First off, I posit we will need to analyze all educational systems should we begin to strategize what is an inter-systemic problem. Attainment is a problem because our attainment systems do not cohere logically to allow for mass attainment past age of eighteen when compulsory education ends in this country. We keep saying that we need more people to attain higher degrees of education, but there are greater impediments to that goal than simply flagging student performance and achievement standards in K-12 schools. Certainly we must address significant structural foundations of educational institutions in this country if we really expect change. Otherwise, we’re just talking about it instead of being about it.

Change efforts must include both K-12 and higher education as institutions that are unquestioned by the majority in most regards, reifying as they do the master myth of meritocracy in this country. We will need to change both K-12 and higher education systems if we are to get serious about providing access and opportunity to all in the nation. And I think we see beginnings of that in new trends in education, including promising examples of Early College and CTE dual enrollment efforts of late. But, lest I wax too optimistic, the article below helps pop the balloon, noting other problems with higher education once we get students enrolled there.

It’s not just issues of access and preparation that are the problems. We continue to adhere to old ideas about what a college education really should provide. Taylor below has it right that we have failed to differentiate and keep up with modern reality, following along with outdated educational ideas we adopted from ancient ideas of what an education should mean. And we do so at our peril.

Education is wasted as currently structured, whether denied from
the masses or inflicted on the rich. Sure, all are deserving of it, but
nobody deserves symbolic violence oft found in graduate school! The academic attainment system simply follows a faulty logic that
restricts access to too many while providing bizarre outcomes to privileged others, whether in form of debt or fancy degrees that sadly do not prepare us for real work in the real world.

What if public higher education was finally updated to be truly an open institution for all comers, paid for by the state to put learners together with practitioners to actually address problem-focused issues of collective concern, as Taylor describes below? Then the university might stop being a numbering and sorting device that polices boundaries and limits its engagement with public concerns of a civil society. It would stop following a market logic but would ironically generate even more capital for local communities and the nation writ large. Human capital and actual capital would increase as theory would take to practice: communities of practice could be built, and new certifications that actually mean something out here would be provided to learners as apprentices.

Learning and real work can occur simultaneously to benefit of
participants and recipients, inside and outside the school gates. Case in point: Eric and Scot are Green Construction instructors in Alameda who are teaching students to build sustainably while also teaching the formerly homeless of Alameda Point Collaborative to do the same and increase real housing opportunities for their peers at the very same time. Thus, students are enriched, deserving citizens are provided much-needed new job skills and access to humane living arrangements, and the community is provided value by the restoration of what was formerly abandoned public housing. All those good people get skills and ideally certification to go back to work, thus paying the state back with productivity. That could be a model for what higher ed as continuing education could mean, not restricted to the few but helping many as it engages the public. We need a California learning corps that will help fix our levees and our roads, our harbors and green spaces, our local neighborhoods, and all other aspects of our living infrastructure. We need a way to engage more in learning and service to benefit those in need, whether individuals or local communities or state/nation writ large. Higher education could be restructured to provide more short-term certificates and credentials to people who do not need a BA or MA or PhD or MD or JD but who are needed desperately nonetheless to contribute to growing needs in fields of health and human services regardless. We would do well to consider the end game of getting work done that needs to get done and prioritizing preparation of people to actually do that work. And while that doesn’t require a terminal degree, we still keep acting like it does.

What we need right now is to prioritize the ideal of American
education again, providing all with learning from cradle to wage.
While higher degree programs still dominate educational priorities,
our world falls apart as the ivory tower patinas with age.

In sum, I agree with your observations and just want to emphasize that we will now need to aggressively and radically alter the institutional logics of both K-12 and higher ed if we really want to see all people provided opportunities for equitable access to a living wage and a meaningful life. We will need to work harder at inventing new attainment systems that match real national needs if we are keen to get at what Obama has identified as a national goal, namely the highest rate of post-secondary completion in the world.

