Keith and Harry,
So the answer is to turn the great English University into a Bartlesville, Oklahoma community vo-tech school? Interesting. Like I used to tell Harry when he went all faux "theoretical" on me. There are plenty of examples of such things over here in the colonies. Music conservatories, specialty high schools in NYCity and across the country etc. etc. Go see how they work before you tear down and destroy your traditions or just make a lot of money for some pusherkes who [like the market], bet against everything in order to pick up money on the side in the chaos. You do realize that is the theory of war of Kazantzakis and his Odysseus right? "I've fooled you death, I've squandered all your goods." And England is going to do to itself what the Anglos did to the Indians and the Artists in America. Now THAT was a big success. All of those social theories practiced on the Indian reservations with us as laboratory rats and now the lowest employment and standard of living in the nation. Of course people who can't teach blame the students. That you would fall for it doesn't speak well for you Keith. I've always thought you were better than that. When that's all you've got I'm not against vo-tech. I went to music conservatory for a masters after I had learned academic studies at University. I also sent my daughter to a vo-tech high school. The point about conservatory is that it is never enough. Private Instruction outside of the "scale" environment of school is required to keep up competitively. My daughter went to the LaGuardia school of Music and Art and Performing Arts at Lincoln Center here in New York City. It is a specialized public school here and a high school conservatory. Still it is considered vocational Tech by educational category. She had her choice of that or the science schools which are really colleges for prodigies as is LaGuardia. She took her work in theater and acting and then chose the best college for writing in America in Boston. Emerson college. Most of the great journalists either went or teach there. As at LaGuardia she studied the theoretical and artistic writing in the first years then switched to the area she wanted to focus on and even came back for an extra year to excel even more. We had to pay more for that extra year because the schools here have the same program as England is now instituting that punishes students if they should change their "track" after the first year. Yes it isn't publically funded. Her mother and I paid for everything. I've never been on the dole. No unemployment, just earned scholarships for being the best at what I was tested at. But basically I paid for everything in my education [and still do] by working in music and the arts. I still study with Maestro Daniel Ferro one of the great voice teachers. He's taught most of the great singers of the last generation and still private teaches although almost 90. Last summer he gave master classes at the Paris Opera and in Tuscany. My daughter graduated at the top of her class [summa cum laud] and has always had a job and works for a big Television corporation running their internet website. She could have been one hell of an actress. Kate Blanchet type, and she had a full scholarship to the Stanislavski Institute in Moscow but choose another profession instead even though with her connections, talent and beauty she stood a better chance of making more money in the movies. Her school places a lot of people there. But it wasn't wasted. I believe "scale" Public, and Private, Schools are for the development of the psycho-physical instrument and the building of options and the wisdom to make good choices based upon what makes you happy. I considered and she agrees that developing the patterning skills from an early age up through high school and building a performance discipline made it much easier for her to choose what she wanted to do and have the discipline to do it. I also gave her voice lessons as education although I knew it was not an option as a living. The skills were the point not a professional career. The patterning and expressive skills were so much better in the Art and Performance schools than the science schools and students who work on expression and performance early don't hate what they do and decide to try to work in the arts long after their biological clock has left them. Mark my words. You are going to have a whole generation of Englishmen and women who will feel like they sold their souls and were cheated from their culture and reason for existence for a buck. Like I said before. It's the contract of Esau when Jacob got the birthright and became the father of a world culture instead of the older brother who could only think "fuel." And fuel is important lost in the desert but he still lost his identity and never returned from the mountain he was given to go think and meditate on his mistakes. REH PS: Didn't you read any Thomas Hardy in school? I even read Jude the Obscure in Tulsa. Yuri Yevtushenko teaches at the University of Tulsa as did Germaine Greer and it's the most prestigious votech Petroleum Engineering school on the planet. :>)) From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 12:50 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] How to screw the poor. The Browne Report, Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (2010), is quite right. Students (and their parents) are much closer to the job market than universities. They are going to be much more realistic about what subjects should be taught. The majority of young people only want to go to university to pick up a piece of paper at the end that will impress a potential employer. However, this doesn't mean that all universities will want to become facsimiles of the broad job market. If only in part, some specialize and establish a reputation in recondite subjects which attracts a minority of young people with a genuine love of learning for its own sake. KSH (At 20:57 14/12/2010 -0500, you wrote: December 13, 2010, 6:00 pm Here we are. Utility again. Been here before. It was before the 98 million were murdered only to be repeated in the 20th century. How many now? Their hearts are dead. They have been devoured by the ants. Nezahaulcoytl REH The Value of Higher Education Made Literal By STANLEY FISH <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/stanley-fish/> A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before