer, “prestige,” does little to explain the high cost and value of the college classroom. “As for the educational value of the classes themselves,” Kesich writes, “well, the schools have told us what they’re worth. Nothing or next to nothing.”
Joining the populist drumbeat against institutions of higher education, Kesich celebrates Kevin Carey’s book “The End of College” and the vision it promotes: a world empty of classes held in classrooms, replaced by online MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. Quoting his online computer science professor, Kesich tells us: “Life is just made up of ‘inputs and outputs.’ ”
Even if we ignore the fact that MOOCs are taught by professors who are trained and work in the very classrooms Kesich disparages, his argument perpetuates the false notion that we need to choose between classrooms and online education. This is what professors (online or in the classroom) call a false dichotomy.
Online classes can be an excellent tool when prepared by experienced classroom professors and taken by motivated students, usually those in degree-granting institutions. (MOOCs, on the other hand, have extremely high dropout rates).
Classes held in classrooms are equally valuable but different. To equate the two is like comparing a live concert to a CD. Why pay $95 to hear the “St. Matthew Passion” at the Merrill Auditorium when I could just put on the recording in my living room? Why go to see “Hedwig” on Broadway for $150 when you can get the movie on Netflix for free? If we accept the logic of Kesich, it’s because we simply like the prestige – “Hey, look at me, I went to a Broadway show, cool.”
Really?
But if life is actually more than inputs and outputs, we might argue that there is a world of quality, pleasure and sheer wonder that opens up in between. A great classroom discussion or lecture, a riveting play, opera or powerful work of art can transform us as individuals – but more importantly perhaps, it unites us. No matter our differences, we have witnessed something larger than ourselves that has helped shape who and what we actually are.
We intellectually stretch as individuals and turn ourselves into a culture. We take on, in other words, new personal and collective identities; we enter into and become a “public” with certain needs, responsibilities and values. We learn, in short, to think of ourselves as part of a larger whole, a community with shared values, hopes and needs.
This, it seems to me, is why college classrooms (and concerts, opera, theater and movie houses) must not, and will not end. It is why teachers are so important and perhaps why in recent years they’ve become such a political football. What on earth ever happened to Mr. Chips?
Consider the recent awarding of $1 million to Maine educator Nancie Atwell. Rightly lauded for her work at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, she is, no doubt, a great teacher, and she’s generously donating the funds to the K-8 school for scholarships for students. They’ll need them: Tuition there is $8,800.
But although the media have dubbed the award “the Nobel Prize of teaching,” this is no Nobel, which is funded by a nonprofit foundation. The Global Teacher Prize is sponsored by Global Educational Management Systems, a subsidiary of the Varkey Group Limited, which owns and operates schools around the world. And, like Harvard, they are not cheap. The tuition at the Chicago GEMS school is $27,000 for pre-K students and $36,000 for eighth-graders.
Neither private schools nor online education will solve our educational problems today. Indeed, the privatization of education continues to create some of America’s greatest problems, including a new era of segregation and income inequality. But if the classroom is not the enemy, neither is online education. We need to understand and appreciate the roles of both.
And as citizens, we need to pony up. “Education,” the bumper sticker reminds us, “is expensive.” We are the only industrialized nation that does not realize this and does not offer free public higher education.
We’ve tried bashing public education, we’ve cut down forests denouncing the classroom teacher and we are now recklessly experimenting with ignorance. Can we please just get back to educating our nation? And, at last, paying the price?
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