The future(s) of religious higher education

I have an ongoing interest in the intersection between religion and higher education for many reasons that readers of this blog might have noted--I'm religious myself (or perhaps religiously confused might be more accurate), I'm convinced that some spiritual practices have great potential for secular higher education, and I'm beginning to suspect that faith-based institutions do a much better job on institutional vision and the development of students than their secular counterparts do.

To these reasons let me add one more:  that current and historic practices in the creation of churches might provide some insights into ways to respond to challenges facing higher education.

Carol Howard Merritt's post "Ten Church Models for a New Generation" neatly summarizes emerging practices among people wanting Christian churches to flourish.  There are five themes that run through them.

• First, the church, like higher education, has moved away from the needs of its congregants, either by succumbing to the temptations of largeness and prominence or by remaining complacent while the world changes around it.  
• Second, that successful innovations are coming in small settings, where the trappings of religion--big buildings, formal worship services--are less important than building a sense of common purpose among those who are participating.  
• Third, that these new forms of congregations have, in many instances, developed new funding models as well, where the congregation is funded by proceeds from a coffee shop, say, or where the pastor is an entrepreneur.
• Fourth, these newly successful congregations emerge from the efforts of a few people who plant a new congregation and nurture it while it grows into something sustainable.
• Fifth, while in some new versions technology plays a central role, in most technology is secondary to the broader mission of the organization.

In this list one can see suggestions for institutions of higher education.  Particularly intriguing to me is the possibility of college-planting, where institutions of higher education select a couple of people to open what is essentially a store-front version of the home institution, dedicated to the particular needs of the people  who live nearby.  In a higher education landscape where even small colleges have hundreds of students, and where campuses are nearly always set off from their surroundings, store-front schools would be a place both to reach new participants, to innovate in education, and to build the sorts of relationships between learners and teachers that result in powerful learning.

Given that the trends that Merritt summarizes are emerging from the church, it may be that church-affiliated institutions are the first to move in the direction of small, emergent colleges.  But no school should overlook the potential of emergent churches to suggest ways to reach new communities of learners, explore new models of revenue, and reinvigorate the human relationships (and the understanding of those relationships) that were once at the core of what it meant to be an educated person.

How innovative is "The Innovative University"?

Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring's new book, The Innovative University is garnering significant attention right now, as one would expect from a book penned by Christensen and a book that is organized around a comparison of BYU-Idaho and Harvard University.  (Full disclosure--Westminster College is mentioned in several sidebars; I was part of the Westminster group who made suggestions about those sidebars.)  Christensen and Eyring's recent Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed, "How to Save the Traditional University, from the Inside Out" has elicited 62 written comments as of 31 July, and several webinars devoted to the book and its argument are pending.

Their argument--that in order to innovate and succeed, colleges and universities need to do more with technology, reduce costs to students, and focus themselves in order to provide to students what they desire while giving society what it needs, is unexceptional.  In fact, it happens all the time, as colleges and universities make decisions about starting new programs, discontinuing old ones, and recruiting students who will succeed on their campuses. (And, it should be noted, it is small, focused institutions that, if they don't find a market, are more likely to die.) I would suggest that the authors' central trope, that Harvard's DNA has been grafted into nearly all of American higher ed causing a sort of arms race that prices students out of the market and fails to deliver good learning, is a bit of a stretch.  It may be the case that Research I universities, and top-tier (and top-tier wannabe) liberal arts colleges have adopted  Harvard-like mission and faculty roles, but the vast majority of public and private universities have not.

But setting this aside, the real question is this--How innovative is "The Innovative University"? At least in their op-ed piece, Christensen and Eyring look towards a future where more specialized institutions (ones that have focused their offerings and their student profile) produce knowledge that meets the needs of their learners, using technology in discovery, dissemination, and learning. (For a great example of this sort of school, plus one that really innovates in its focus on learning, take a look at Roseman University of Health Sciences.)  But presumably, students would still take classes, work towards degrees, and engage with the institution over a brief but focused period of time.  That is, college education would still look largely the same to students once they matriculate. The main difference would be in the options available to students, and the role of cost and specialization in helping students choose those options.

