Capitalizing on Knowledge and Education

-- By ToddDensen - 13 Mar 2015

The Cost of Time

A few days ago, in Contracts, while the professor waited for the class to settle into their seats, I wondered how much each minute of wasted time was costing the class. Class started two minutes late – or collectively about $446.

Class began and my mind was still far from the subject matter, wasting my own money now. I knew each minute I listened to my professor sat in my seat, Columbia collected $2.32 from me. But what for? Was I paying for the privilege of listening to an accomplished scholar lecture on Contracts? That couldn’t really be what it was right? It can’t possibly cost Columbia $232 a minute in speaker's fees. Nothing that was said was proprietary; nothing about the environment could not be adequately recreated on my computer screen on Coursera.

Participation, engagement, access to professors – these must be where my tuition dollars work. But realistically I will be called on once, maybe twice a semester in this class. I could raise my hand to ask questions and I could go to office hours, but I could also pay a private tutor less to help me more.

The Functional Reality of Law School

What function does law school play? Is it to educate the next generation of lawyers? To teach them doctrine, to teach them how to “think"” Perhaps that is what most believe the purpose is, but in functionally it serves a far more utilitarian purpose – to obtain legal employment. At least that is what Columbia and a number of other prestigious law schools actually do; they get their graduates jobs. So then this is really just a very expensive firm of job search associates. And there might not be anything wrong with that necessarily.

Law school does serve one other function. A law degree, along with passing the bar exam, allows one to practice law New York State. In all but five states, one must obtain a J.D. in order to practice law. It is no secret that many lawyers earn a comfortable living. And after all, the rank of one’s law school generally will correlate to one’s legal job prospects.

So then functionally law school is a regressive measure that permits the wealthy and educated, who can afford to be admitted and attend premier law schools to access the sacred legal profession. All the while keeping the proletariat at bay. You might say admission itself is not limited to the wealthy, but indirectly it is constrained by one's wealth. Anyone with enough money or time (likely because they have enough money that they needn’t work) can study enough to excel on the Law School Admissions Test.

The Idealism of the Future

This needn’t be the system we endorse. Undergraduate education is already changing. University of the People offers accredited degrees completely free of charge. But maybe that is because the financial elite believe the value of undergraduate degrees has eroded enough that they no longer feel threatened. Or maybe that most private universities do not believe this is the future, but this is mistaken.The future is inevitable. Beyond a fathomable horizon, maybe; but inevitable nonetheless. Because knowledge cannot commoditized forever.

I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle. --Stephen Downes

This is the most sensible future for education. Free access to information and free advanced degrees. It makes perfect sense. As a species, we are more interconnected and smarter now than we ever have been. As access becomes easier, the chains of inequality loosen. Many homeless now have cellphones. And yes, 3/5 people in the world still do not have access to the internet. But it is only a matter of time before mobile phone service, specifically wireless internet service will be more accessible than clean water.

If only 3/5 of the world have access to this information now, imagine the power of mankind when access to knowledge can increase 150%? But the haves already begin to fear the have-nots and clench ever tighter to their slippery reins. Before our very eyes, knowledge has been transformed into property. Achievements of all mankind reduced to individual effort and latched away from the yearning plebeians. The resistance to knowledge dissemination is a blight, a physical hinderance to our species ability to adapt.

The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.--Aaron Swartz

Aaron had a vision, that the work of individual academics is not a piece of personal property that someone can be charged to access. If a man stands on the shoulder of a giant, is he the tallest man? Does the woman who builds a birdhouse own it if she used wood from a tree grown by another? Collective knowledge packaged and licensed is inconsistent with human progress. To progress as a society, we must add to the stack of collective knowledge freely. To do so at a fee is only to create waste, and restrict the number of intelligent people who can build further.

The more we give away, the richer we become.--Eben Moglen

The connection between knowledge and conferring degrees and qualifications is clear. On the one end, free acess to scholarly work is important for society to advance intellectually. At the other end, free access to degrees, and more specifically advanced degrees empowers individuals. It empowers them to become employed and to become scholars for humanity contributing to the collective knowledge.

I think the problem on both sides of the essay involves a single point of failure in the social analysis. Teaching is a form of human relationship, between two people, older than speech, which was the primary form of human cultural transmission, before speech, for millions of years. We are highly evolved for teaching relationships, which are not merely transmissions of knowledge. Hence your failure to identify what is either right or wrong with law school. (Your hypothesis that the professional certification function is the primary function of a trade school, whatever the kind, is framed by disregarding the relational nature of teaching.) So is your analysis of the future of education as a social process. To imagine that the personal relationships in education can be "free" is to disregard the scarcity of human sensitivity and attention which is the price of all significant human services. A labor theory of value has become a theory of labor anti-value. But neither teaching nor psychotherapy can be conducted "free" even if, like Cooper Union since the time of Peter Cooper until yesterday, no tuition fee is charged. But Peter Cooper left his land for the tuition-free education of the working class (a job later assigned to the City University of New York, which did indeed provide tuition-free higher education in the 20th century, through socialism) knowing that what a man or woman pays for teaching isn't necessarily the money that pays the teacher's salary, but the half of the relationship that, just like the teacher's half, is indispensable and therefore pricy..