Most people no longer feel the need to visit a large, stone building for hours every week, submit to the authority of a cleric, and listen to some garbled Latin or Hebrew in order to connect to a higher power. I have to wonder if organized higher education could someday go the way of organized religion – not to disappear, by any means, not even to diminish in absolute size, but to cede its place at the very height of human thought and center of daily action.
True, university reform is necessary, the institution having become, in Christopher Olaf Blum’s words, “a chance collection of individuals building their careers.” But when would be reformers are unaware of the academic challenges to secularization theory, that the Catholic Mass is no longer exclusively in Latin, or that Hebrew might actually be worth learning, then there is cause for hesitation. Books such as these inadvertently reveal that universities have failed to pass on much of substance. (That “garbled Latin” verb, tradere, comes to mind.) I can’t speak to the details of DIY U’s Edpunk strategy because paragraphs like the ones above, or the book’s beginning by dismissing colonial colleges in toto, caused me to lose interest. I can say that reform does not come from pressing forward into digital oblivion, but from returning to (ehem) the original ideal, an ideal that can now be digitally enhanced.
Any student worth their salt will supplement formal instruction with some of the resources mentioned in books like DIY U. But they are just that – supplements (and the best of such supplements, sorry to say, require University affiliation to access). Saying, as some do, that wikipedia, iTunes U or the superb Great Courses series have outmoded the collegiate, residential ideal is like saying the internet’s proliferation of recipes has outmoded eating. Colleges still can be, in Blum’s words, “a kind of fellowship, even a friendship, whose characteristic activity [is] to ‘rejoice in the truth’ (gaudium de veritate).” I know because I teach at one. But the thing about friendship is you can’t do it yourself.
Matthew Milliner is Assistant Professor of art history at Wheaton College. You can follow him on twitter.
December 13th, 2011 | 8:50 am
I agree, of course. But I have to quibble (just a bit) and throw out there that in my experience, about half of the “superb Great Courses series” in my field (theology, philosophy) contain seriously misleading content. Some are great (Fr. Koterski, thank you if you are reading this). But some are the product of a professor with a fixation or two, presenting their fixations as settled fact.
That’s not a problem if you are taking a university course; you have other professors, and you learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. But if the Great Courses series, like the Wikipedia article taken to a higher level, is your primary or only source of information on a topic, you could run into problems.
Students like the ease of access to DIY U. However, my impression is that they really do want an educated person to tell them, “This is what is important: read this, do this.” They want professors, in other words, not self-directed studies.
December 13th, 2011 | 12:05 pm
I have gone through a few Great Courses, one in linguistics and a couple in history, and loved them.
But the idea that I’m getting an “education” from doing that, as opposed to learning some more information in a particular field of interest, is just really wrongheaded.
I know a ton more about linguistics than I knew before, and find it fascinating, and am able to apply it ways I couldn’t before, but I would never imagine myself claiming that I had been “educated” in linguistics in any way comparable to a university education in it, even a poor one.
But I don’t quite like the Internet recipes/eating analogy — perhaps a better one would be Internet recipes/top-level gourmet chefs. Thanks to recipes more widely available than ever, we can all attempt, and many of us pull off, those recipes that the top-level chefs use. The idea that it makes us equivalent to those chefs is risible.
December 13th, 2011 | 4:25 pm
But the idea that I’m getting an “education” from doing that, as opposed to learning some more information in a particular field of interest, is just really wrongheaded.
And did you utilize all the additional content, follow the recommended links and do all the additional reading?
If you did, I am sure you got more out of the course than most college students would get out of a similar course.
If I remember right, you’re a homeschooling parent (?)….you must be aware that the Great Courses are not the only or even the best resources out there.
Many schools are finding ways to make their content available.
The only thing missing is a reliable way to document what one has learned. As long as there is no formal gatekeeper process, schools will be necessary for the piece of paper – even as they are increasingly failing to back their own currency with anything real.
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