On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Ken Wark <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:warkk@newschool.edu">warkk@newschool.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
But the tendency now is to think of education not as 'the good', but as 'the goods.' Just another product. Its why its now called "learning." As if there weren't at least two parties, in a strange, gift relation to each other: teacher and student. Its a product to invest in to increase your own long-run marketability. Applecare for the soul.<br>
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I don't think the only reason people rename education "learning" is to
commodify it, although I agree there is plenty of that going
on. When I hear "learning" the gerund means to me process rather than
outcome, the doer is the student rather than the teacher, and "learning" sounds like a lifelong,
natural, unstoppable condition of being alive rather than something traditionally confined
to particular times and places and institutions. <br>
<br>On a related note, I very much enjoyed your piece but I think it's a big mistake to "leave economics to the economists." I much prefer your formulation that education is an institution only partly external to capitalism, and vice versa. There's no intelligent conversation about the aims of education that ignores the economic structures that produce it, and that it reproduces.<br>
<br>Economics is the vector that drew me into thinking about education. One of the reasons mass higher education is on the rocks and on the rack is that tuition has grown more than any other major good or service since 1978. It's inherently more and more expensive to try and educate a higher and higher proportion of the population each year. Mass higher education has grown through the development of a mass bureaucracy, and institutions spend more and more on administration while spending less (proportionately, not absolutely) on teaching. And as public support for this expensive project is exhausted (maybe because of creeping Philistinism, and maybe because the coffers are bare and we have other public priorities that rightfully take precedence like roads and ambulances and police officers) students carry more and more of the burden, which keeps poor kids out of college in larger and larger numbers. <br>
<br>Surely a major reason that students are more and more inclined to think of their education as a product is that it's become a huge monetary investment. Yes, teaching is in part a gift relation, but that must be a confusing proposition to articulate to students who pay $1015 a credit at the New School. <br>
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