Padd Solutions

Converted by Falcon Hive

How much to consume education?

Posted by moses @ 15:44 • , , , • 0 comments


Let's face it, adults as a group are pretty bad at giving advice to young people. For example, if young people aim low, adults tell them to aim higher and have more ambition; on the other hand, if young people aim high, adults tell them to be realistic and to pay their dues first. Basically, a lot of advice actually boils down to "do/don't do what I did" or "be/don't be like me".

Then there are those who assume that people think or should think they way they do, and this group certainly includes young people as well.

In times of great uncertainty, the advice and words of wisdom become especially loud and numerous, as everyone chimes in on what they think people should or will do. And I dare say that most of them haven't got a clue.

Now, on the Guardian's question of whether the tripling of tuition fees to £9,000 will inevitably turn students into consumers –this is a silly question and those who are happy with it are quite inevitably going to come up with silly answers. I mean, it implies that students haven't always been consumers. Does the price of a good determine whether you are a consumer? Or is there some kind of a consumer continuum? Shoppers at cheap Tesco are not as much consumers as shoppers at Waitrose?

Of course, this doesn't matter to those who wish to use the question as an excuse to air their self-righteous opinions and advice. In particular, I'm thinking of those who would take this opportunity to remind young people of the value of education, of which they are themselves naturally and keenly aware.

But instead of rushing to tell people what they should or will do, let's address the question carefully. Aside from the fact that it seems to be predicated on the strange idea that students aren't already consumers of education, there is a related question that we must first ask: What qualities can we objectively attach to consumers as a group? Certainly, there are examples of consumers behaving both rationally and irrationally. At times, they are able to make pretty good cost/benefit calculations and drive the market in a way that benefits them; at other times, they consume almost mindlessly. The diversity of consumer behaviour means we cannot assign any particular quality to consumers in their capacity as consumers and argue whether students will be more or less like them.

It also suggests that it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict how students will generally behave due to the fee increase, beyond invoking a basic economic maxim and saying that demand for higher education will almost certainly go down to some extent.

So there really isn't a good answer to the question of whether university students will become consumers, not even if we interpret it as one that is concerned with the value that future students will place on university education.

Is that a boring answer? Well, I think it certainly beats the millionth musing on how students don't value the education they are receiving enough.

Don't think like a manager

Posted by moses @ 18:37 • , , • 0 comments


It is often said that knowledge is power. Is it? Or does knowledge simply avail us to the means of power, if that?

There are criticisms to be made of the naive view that knowledge can automatically solve the world's ills, but we do not even have to venture there. In the first place, we should ask what kind of knowledge is regarded as power.

It stands to reason that not all kinds of knowledge can be associated with power. But aside from the fact that some knowledge is obviously of limited use, there's a particular kind that is foremost in the hierarchy of knowledge, being perhaps the only kind that is really recognised as empowering in the minds of many: Actionable knowledge.

In a way, this is apt when we consider the naive belief that knowledge is automatically empowering. Obviously, actionable knowledge is valuable because it allows us to take actions that would otherwise not have been possible or as effective without it. On the other hand, the notion that only actionable knowledge is empowering leads to the idea that only knowledge that is actionable is worth pursuing. That is why we hear rants, such as the one in New York Times recently, about the amount of time and money spent pursuing 'useless' knowledge.

Such complaints do have their points, but they often leave us with the distinct impression that people expect a lot from the knowledge they pursue. They expect it to pave the way to good jobs, to yield financial profit, to save time—in short, knowledge is expected to have tangible benefits, measured in terms that people are already familiar with and fully expect.

There are two criticisms that can be made. Firstly, such expectations are contrary to the nature of discovery. Whether the discovery is unprecedented or personal, whether the knowledge gained is completely new or already known to others, gaining knowledge entails learning something you didn't know before. It is therefore strange that we think we know what we can expect out of gaining some knowledge. While we can perhaps guess at or imagine its possible outcomes, the process of learning is likely to entail learning more than just actionable knowledge. In any particular body of knowledge learned, perhaps only a small part of it is actionable knowledge. Yet such 'wastage' is an unavoidable part of the learning process, a consequence of not knowing what exactly to expect, and this is especially true when engaging in cutting-edge research that seeks to break new ground.

This brings us to the second point, which is what the New York Times article seems to overlook when it rehashes old complaints about the academic ivory tower: A lot of the knowledge gained through research in institutes of higher learning is 'useless' because research is not an entirely predictable process. Important discoveries are often unexpected and made when pursuing lines of inquiry that might initially seem esoteric and of limited practical consequence. Even if a body knowledge seems to be full of information that is of little use outside of academia, the discourse it generates may have a cumulative effect that could be instrumental to making important discoveries within that body or outside of it. Thus, research is not made up self-contained projects that either yield useful results or not—research can be seen as consisting of discourses that together form the ground from which new knowledge germinates, not necessarily as a result of any single effort.

That is not to say that research need not be directed by practical goals. However, we should not be surprised that only "around 40 percent" or whatever proportion of academic research proves to be immediately useful in practical contexts. These circumstances are part and parcel of the process of research, and perhaps it is a gross misunderstanding of the way knowledge is gained that leads to the kind of cynicism that demands that knowledge yield tangible rewards or be deemed not worthwhile.