Such an approach, for all of its virtues, fails to respond to some of the major issues facing education in the US.  It does not, for example, do anything to ensure that college-going students are prepared to go to college.  It does little to reach the millions of adults who need more education but cannot enroll in college to get it.  It doesn't put the interests and passions of students at the center of the learning experience.  It assumes that much knowledge exists largely in universities. And it maintains (or perhaps exacerbates) the assumption that learning and knowledge exist in disciplinary boxes, rather than being integrated with each other.

One might imagine an entirely different model of education--call it the Education Maintenance Organization (EMO).  An EMO would look like an HMO.  Its job would be to provide regular check-ups on the learning and academic growth of young people and adults.  EMOs would be made up of generalists--educators who could diagnose needs and provide guidance on behavior.  They would develop relationships with their clients. They could prescribe--a focused set of sessions on math for the 10-year old, learning experiences that would develop competency in history for the college-age student, job re-training for adults wanting to shift careers-- and they could provide treatment.  Costs would be paid like health insurance--on an on-going basis throughout the lifetime of their members.  The goal would be well-being--ongoing learning that serves the needs of individuals, and y so doing, of the broader community as well.

For some an EMO would sit on top of a traditional education--filling gaps, helping parents raise student achievement, providing focus during the summer, helping relate learning to student's passions.  For others it might replace some aspects of formal education.  But EMOs, whatever their role, would look little like colleges and universities.

I am not suggesting that colleges and universities should disappear.  In fact, I think that the reason so few of them are disappearing is that, by and large, they do meet the needs and desires of their students.  But if it is innovation we are looking for--not just in content but in structure, role, and location in society, it will take more than focus to get us there.

Is your school more like a newspaper or a pub?

More to muse on from Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus...

Shirky argues that old media, like newspapers, are on their way out as a model for making money on information.  Nothing new here.  But arguing from the analogy between a bar and social media, he suggests that social media can make money for content providers.  After all, people can drink more cheaply at home than in a bar, but they choose to go to a bar anyway because of the conviviality, social connection, and sense of common purpose that can grow in a bar (and in other third places, for that matter).  In the same way, people gather to use social media because it provides them a sense of common purpose, and are willing to pay for that opportunity, or at least look at advertisements that pay for that opportunity. To borrow from the title of Richard Putnam's follow-up to Bowling Alone, there are some things that are done better together.

Colleges and universities operate on implicit models.  It is frequently remarked that higher ed (and K-12) is built explicitly on a factory model.  But the closer analogy is not a factory, but a newspaper.  Newspapers, like colleges and universities and factories, are efficiency-based, low profit-margin businesses.  But newspapers and colleges and universities share something that not all factories embrace--the creation of new content.  After all, a newspaper that ran the exact same story day after day would fail.  A factory that produces the same widget every day succeeds. For the past four generation, it has been the creation of content by faculty members that has been at the heart of the "colleges as newspapers" educational model.

Both colleges and newspapers, though, may be overtaken by quicker, cheaper ways to create content. And some of that content will be produced in bar-like settings where people collaborate to create.  In this setting, the concern is not how to produce content more quickly or cheaply, but how to help their publics make meaning (including establishing the value and quality) of the content swirling around.  Here is where the pub analogy helps.  Pubs are meaning-making venues where people pay to make that meaning. The value-add is the setting and the interaction that a good pub with a good clientele creates.

So, some questions to think with: How is your school like a newspaper and how is it like a pub?  What is your school doing to become more like a pub?

The Priceline model for choosing a college

I met today with a group of enrollment managers at the NACU conference at North Central College. One told the story of a father who came to the financial aid office on his campus and said "I have $xx,xxx dollars to spend on higher education for my son each year.  Make me a deal." This scenario was quickly called "the priceline model" of higher education.

This story is enlightening for what it tells us about debt, decision-making, and the place of higher education in the economy.  The people in the room agreed that this scenario would become more common in the near future, in part because of the cost of private higher education, in part because of the New Frugality, and in part because higher ed is no different from the rest of the economy where consumers are seeking more customized, personalized pricing and experiences.

