What the Shift to Virtual Learning Could Mean for the Future of Higher Ed — Vijay Govindarajan and Anup Srivastava

Difficult to estimate now how this pandemic will change education other than to say some effects are highly likely. The digital revolution is now here of necessity and necessity is the mother of invention. Not only higher education is being effected but also primary and secondary. In addition, many are working at home for the first time. The obvious benefit is reduced transaction costs and less need for resources directed to physical plant, transportation, etc. So some change is inevitable and this can be looked at as a test case.

Harvard Business Review
What the Shift to Virtual Learning Could Mean for the Future of Higher EdVijay Govindarajan and
Anup SrivastavaVijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Anup Srivastava. Canada Research Chair in Accounting, Decision Making, and Capital Markets and Associate Professor at Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary

A Market Correction in the Humanities—What Are You Going to Do with That? — Leigh Claire La Berge

The GI Bill marked a pivotal moment in higher education. But such a bill should be seen as more broadly reflective of the country’s Keynesian moment: roughly, the late 1940s through the early 1970s, in which art, public culture, and, yes, education, were funded directly by both state and federal governments. In the 1950s and ’60s, as Sharon Zukin notes, public expenditure in arts through universities “opened art as a second career for people who had not yet been integrated into the labor market” so much so that by the end of that decade “more than a million adults in America had identified their occupation as in some way connected with the creative arts.” [2]

Indeed, as millions more students and dollars entered colleges and universities, the number of colleges and universities increased. And as they expanded by population served and subject areas taught, universities became more radical places, particularly in relation to their own funding. Students in New York and Massachusetts began to demand wages for attending college — the “Wages for Students” campaign. From 1969 to 1975, after intense student and community protests and strikes, the City University of New York announced a program of “open admissions,” which included accessible and free remedial education, Spanish-language instruction, and a tuition-free university.

Of course, there were always dissenters from the Keynesian order, and they too laid their eyes on the expanding university. American neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman took note of this expansion. As Melinda Cooper laconically notes, they “began to suspect there was a connection between free and low tuition and the militancy of the student movement.” [3] The extension of their concerns into policy prescriptions — fewer grants, more loans — was aided by the coming contraction of the US economy. By the mid-1970s, the Keynesian curtain had begun to draw to a close. The reasons for its denouement were legion: the emerging productive output of a newly rebuilt Western Europe and Japan, the spending on and loss of the Vietnam War, the reaching of a limit of productive/consumptive capacity in many domestic industries, the rise of an offshore financial system and dollar market. By 1979, inflation topped out at 13 percent a year, and by the early ’80s this particular act was indeed over.…

Is the trend swinging so far in the direction of STEM, business & management, and trade school that the basis of liberal democracy is being threatened by insufficient appreciation of its intellectual roots and the debates from which it arose? Is culture based on consumerism becoming superficial? Is the digital age rendering classrooms, school buildings, libraries and campuses obsolescent? Are a new method, organon and curriculum needed to meet emergent opportunities and challenges?

In the big picture, "what's going" on can be summarized by being simplified into a binary model involving individual reproduction and social reproduction.

Individual reproduction normally takes care of itself through the attraction of the sexes, but presently reproduction rates are falling,  reversing a longstanding population trend. In some societies (nations) this is happening to the degree that some are becoming concerned about reproducing the society and culture,.

Social reproduction involves reproduction of the culture, which requires reproduction of the economy as the material life-support system of a society. This involves reproducing both capital, now chiefly technology, that depreciates over time and also labor, both physically (labor time) and with respect to capabilities (labor power).

In addition, the culture itself has to be reproduced to be maintained and improved to grow. This involves innovation.

Social reproduction involves transmitting knowledge and shill to the succeeding generations. This is based on "education" broadly speaking, from childhood upbringing to advanced higher eduction and lifelong learning.

Needs change from generation to generation as innovation results in adaptation to new conditions. In addition, changes in the mode of production lead to changes in era, in the broad sweep, from hinting-gathering, to agriculture, to industry and now toward digitization.

The need for knowledge and skill transmission changes according, although institutional change often lags change in conditions.

Are we at this point presently?

Los Angeles Review of Books
A Market Correction in the Humanities — What Are You Going to Do with That?
Leigh Claire La Berge | Associate Professor of English at BMCC CUNY

"Natural Rate"–What if it isn't? — Matt Reed

Users of Twitter know the thrill of seeing a tweet so good that you want to have it embroidered on pillows. The form lends itself to aphorisms or clever asides; Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker would have loved it. This week, the economist Stephanie Kelton posted a tweet for the ages: “What is the natural rate of college enrollment?”