them had he not been the beneficiary, as a working-class youth in England, of a government policy to provide a free university education to the children of British citizens. He walked into the university with little knowledge of the great texts that inform modern democracy and he walked out an expert in those very same texts. It goes without saying that he did not know what he was doing at the outset; he did not, that is, think to himself, I would like to be come a scholar of Locke, Hobbes and Mill. But thats what he became, not by choice (at least in the beginning) but by opportunity. That opportunity to stroll into a world from which he might otherwise have been barred by class and a lack of funds is not likely to be extended to young men and women in England today, especially if the recommendations of the Browne report, Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education <http://hereview.independent.gov.uk/hereview/report/> (Oct. 12, 2010), are implemented by a government that seemed to welcome them and, some suspect, mandated them. The rhetoric of the report is superficially benign; its key phrase is student choice: Our proposals put students at the heart of the system.Our recommendations . . . are based on giving students the ability to make an informed choice of where and what to study.Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education. The obvious objection to this last declaration is, No, they arent; judgment is what education is supposed to produce; if students possessed it at the get-go, there would be nothing for courses and programs to do.But that objection would be entirely beside the point in the context of the assumption informing the report, the assumption that what students want to get from participating in higher education is money. Under the system the report proposes, government support of higher education in the form of block grants to universities (which are free to allocate funds as they see fit) would be replaced by monies given directly to matriculating students, who would then vote with their pocketbooks by choosing which courses to investin. Investis the right word because the cost of courses will be indexed to the likelihood of financial rewards down the line. A courses key selling pointwill be that it provides improved employabilityand students will be asked to pay higher chargesfor a course only if there is a proven path to higher earnings.(There is a verbal echo here, surely unintended, of the value nowhere to be found in the report, the value of higher learning.) The result, anticipated and welcomed by the reports authors, will be that courses of study that deliver improved employability will prosper,while those that dont will disappear.This will hold also for universities, which will either prosper or wither on the vine depending on the agility they display in adapting themselves to student-consumer demands. Institutions will have to persuade students that the charges they put on their courses represents [sic] value for money.(Adapt or die.) It hardly need be said that under this scheme the arts and the humanities (and most of the social sciences) will be the losers: the model of rational economic (as opposed to educational) choice does not encourage investment in medieval allegory or modern poetry or Greek history. But the Browne report is taking no chances. Concerned that students might choose (invest) poorly and thereby threaten the viability of prioritycourses of study science, technology, clinical medicine and nursing the report proposes additional and targeted investment for those courses. The confidence in consumer choice as a means of identifying value will be supplemented (one might say weakened) by a state subsidy that will ensure that the proper values technological and scientific are nourished and make it even more likely that other values, associated with art, literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, political science, etc., are not. In addition, strict surveillance will be required to make sure that universities accepting these targeted investmentfunds actually use them for priority courses and dont divert them to frills. Students will not only be the drivers of the new system; they will pay for it, but only after they enjoy the income they have been promised: Students should only pay towards the cost of their education once they are enjoying the benefits of that education. The logic is the logic of privatization. Higher education is no longer conceived of as a public good as a good the effects of which permeate society but is rather a private benefit, and as such it should be supported by those who enjoy the benefit. It is reasonable to ask those who gain private benefits from higher education to help fund it rather than rely . . . on public funds collected through taxation from people who have not participated in higher education themselves.No one who has not been to a university has any stake in the health or survival of the system. At the end of the report, the authors congratulate themselves: We have never lost sight of the value of learning to students, nor the significant contribution of higher education to the quality of life in a civilized society.A first response to this declaration might be to describe it as either a lie or a joke. There is no recognition in the report at all of the value of learning; quality is a measure nowhere referenced; civilization, as far as one can see, will have to take care of itself . But at second thought this paean of self-praise is merited once we remember that that the reports relentless monetization of everything in sight has redefined its every word: value now means return on the dollar; quality of life now means the number of cars or houses you can buy; a civilized society is a society where the material goods a society offers can be enjoyed by more people. One must admit that this view of value and the good life has a definite appeal. It will resonate with many not only in England but here in the United States. And to the extent it does, the privatization of higher education will advance apace and the days when a working-class Brit or (in my case) an immigrants son can wander into the groves of academe and emerge a political theorist or a Miltonist will recede into history and legend. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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