How would a priceline model influence higher education?  It would do three things, I think.  First, it would shake the prestige nonsense out of higher education selection.  If a consumer of higher ed were to select parameters (location, field of study, NSSE scores, etc.) and then offer a price, students would end up in one of the thousands of good institutions in the US, but almost certainly not in the ones that use price as a proxy for prestige.

Second, it would encourage innovation on the margins of higher education.  New higher ed providers might "compile" an educational experience for students, putting together a set of classes from disparate institutions, united by advising, or an internship, or something else. The result would be a college degree that met the consumer"s demands by building an institution from scratch. Or providers might go in seriously for differential pricing (a history degree would be cheaper than a business degree, for example) or disaggregated pricing, so that instead of paying tuition for classes, you pay instead for a certain amount of faculty time for each class, or you select having a mentor in one class but not for another.

Third, institutions would lose the relationships that often bring students to campus and keep them once they arrive.  Instead, the decision to choose a college would be made almost entirely on cost.

Would this make for a better learning education for students?  Would it improve or diminish the quality of colleges and universities?

Blogs to love

Here are several blogs worth reading, all of which focus on education, community, and the search for a good (or at least viable) life:

Front Porch Republic: Its tagline says it all: Place. Limits. Liberty.  The conservatism of FPR's writers is bracing and clear-eyed--no promises that a set of tax cuts or free-trade agreements will solve the world's ills.  Instead, a willingness to examine ills, local or global, in the context of the limits of the earth, and the limits of human beings.

The School of Life:  A British gathering of academics and civic innovators, who've set up a location for learning that does some of what schools do, but does it in a particularly thoughtful way.  Take a look, for instance, at today's post about the creation of healthy minds.

The Politics of Well-Being: British journalist Jules Evans' regular examination of the search for well-being. He mixes a nose for trends just emerging (positive psychology, for example) with pithiness and neo-aristotelianism.

The Big Society Watch and InCommon from the Davenport Institute at Pepperdine University: The Big Society watch traces Great Britain's experiment with Tocquevillian social change in modern Europe;  InCommon looks at civil society in California.

Cato Unbound: Most blogs purport to show diversity of thought and real intellectual engagement.  This one actually does.  The exchanges on typical libertarian topics (the limits of government, for example) can get to be inside baseball quickly (unless you are deeply familiar with libertarian and conservative political thought), but the exchanges whose titles promise dullness, like this one on the impact of free parking are excellent.  My current favorite is the discussion of the political scientist James C. Scott's work.

The Becker-Posner Blog: Wherein two of the smartest economists in the world write consistently clear and challenging essays about big issues in American life.  Great stuff, especially for folks trying to understand the market from the perspective of people who understand the market and still admire it.

Buddhist Geeks: Regular podcasts from Buddhists who work in the high-tech world.  Full of insights about systems, change, the ways of organizations, personal transformation, and social change.

Taken together these blogs are evidence both of the rich learning and community that can emerge on the web, and of people who have gotten well past the superficiality of the current discussion of politics, government, and the good life.  All are worth following.

Learning from Learnable.com; or starting a college and getting paid

Over the past couple of years I have blogged several times about what it would take to start a college or university today:

Here and here I posted about the notion of "Charter Universities"--where states would adopt the model used for charter schools to encourage innovators to provide higher education as well.

Here I mused about whether an "emergent" model of change could lead to the creation of a college.

This essay noted some of the "mysteries' in education--things we don't currently do well--and proposed ways to arrange a school that made money by responding to them.  And this one wondered how you could monetize learning as opposed to classes.  These posts have mused about ways to make use of open learning resources.  And this one suggested that private universities ought to start junior colleges.

Having said all this, there are essentially 3 big barriers to starting a college or university today.  The first is the cost associated with building a campus.  Even schools like the  University of Phoenix that rent their buildings have significant space costs.  And the cost of building a new campus, especially one that includes science, would be enormous.  The second is accreditation.  Without accreditation, students cannot get federal financial aid, and without accreditation, diplomas have almost no meaning.  But getting accredited means many years of work, years during which whatever students you can gather have to take it on trust that their expenditures will produce something that has meaning.

