Learning and Education are not the same, although they are
often confused. Whilst technology has augmented and transformed the means by
which individuals can do the work of learning, the institution of education has
developed in different ways, harnessing technology to increase their dominance
and power in the lives of more and more people. This appears contradictory: how
can a technology which makes the means of learning more available contribute to
the rise educational institutions who, despite rising costs borne by students,
take a stranglehold over the business of education, and the lives of learners
the world over?
To understand this, I think the economic
critique of Higher Education by Thorstein Veblen – a critique whose pertinence
to the current situation is remarkable - and the recent work of John Searle on
social ontology are both very useful. Both Veblen and Searle are united in a particular focus on
‘status’. For Veblen, Education is a status game played by the aspirant members
of the ‘leisure class’ in their effort to imbue their lives with meaning
through becoming admitted to the ‘priesthood’ of knowledgeable people. Veblen
documented and satirised transformations to educational institutions at the end
of 19th century which could easily apply to those today: the pathologies of
managerialism are now new (Veblen called it “absentee ownership”). Having said
this, it is not entirely clear what Veblen means by status.
Searle’s recent work on social
ontology discusses what he calls ‘status functions’ - particular kinds of speech act which relate to
networks of rights, responsibilities, obligations and commitments. Searle
explains social phenomena like money (e.g. "I promise to pay the bearer.."), nation states and institutions in this
way. The analysis is useful when we come to look at the relationship between
‘personal learning’ and University degrees. There are fundamental differences
between the patterns of rights, responsibilities, obligations and commitments between 'personal' or informal learning and a University degree, despite the fact that there are similar end-results in terms of skill acquisition and
learning. If it is the case that institutions are increasing their
power and that students are not turning their back on them to self-educate,
does this tell us something about the power of status declarations in society
more generally, and whether Veblen is right that the principal driver of
education is in increasing status rather than increasing knowledge?
I think that this is an important question with far-reaching
consequences for the way that we think about the future of education. Many
advocates of the PLE assumed that the purpose of education is learning, and
that technology can serve that purpose as well as institutions (if not better).
But what would a PLE look like if its focus was on increasing status, not
learning? Can technological forms of personal learning, or even learning
through MOOCs, ever be functionally equivalent to institutional education? And
what are we to do with those powerful educational institutions for whom
initiatives like the PLE might ultimately only serve to drive more people into
their clutches?
5 comments:
I think Illich's notion of the "hidden curriculum" is relevant. We could view the concerns of "learning" as being the visible curriculum of higher education, and the conferring of status as part of the hidden curriculum.
The problem I see with xMOOCs is that they attempt to mass produce education by focussing on amplifying the overt aspects of learning (visible curriculum) without really addressing the issue of status.
Can you mass produce status without causing status inflation?
Hi Scott,
Veblen saw the whole thing as archaic and irrational - even more so than Illich does, I think.
As for mass-producing status, that's an interesting question. But what kind of question is it? It's still couched in the frame of 'delivery' which is where the MOOCs come from. But actually, I think the question of everybody being able to raise their status is the same as "can we remove the barriers to a good society?" It's a socioeconomic question, not an educational one.
(a) If the university is a status filter operating within a largely frozen socioeconomic system with little social mobility - which seems to be where we're heading now - then I'd think that status cannot be raised by MOOCs or similar interventions.
That doesn't mean they can't have personal meaning, but the differences for the participants would be psychological rather than material.
(b) If on the other hand we did have a socioeconomic shift to a society with more distribution of opportunity, then education would play a critical part in creating that society.
(c) Perhaps the reality of the situation is (a) but eduction is there to provide the illusion of (b).
We would have to what a "frozen socioeconomic system" is. A "frozen" society isn't a society, is it? What's there to freeze? It's merely an idea.
I think both Alison Wolf and Andrew McGettigan make this mistake of critiquing the education system or gov. policy through the same lens that introduces the pathologies!
We need a different way of thinking about the reality of social life. Then technology might play an important role in realising new emancipatory possibilities.
There are many educational organizations at work concurrently, and any of them might not often and more generally have much power over a single individual learner or over an individual's main objective that is to learn and acquire all kinds of learning outcomes. The main guestion seems when elavaluating all functions of educational organizations at first to have depeened and broad sociological and psychological conceptualization of what kinds of learning outcomes, skills and behavioral competencies (as dispositions) there might emerge both in general and within any specific learning institution. I am not worried that a specific educational institution might have a main role over an individual's all kinds of learning objectives or goals those that an individual always has.
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