[iDC] The Aims of Education

[davin heckman]

With high unemployment rates and a growing number of desperate
scholars, artists, and technicians with deep experience, training, and
passion, but no access to a living wage...  one option would be just
to publicly fund education, pay everyone involved in the process a
dignified wage, and then we could have a system in which the increased
demand for education is actually met with an increase in resources
dedicated to providing this education.  We could say, as a society,
that education is a right and a duty.  Students and families have
already demonstrated that they are willing to pay a portion of their
incomes to banks for the rest of their lives in exchange for
education...  so it isn't even really a question of whether or not
people want to sacrifice income in exchange for it.  On the other
hand, students and parents often are resentful of critical content and
the work of learning, willing to put in the time and money in exchange
for the degree, so it is safe to say that this whole dynamic has
profoundly warped the idea of education, the lives of teachers, the
minds of students, and everything else.

Knowing there is no problem with logistics and none with the basic
desire....  it is pretty clearly, as Ken says, a fundamental attack on
education itself.  Which is just another aspect of the broad attack on
the idea of society.  (Which is pretty much the gist of the Republican
debates).  It strikes me that many of the tactical deployments that
try to enable education to take place here and there are really great
and encouraging and nourishing.  But if we want grass roots change, we
are probably going to have to struggle for more fundamental things,
because no amount of good technology or methodology is going to be
able to counteract the general social thrust.  There just can't be
meaningful education for society without a social vision.

Davin