People who have responded to these two issues have often done it by focusing on supporting learning online.  The most famous example today is Khan Academy--a learning center than began on YouTube and now boasts thousands of videos on discrete topics in math, science, and other areas.  Khan Academy has hundreds of thousands of fans, and just got an infusion of money and support from Bill Gates.

But these free online learning models have not resolved the accreditation problem, and in fact aren't really interested in becoming colleges or universities.  And they often run on a non-profit model, where they rely for funding on donations.

All of which makes the recent re-launch of Learnable.com more interesting.  Learnable is the first site I've seen that allows producers of learning content to get paid by the users of that content.

 Looked at one way, Learnable is like Etsy.com, a site that allows craftspeople to sell their wares.  Looked at another way, though, it is a combination learning management system and back office for a college or university.  With Learnable, then, a group of people who want to start an actual college or university have access to the resources to run the school, manage the courses, and handle much of the financial end of the business.  I wouldn't be surprised to see new, small colleges and universities pop up on Learnable, either as a supplement to regular face-to-face courses, or as the platform for their entire institutions.

Public places, contemplation, and E. B. White

My friend Diane VanderPol, the Director of the Giovale Library at Westminster, wisely pointed out that libraries have bucked the decline in public spaces.  In response to my last post she wrote:

I hold out hope for one public something: libraries! In the economic downturn, public libraries have seen increases in numbers of visitors, check outs and program attendance. During the very eras that saw a decline in the private fraternal orders, civic groups, etc, public libraries- as municipally and regionally supported entities full of paid professionals- thrived. Public libraries= the quintessential third places and the last hope for public something! 

Diane's is an important insight because it highlights an exception to the rule of public decline.  But it is even more interesting because it hints at an important but under-appreciated role of public spaces--they are a venue for communal contemplation.

Thinking of public places as refuges goes against most of the literature on those locations, which focuses on their ability to spark deliberation and engagement between citizens.  Think for example, of Robert Putnan's Bowling Alone which uses individual action in public spaces as a metaphor for the decline of community life.  Or consider Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites, which laments the decline in public dialogue that has accompanied the decline in third places. 


Recall for a minute, though, those types of public spaces that have flourished in the past 20 years--libraries, spas, yoga studios, coffee houses, and trail systems.  They all provide people the opportunity to be alone in public.  When I run on the trails near my house I often see other runners.  We always greet each other but never stop to talk.  When my wife and I stop at Starbucks we are surrounded by other couples who engage in quiet conversation, and by individuals alone with newspapers or iPods. Spas fill up with people getting massages or manicures in close physical proximity, but they may never speak to each other.  Yoga classes consist of rooms full of people enacting what has been for millenia a contemplative practice.  And when I have had enough with my office and the pressures flowing through the computer and phone, I get up, walk across campus, and enjoy the peace of being quietly surrounded by dozens of other people who pay me no mind.

I have no great wisdom about why this is the case.  But it is true that those places that once provided contemplation--churches on one hand and homes on the other--have lost their ability to do so.  Home is either a riot of engagement--getting kids to lessons, rushing to make a meal, cleaning house, watching TV while online--or a place of genuine alone-ness.  Churches (at least in the Protestant traditions) have moved away from quiet, solitude, and thoughtfulness to electrified music, non-stop talking, and enforced interactions.  So perhaps we must get into public now to find the conditions we need to be alone.

E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web and essayist for the New Yorker made this point in 1948 when he wrote, "On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy."  His insight was a simple one--it takes being around others to experience the solitude that makes us well.  Some public places do that, and we should be grateful for them.

How does age matter in education?

As I write my house is full of kids--three of my daughters (ages 12 to 18) and four of my nieces and nephews (ages 2 to 8).  I am the only adult here.  I've been watching the kids interact, and seeing the mutual pleasure they find in being together.  Much of their play is about learning--how to play a particular video game, how to make lunch, how to keep track of each other, how to make sure that everyone is having a good time.

