… says a high school student in one of our most depressed states — a state that, like some others, has cynically decided to deal with its education budget by buying a bunch of computers and shoving them in front of students.
Hey, they can shove computers in front of themselves at home and fuck the whole get up in the morning / be with other people / deal with a teacher thing! Remember Irving Berlin:
I’ve Got the On Button in the Morning and the Off Button at Night
And With the On Button in the Morning and the Off Button in Evening
I’m All Right!
Sure, you’ve got a little grousing – from a few teachers, a few students – but gradually everyone’s going to get on board. The teachers will still be paid — only they’ll be paid not to show up. They’ll stay home, just like their students, and be what this blog has long called distance teachers: air traffic controllers. The students will watch films and play games on their laptops and cheat their way through the courses. A win/win situation, and it costs the state vanishingly little.
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UD thanks Taylor for the link.
January 6th, 2012 at 11:27AM
Now that the word “education” has little to do with teaching and learning, but refers to a business that sells Certificates of Presence (loosely defined), we need another word to name what “education” used to mean.
January 6th, 2012 at 6:50PM
How about “cultivation”?
Jacques Barzun, from “Culture High and Dry,” way back in 1984:
`Today anybody with a diploma from any institution calling itself educational is counted among the educated, while the disparate doings of our elementary and high schools are also called education…
Culture and education are qualities found in persons who have first been taught to read and write and then have managed, against heavy odds, to cultivate their minds, to educate themselves.’
January 6th, 2012 at 8:32PM
Well, how about barzunation?