It’s slyly great. It’s a play on the “natural rate of unemployment,” a discredited concept popular in the 90’’s. The NAIRU was supposed to represent the unemployment rate an economy couldn’t go below without triggering runaway inflation. (It was based, in turn, on the “Phillips curve.”) The assumption underlying the NAIRU was that unemployment and inflation were inversely related, so if unemployment got too low, inflation would result....

Inside Higher Ed
"Natural Rate"— What if it isn't?
Matt Reed

Jerry Andersen — A free, teacher-less university in France is schooling thousands of future-proof programmers

“We don’t teach anything,” says Nicolas Sadirac, head of École 42. “The students create what they need all the time.”...

Who cares about another coding school?

Schools around the world, from kindergarten up, are scrambling to figure out what skills kids need to thrive in the future. Disagreement abounds about which skills should be prioritized, and how they should be taught, but opinions coalesce around some mix of collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, communication, and initiative (or agency)....

When Sadirac describes École 42, it is easy to forget it is a school he is talking about.

“I would mainly say it’s not about learning.”

“We think we are an art school.”

“Knowledge is un-useful, dangerous, and removes your freedom.”

All of this must be put in the context of programming, and how information technology has changed. École 42 is not about learning because learning has traditionally been about mastering a body of content, or set of skills.

“We should not try to learn and memorize stuff,” Sadirac says. “It’s dangerous, it makes you less agile.”

Getting information to stick in your brain is complicated and hard. Getting it out, to make way for new way things, can be even harder. Sadirac’s previous job, as it happens, involved retraining adults. The biggest impediment to them learning new things was often unlearning what they already knew. Case in point: around 30% of the students in the swimming pool come with coding experience. After one month, those with experience perform no better than those without it.

Around 30% of the students come with coding experience. After one month, they perform no better than those without it.

He considers École 42 an art school because programming is more art than science, he says. Two myths that persist about coding is that you have to be good at math and that it is a solitary endeavor.…

Knowledge is “dangerous,” Sadirac says, because of the way technology has changed. Companies first applied digital technology to transform existing processes, which required high levels of organization and knowledge, but not a lot of creativity. Today, as companies reinvent themselves around everything digital, it is programming that reinvents processes. That requires people to work together and think broadly about how to solve real-world problems

Quartz
A free, teacher-less university in France is schooling thousands of future-proof programmers

Jenny Andersen

Sparky Abraham & Nathan J. Robinson — What Is Education For?

This article looks at Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education critically. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University. The economic school of thought with which he identifies is public choice, e.g, James Buchanan.

While I regard Caplan's solutions as questionable if not ridiculous, as does the author of the review, he does make a point. What is contemporary education really for? That does not seem to be clear as Caplan points out. He concludes therefore that education is worthless as it stands and needs revisiting. I agree with that. However, I regard Caplan's error as looking in the wrong direction owing to his ideological presumptions that operate as cognitive-affective bias.

The fact that the purpose of education is not clear from examining the current educational process in the US ( strongly suggests that it needs an overhaul. This is not surprising since the Western classroom model and curriculum now longer seems to fit. I agree with that.

This requires stepping back and revising the question of the purpose of education and the means for realizing that purpose optimally in the lives of learners.

That question is a foundational question in the philosophy of education, as subject that apparently the author of the article is unfamiliar with.

There are basically two types of educational philosophy — traditional and liberal.

The goal of the first is to inculcate a tradition. This type of education ends to be one-sided, as in religious education, or military school, or vocational education.

The goal of liberal education is to develop a well-rounded person capable of both creative and critical thinking, and of citizenship in a liberal society. The goal of liberal education is developing full potential as an individual and a human being in a society in which the fundamental question is what it means to live a good life in a good society, and how to implement this in one's life and one's society. There are many possible answers and liberal education explores them.

Philosophy is the basis of liberal education, in that philosophy is concerned chiefly with critical thinking. The method is understanding of logic and the principles of critical thinking by applying them to the great thinkers of the past that were foundation in shaping history and culture.

Liberalism has now become a tradition in the West, where it emerged in ancient Greece, and over time in some other parts of the world. The challenge, therefore, is to present liberal education as open, innovative, synergetic and adaptable instead of a one-sided tradition.

The author of the article confused education with the subjects taught and their practical application. The etymology, of the term "education, which means to lead from" in Latin, shows that education is about learning and not teaching. A major aspect of this learning is self-discovery, self-creation, and self-actualization. This cannot be put in but must be drawn out.

The criticism offered of the author's analysis and proposals is also off target in presuming that education is about doing and learning to do.