NYT
April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor

End the University as We Know It

By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate
programs in American universities produce a product for which there is
no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and
develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in
subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one
other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost
(sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into
sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for
decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation
of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the
Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content
of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor,
so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public
teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to
separation where there ought to be collaboration and to
ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for
example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with
little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication
become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the
trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that
all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A
colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his
dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used
citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational
system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate
those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own
pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these
students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid
graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching,
universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing
undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still
encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper
to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as
little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire
full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard
for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the
illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical
presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there
will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are
self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review.
While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight
responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To
complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted
tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for
the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own
departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century,
colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be
rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to
make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin
with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and
proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The
division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must
be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex
adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become
cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who
had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never
considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the
world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate
understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines
are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on
questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology,
sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in
comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is
restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be
transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education,
and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving
programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one
should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly
changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around
which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law,
Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and
Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water
will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity,
quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific,
technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political
and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be
adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical,
religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as
much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts,
social and natural sciences with representatives from professional
schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work,
theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple
perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and
unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not
need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to
form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be
able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong
department in French, for example, and the other a strong department
in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can
be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have
already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the
Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities,
where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a
market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more
footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses
continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly
certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press
print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is
less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many
years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not
write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats
from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate
students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in
alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students.
Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they
are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare
for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new
approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life
issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit
organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate
in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly
changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended
to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with
little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once
tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor
to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to
assume responsibilities like administration and student advising.
Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the
programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This
policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers,
scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive
while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather,
take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never
imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is
that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency
and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia,
is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere:
Reflections on Dying and Living.”

Thanks,

Deborah

I’ve had the good fortune to be able to do some consulting outside schools and school districts, including government agencies (as far away as Singapore, but also our own government), non-profit organizations, and even some private sector businesses. I’ve come to see that in every case, the same longing for transcending traditional bureaucratic forms that were created to serve an entirely different purpose (and even different epistemological underpinnings) and discovering more authentic, networked, connected, responsive, emergent, fluid forms that can address the complex world and the revolutionary speed of learning and knowledge (not just information) creation and use.

Even more fundamental, people are longing for a new sense of meaning and purpose, a clarity about values and principles, to get away from cynicism and meaningless, repetitive, compliance-driven work, to make connections with each other, to renew our commitment to stewardship of the earth, to rebuild community and find the heart of what it means to be human together.

I had been working with Van Schoales and Alan Gottlieb in Denver to create a new coaching organization there (the Institute for Educational Equity) to work with Denver Public Schools, and in the process of doing that, got involved with an intriguing social network driven organizational development project with the Piton Foundation and several organizations in Denver, including the African Community Center, which resettles African and other refugees. It’s been inspiring to see their openness to organizational forms unimagined before, in the service of building strong community networks.

Underlying all of these projects is a huge need to understand the processes of creating and making meaning out of and managing in a real time way all the knowledge that is being generated in these new work relationships and conversations. I’ve been working with several groups on what a dynamic and interactive knowledge management system and collaborative workspace would look like. I’m excited about the prospects of an architecture that mirrors the new networked organizational forms that are emerging.

We are on the verge of an absolutely essential radical shift in the way we organize to do collaborative work and build community, I believe. The work on microdemocracy that The Right Question Project is doing, the Small Planet Institute that Frances Moore Lappe started, The Sustainability Institute that Donella Meadows started (she was one of the systems thinkers who influenced Peter Senge), the work of Kevin Kelly on networked, co-evolving, open systems, the World Cafe of Juanita Brown and David Isaacs… the list goes on and on of emerging new thinking about this essential need. I think there is enough evidence and thinking out there to give us all the clues we need; it’s just a matter of slowing down enough to take the time to think about how they all fit together.

At any rate, I’d love to get involved, share ideas, and see what emerges. Your writing is inspiring, and what you are thinking about as a new form of community commitment to educating our youth and building our future democratic community gives me hope. I hope we can connect and talk about all this at some point soon.

This initiative comes at an important time for me, as I work to help our school rethink our own curriculum. I’ve been working toward more “personalized” learning, but this model is deeper and richer than others I’ve seen, and it’s pressing me in great ways. Thank you for your strong thinking and your clear ethic of care.