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The need for decentralized accredited education

-- By GabrielLopez - 25 Nov 2024

Introduction

Education has grown more authoritarian and oppressive in recent decades, perhaps in part to an implicit level of legitimacy that is given to higher education institutions and a growing demand for college education. Regardless of the reason, it seems that much of the reforms that students of the past fought for has been eroded in the face of digital tracking and surveillance and a school structure more focused on generating consistent income from its investments, donors, and tuition rather than the actual education of its students. Though a long march my more liberty minded academics into the institutions of universities is a possible solution this would take at least a few decades before any results could be noticed leaving generations of students all the worse off. The solution it seems would be to build an educational system that can challenge the universities and offer students the ability to learn as much as they can without being subject to oppressive university administrative policy.

Why accreditation?

However the problem is actually deeper than just creating a rival system. A group of tech savvy professors that chose to could essentially operate as an online university as far as the content that they would teach is concerned, but this would not solve the issue. The issue is to a large extent the issue of legitimacy or credibility, regardless of why we should want people to go to university the reality remains that they do do to get jobs and since such a rival system would require accreditation in order to be seen by employers as “real” the first issue that would need to be overcome is becoming and accredited institution. As such the challenge that any such attempt for an educational institution built for liberty and learning would be to get accredited by one of the 18 institutional accreditation agencies that are recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) or the Department of Education (ED).

Subverting the system

I believe that this issue can be overcome fairly easily, so long as the true purpose of the institution was not disclosed. This is to say that there is no dearth of professors or other academics which may be willing to join such a project and thus it should be able to attain accreditation given that other online only schools have been able to do so. The only objection that I can see to such an institution becoming accredited would not come from its lacking any sort of educational quality but rather from other colleges and universities that do not want a competitor. Thus it is best to approach accreditation as though this were to simply be another online only college that has no intent to rock the boat.

Once accredited this institution will be able to act as a university should, that is to say a place centrally focused on education, the development of young minds, and not focused on tracking, censoring or otherwise oppressing its students. This example overtime will hopefully either cause others to replicate its success in order to fill a need or colleges and universities will begin to reform and limit their authoritarian tendencies and focus on providing an education to their students. Either result would be better for students than our current system and would begin having effects on some students near immediately and on many more within a few years of accreditation as the education market would react to a school catering to students that care about their rights and their education more than they care about the prestige of name recognition. Creating an institution that serves students without oppressing them will cause changes within the educational system far more quickly than attempting to reform the current system from within and thus is a more worthwhile use of the time of educators that believe in educating students and respecting their rights.

Conclusion

Ultimately it might seem tempting to completely upend the educational system and create a school without the need of accreditation, especially since it seems that accreditation has become more and more easy to come by, this approach is flawed in that it would only be able to serve wealthy students that share the schools ideals. Lacking accreditation means that anyone who reasonably has to worry about employment in order to live would be unable to attend the school because graduating from it would not materially help them as they search for employment. Worse than the mere classist implications of this attempt to completely snub the current educational system is the fact that the school would lose out on great talents that could serve as champions for the cause of freedom. It is thus more valuable to the ultimate end of changing education in order to recenter teaching and freedom to have accreditation than it is to be seen as a completely outside institution.

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