Max Sawicky asked,
>If students who pay for some type of education are not
>customers, what are they? Suckers?
Apprentices in the process of coming to know what they know. It may sound
pretentious (not to mention paradoxical), but people can't be taught
anything they don't already know. In agreement with Paulo Freire and Myles
Horton, I see the teacher's role as helping students to discover the value
and meaning of what they already know from practical experience and to learn
to reflect and build on those insights instead of feeling subservient to the
pronouncements of experts.
Often students do see themselves as "customers" who are paying for the
commodity that they have been told is education. This so-called education
requires no ethical commitment from the customer and it involves no personal
transformation. A better word for it would be a "franchise in a package of
cliches". The cliches are worthless but in the perverse world of inflated
credentials and disdain for genuine learning they may, by sheer chance,
realize a greater exchange value than any quantity of knowledge or wisdom.
Usually, though, the cliches are totally depreciated by the time the student
drives them out of the showroom.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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