Their presence (and a recent conversation with my wife where she pointed out that we are potentially grandparent age (since two of our own children are now over 18) and that she would welcome the presence of some little kids around the place--yikes!) has me thinking about age and what it means for learning.

When my kids were smaller they went for a year to a non-graded charter elementary school called Sundance Mountain School.  (It continues to this date, though under a new name, Soldier Hollow Charter School.) I was never sure how good the learning was in a formal sense, but in terms of practical experience, there was something wonderful about 5 year olds and 12 year olds learning science and math together.

In this now-famous talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the point that among the industrial-era absurdities of schooling is that students are grouped according to their "date of manufacture" rather than some more educational commonality (or difference).  It is among the practices that squashes the creativity out of people.

It seems like colleges would be a place where we could learn about the roles of age in learning.  After all, most classrooms include students with different dates of manufacture, and particularly in schools where there are many non-traditional students, the age gaps can be quite significant.  But there is no reform movement or pedagogical approach (that I know of) that attends to age (with the possible exception of freshman learning communities which group students by age, sometimes to the frustration of faculty who think it makes the classroom "too much like high school.")

Is it the case that once a person reaches, say, 18, that age no longer matters and therefore we make nothing of in in higher education?  Are we losing potential learning by just assuming that the age system (which, for example, mandates that you have to be between 17 and 19 to start college) makes sense?  Is there some reason to accept things as they are?

Emergent education, or, Can friends start a college?

There is a long tradition in American civic life--one that I love.  It is the tradition of small groups of people, friends often, co-religionists sometimes, bonding together to respond to a social problem.  Many things might come out of that response--laws, for example, or organizations, or movements, or communities.  But at the core, these responses have always been organized around an ethos of friendship.

The intellectual history of the tradition runs from Tocqueville through Mary Parker Follett and Jane Addams to Jane Jacobs and Myles Horton and Ella Baker to Steven Johnson.  The organizational history runs from frontier towns to community organizing and social settlements and folk schools to the civil rights movement and into the movements of today.

Today some of the most important thinking and organizing in this tradition is coming out of evangelical Christianity under the umbrella of "the emergent movement."  Emerging Christian organizations have eschewed mega-churches and literalism and are focused on building Christian community out of questions and friendships.  Doug Pagitt puts it this way in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope: "The emergent imagination is at its most basic level a call to friendship--friendship with God, with one another, and with the world."

When we talk about trends in education today, we tend to focus on structure and infrastructure: charter schools, standardized testing, technology, for-profit higher ed, assessment and accountability.  There is some value in this.  But in doing so, it masks the cultural changes that are going on in schooling.

One major cultural tendency is towards standardization, efficiency, and systems.  That tendency runs through all of the structural trends in education--systems of charter schools, national tests, system-wide adoption of technology, etc.  It is largely about measuring outcomes to create a one-size-fits-most way of education. It values the involvement of parents, students, teachers; but largely as choosers.  Pick this school or that one; select this curriculum or that. Leadership is traditional--one person or a small group of experts in charge.  Elected or selected.

The other cultural tendency is towards emergence, relationships, and ecosystems as the basis of education. Where the systematizing trend focuses on choice as involvement, emergent education focuses on co-creation as involvement.  It  can be seen in charter schools, those started by collections of parents and educators who want better options for "their kids."  It underlies the way that home-schooling is no longer a parent teaching her/his own kids at home, but instead a network of parents taking that role, and meeting to share curriculum, go on field trips, or expand educational offerings.  It is hidden in some portions of the open learning movement  and in some versions of technology-enabled education. It is behind collaborative creation of curriculum, and behind efforts to improve advising. It creates flat organizations and has little organizational structure.  People lead where they can lead--they play the role they seek (and are best prepared) to play.

One wonders, though, if it has any chance in higher education.  One would hope so, since higher ed is the home to some of the worst results of big, efficient, standardized education.  But I know of no instance in the recent past where a group of friends got together to talk education and ended up starting a college.  This sort of thing happened a lot in the 19th century, where many small towns had their own locally grown colleges.  Can it happen today?  Can a college emerge?