The solution offered at the close, which is not explained or elaborated is, "What is education for? It’s for becoming a person, not a worker." That is correct in my view but it needs explanation.

Education should be chiefly about being, then doing as a result and finally having based on what one has accomplished. However, the end it view is not chiefly about career success or material accumulation. It is about being a person of excellence" as Aristotle observed in Nichomachean Ethics.

First comes personhood. Second comes expression of that personhood in an individually unique way. Third comes receiving the feedback of this expression from the objectification of one's action in world, which concretizes the abstract.

Aristotle argued that all agents act for some end that that end is regarded as some good, a good being that which increases happiness. He then looks at the various proposals based different assumptions and finds them wanting. He argues that happiness is a by-product of living a good life in accordance with excellence (Greek arete).

This requires education based chiefly on being rather than doing or having. That is the goal of liberal education as conceived classically and which has been largely forgotten in the stampede for fame, fortune, power and pleasure.

While may seem non-specific, it is for an important reason. Each individual is unique and should be approached as such. Specificity need to be designed for individuals instead of a one-size-fits-all approach being applied indiscriminately.

There is no problem in combining liberal and traditional in the liberal paradigm in that liberalism is central to the Western intellectual tradition, having been initially explored in ancient Athens, which was a direct democracy of male citizens, at least of sorts. Western liberalism was eclipsed for a long while by traditionalism when the West was dominated by Christendom, although it began to reemerge with the Protestant Revolution.

Liberalism did not really comes of age until the 18th century Enlightenment, however. Eventually,  in "modern times" liberalism came to embrace tolerance of different views and different traditions, while becoming a tradition itself, opposed to anything it viewed as single-side traditionalism. This led the paradox of liberalism as a single-sided tradition itself opposing other single-sided traditions.

In spite of some rigidity setting in to liberalism as a tradition, liberal education requires learning about different traditions objectively, which is a necessity in a liberal society, especially a global one, since a key purpose of liberal education is developing a culture in which "we can all get along" despite differences in views and culture.

Current Affairs
What Is Education For?
Sparky Abraham & Nathan J. Robinson

Bill Mitchell — Education – a faux crisis, an erroneous ‘solution’ and capital wins again

One of the ways in which the neoliberal era has entrenched itself and, in this case, will perpetuate its negative legacy for years to come is to infiltrate the educational system. This has occurred in various ways over the decades as the corporate sector has sought to have more influence over what is taught and researched in universities. The benefits of this influence to capital are obvious. They create a stream of compliant recruits who have learned to jump through hoops to get delayed rewards. In the period after full employment was abandoned firms also realised they no longer had to offer training to their staff in the same way they did when vacancies outstripped available workers. As a result they have increasingly sought to impose their ‘job specific’ training requirements onto universities, who under pressure from government funding constraints have, erroneously, seen this as a way to stay afloat. So traditional liberal arts programs have come under attack – they don’t have a ‘product’ to sell – as the market paradigm has become increasingly entrenched. There has also been an attack on ‘basic’ research as the corporate sector demands universities innovate more. That is code for doing the privatising public research to advance profit. But capital still can see more rewards coming if they can further dictate curriculum and research agendas. So how to proceed. Invent a crisis. If you can claim that universities will become irrelevant in the next decade unless they do what capital desires of them then the policy debate becomes further skewed away from where it should be. That ‘crisis invention’ happened this week in Australia....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Education – a faux crisis, an erroneous ‘solution’ and capital wins again
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Anatoly Karlin — Chinese Science

China coming on strong. It still has a way to go though.

The Unz Review
Chinese Science

Anatoly Karlin

Livia Gershon — The Different Meanings of Monopoly

The history of the board game.

JSTOR Daily

The Different Meanings of Monopoly
Livia Gershon

Kristin Houser — Why robots could replace teachers as soon as 2027

Many professions, including education and health care, will become increasingly automated. This won't eliminate the need for humans, however, since the social element is also a vital factor in many fields, especially education, which involves socialization.

The problem inherent in this article is difficulty thinking outside the box, in this case the traditional classroom. That model is obsolescent, and technology will soon make it obsolete. Then we will look back on it and wonder why it held on for so long in spite of the obvious limitations in addressing individualization through personalization.

Individualization and socialization need to be balanced in order to develop well-rounded people that have an optimal opportunity to develop and express their full potential as individuals, group participants ("team-players"), citizens, and authentic human beings.

World Economic Forum
Why robots could replace teachers as soon as 2027

Kristin Houser | Senior Editor at Futurism

Adam Jezard — Finland thinks it has designed the perfect school. This is what it looks like.

The walls are coming down in Finland’s schools – but not just the physical barriers between classrooms. Also going are divisions between subjects and age ranges, and students have more of a say over what will be learnt than children in many other countries.

According to CityLab, an architecture website, the country is undergoing an ambitious national redesign of its 4,800 schools. Some 57 new schools began construction in 2015 and 44 in 2016. Others are being refurbished using open-plan principles...

Education for life rather than a job.

Proponents of PBL [phenomenon-based teaching and learning] say it helps to equip students with the critical thinking skills they need to flourish today. Kirsti Lonka, a professor of educational psychology at Helsinki University, told the BBC: “When it comes to real life, our brain is not sliced into disciplines ... we are thinking in a very holistic way. And when you think about the problems in the world – global crises, migration, the economy, the post-truth era – we really haven’t given our children the tools to deal with this inter-cultural world.”...

World Economic Forum
Finland thinks it has designed the perfect school. This is what it looks like.

Adam Jezard | Senior Writer at Formative Content.

Jonathan Vanian — Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Has Created a New Online University

The Silicon Valley technologist, who helped create over 40 years ago with the late Steve Jobs, has debuted Woz U, an online university. He plans to eventually open physical campuses in over 30 cities in the U.S. and other unspecified countries.

The institute, with a corporate headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz., offers online courses that are intended to train people in computer science and related fields and help them land jobs in the technology industry. Woz U is part of the private, for-profit Careers Institute, which operates seven campuses in Texas as well as an online school. Although Woz U is affiliated with Southern Careers Institute, it plans to “partner with other colleges and institutions as we grow,” according to the Woz U website....

Fortune
Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Has Created a New Online University

Jonathan Vanian

Eli Meixler — Tim Cook Says Learning How to Code is More Important than English as a Second Language

Last month, the Apple exec told Fortune about how the company developed the programming language Swift to encourage students of all ages to learn to code.

“All this curriculum stuff is free. Anybody can have it that wants it around the world. We've done it in multiple languages,” he said.

Fortune
Tim Cook Says Learning How to Code is More Important than English as a Second Language
Eli Meixler

Education

Every child begins their journey through life with an incredible potential: a creative mindset that approaches the world with curiosity, with questions, and with a desire to learn about the world and themselves through play.
However, this mindset is often eroded or even erased by conventional educational practices when young children enter school.

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking is often cited as an example of how children’s divergent thinking diminishes over time. 98% of children in kindergarten are “creative geniuses” – they can think of endless opportunities of how to use a paper clip.
This ability is reduced drastically as children go through the formal schooling system and by age 25, only 3% remain creative geniuses....

The World Economic Forum has just released its Human Capital Report with the subtitle “Preparing People for the Future of Work”.... It goes on to underline how schools tend to focus primarily on developing children’s cognitive skills – or skills within more traditional subjects – rather than fostering skills like problem solving, creativity or collaboration. 

This should be cause for concern when looking at the skill set required in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are the three most important skills a child needs to thrive, according to the Future of Jobs Report....

Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are different aspects of the same skill. Karl Popper wrote a book entitled, All Life Is Problem Solving, which sums it up. And it is not just about human capital and job qualifications.

The ability to combine creative and critical thinking are necessary conditions for the multifaceted types of problem solving one will need for life both personally and socially. While creativity is natural for children, ciritical thinking has to be acquired. And after childhood creativity has to be fostered with nurture or the natural impulse may decline and studies show that it does in the case of most people.

This requires emphasizing active learning over passive learning.

This realization is nothing new. John Dewey was famous for his pragmatic educational philosophy decades ago. He also emphasized that education is a necessary condition for a healthy democracy.

Unfortunately, the Human Capital Report is about "preparing people for work" rather than preparing people for life in a comprehensive way. That is a recipe for failure, both for individuals and society owing to its misdirected emphasis on a part of life rather than the whole. Education must be holistic, and therefore it must be systems-based.

World Economic Forum

This is the one skill your child needs for the jobs of the future
Mirjam Schöning, Head of Learning through Play in Early Childhood programme, The Lego Foundation, and Christina Witcomb, Senior Communication Manager, The Lego Foundation

See also

Over the past few years, Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings have all endorsed a teaching method known as "personalized learning."

It involves students guiding their own lessons with the help of technology, while teachers take on more of a coaching role if problems emerge. For its apparent benefits in getting kids up to speed in reading and math, advocates have claimed it could — and should — become the future of US education.

But personalized learning is so new, many teachers still need to learn how it works....

Business Insider

There's a teaching method tech billionaires love — here's how teachers are learning it

Chris Weller

Matias Vernengo — 'Edupreneurs,' Corporate Universities and Pluralism in Economics

I posted recently on the increasing influence of corporate money in academia, specifically the new Marriner Eccles center funded by the Koch brothers at the University of Utah. The piece by David V. Johnson in the Baffler on this subject is worth reading. As he notes, the new breed of private money goes beyond what they used to do in the past, trying to directly influence what kind of research, the curriculum and what ideas should be disseminated, and, indirectly who should be hired and retained. This is all the more problematic in the context of the retreat of public funding and the rise of the the corporate university, which implies that increasingly money equals voice in academia....

Further crapification of American education.

 The two top universities globally are not in the US any longer this year. Oxford and Cambridge took the top spots. Chinese and Russian universities are moving up the list.

The corporate totalitarians are also going after high school education as well. Their vision is clearly controlling education K-through PhD.

Naked Keynesianism
'Edupreneurs,' Corporate Universities and Pluralism in Economics
Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University

Lars P. Syll — Modern society

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Modern society
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Bloomberg View — Kids Should Know How to Code

The three r's plus c. Reading, writing, 'rithmetic, and coding.

Wholeheartedly agree. Digital natives need to be digitally literate.

I would a reasoning to the three r's.

Coding relates closely to reasoning in addition to acquiring symbolic literacy in a computer language. It is also a bridge to mathematical reasoning.

Bloomberg View
Kids Should Know How to Code

The Editors

Livia Gersho — The 19th-Century Activist Who Tried to Transform Teaching

The daughter of a union worker and activist, Margaret Haley became a teacher at age 16. A few years later, she found her way to teacher education classes based on John Dewey’s ideas of progressivism and teaching as a profession.

Haley criticized the “factoryizing” of education that turned the classroom teacher into an “automaton.”…

Haley harnessed the progressive idea of democracy as the central purpose of schools.

“Haley argued that unionization would join progressivism’s democratic convictions to labor’s democratic practices, and thus, fulfill education’s responsibility to publicly uphold ‘the democratic ideal,’” Hlavacik writes.

Best line.

“Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine,” she said. “The other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life.”

The struggle goes on.

JSTOR Daily
The 19th-Century Activist Who Tried to Transform Teaching
Livia Gersho

Alan Tuckett — Lifelong learning helps people, governments and business. Why don't we do more of it?

This is one of the most important questions that can be asked socially, political, and economically because lifelong learning is a significant factor in raising the level of collective consciousness that shapes individual decision making, social behavior, cultural development, and institutional arrangements worldwide.

The single most productive investment is in education in the broadest sense. But it must be quality education rather than education for education's sake, credentials, or job training. Genuine education is unfolding full potential for living a full life rather than teaching toward the test.

This rest on the question, what is living the good life in a good society? This has been an enduring question in the Western intellectual tradition, as well as other traditions.

World Economic Forum | Agenda

Lifelong learning helps people, governments and business. Why don't we do more of it?
Alan Tuckett | Professor of Education, University of Wolverhampton

Deborah Bach — Babies can learn a second language in 1 hour per day

“Science indicates that babies’ brains are the best learning machines ever created, ...” says coauthor Patricia Kuhl, codirector of I-LABS and a professor of speech and hearing sciences.

A primary ask of educational research is how to harness this most effectively and efficiently. Presently, a lot of potential is going to waste. Waste is uneconomical.

World Economic Forum | Agenda
Babies can learn a second language in 1 hour per day
Deborah Bach

Kerry McDonald — How Schooling Crushes Creativity

In 2006, educator and author Ken Robinson gave a TED Talk called, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” At over 45 million views, it remains the most viewed talk in TED’s history.
Robinson’s premise is simple: our current education system strips young people of their natural creativity and curiosity by shaping them into a one-dimensional academic mold.

This mold may work for some of us, particularly, as he states, if we want to become university professors; but for many of us, our innate abilities and sprouting passions are at best ignored and at worst destroyed by modern schooling.…

Robinson echoes the concerns of many educators who believe that our current forced schooling model erodes children’s vibrant creativity and forces them to suppress their self-educative instincts....

Compelling research shows that when children are allowed to learn naturally, without top-down instruction and coercion, the learning is deeper and much more creative than when children are passively taught.

Like American philosopher and educator John Dewey said many decades ago. It was called "progressive education" by then as an alternative to education by rote, which is now called "teaching the test."

Progressive education involves emphasizing learning over teaching, discovery over schooling, and group (team) learning over individual instruction.

Then objective is learning for life rather than credentialing.

FEE — Foundation for Economic Education
How Schooling Crushes Creativity
Asif Aziz