"Where there's mystery, there's margin"

A couple of days ago Bob Frankenberg spoke to Westminster's chapter of Delta Mu Delta, the business student honor society.  Bob is the Chair of Westminster's Board of Trustees, a venture capitalist, and an innovator in computers and networks who has been involved in most of the major shifts in computer memory and networking in the past 30 years.

His talk focused on the need for students to keep learning throughout their lives in a society where the half-life of information and skills is about 4 years.  But among his pieces of advice was this; "Where there is mystery, there is margin."

The mystery/margin insight is not a new one of course.  Anyone who innovates in a business has discovered a mystery--how to shrink computer memory, for example--and made money off it, because by understanding the mystery that others don't, they are able to supply products that others demand.

But that formulation got me thinking about my previous post on making money on learning.   Educational entrepreneurs, by and large, are focusing on a single mystery--how to deliver schooling to a bunch of students in a way that makes money.  And they do it, by and large, through enrollment and systems management improvements.  So, if a school can enroll more students, or deliver schooling at lesser cost, then they can make money.  (Or perhaps more accurately in the k-12 environment, they can capture more of the education subsidies that make providing schooling financially feasible.)  This is the insight of nearly all of the new educational ventures that have sprung up in the past decades--the University of Phoenix, for example, or Green Dot and KIPP schools.    The biggest effort in this direction comes from the Gates Foundation, which is focused on improving the access and completion systems that get kids from high school into college.  Their attention is turned to the huge systems--community colleges especially--that school millions of students each year. Now in each of these instances, lots of learning takes place, it is true.  But the essential business model is around schooling, not learning.

I have no interest in criticizing any of the above innovations.  Their work is important and their successes meaningful.  But I do want to think more about the learning mysteries. So what are they?

1. How do you engage students in learning who are not engaged in schooling?
2. How do you reach those potential students?
3. How do you provide that learning in a way that is inexpensive enough to be welcoming to low-income students and families, but remunerative enough that you can make money off the learning?
4. How do you ensure that learning takes place?
5. How does that learning translate into the credits and degrees that the learners will need to show the educational and employment systems?

How do you provide learning that makes money by responding to these mysteries?  Here are some thoughts:

1. While there are tons of  people (many of them young) who hate school, most of them love learning about something.  For many of them, that something lies in the arts and humanities, or in sports.  They love music, or art, or writing, or dance or video games.  Or they love skateboarding and snowboarding and football and martial arts and dance.  Most schooling-focused efforts place these passions on the margins so they can focus on an academic core.  But a learning-focused effort would start with arts, humanities, and athletics, not think of them as a distraction.

2. Learning is an intensely social, relationship-focused thing.  Or at least, the sorts of learning above are like that.  So whatever solution you choose, it cannot be simply based on learners sitting alone watching clips on YouTube or taking classes on MIT's OpenCourseWare, or taking online courses.  It is not that learning fails to happen there, just that it is deficient learning.  or put another way, learning in isolation and schooling are close relatives.

3. The two key fixed costs in schooling are physical facilities and personnel.  (These are the major fixed costs outside of education, as well.) Innovators outside of education have gotten around these costs by using technology, it is true.  But they have also gotten around them by using franchises and distributorships.  Learning lends itself to this model as well.  If, for example, you want to find a business that reaches across ethnic and class lines, take a look at Amway or NuSkin.  They have representatives everywhere, who make money on selling but also on inviting new distributors into the system. If you want the reach of learning to be broad, and to get into communities where a representative of a college cannot speak authentically, then a distributor/franchise structure works better than building schools.  And it resolves some of the personnel cost issues associated with schooling.

4. Because learners will need to translate their learning into credentials, the formal evaluations of learning ought to be done in part using tools that help with that translation.  Here I am thinking about AP, CLEP, IB, and other sorts of tests that are accepted for college credit.  Such an approach both allows for systematic measures of quality across distributors and helps work around the accreditation problem and leads students into the formal systems of schooling, which I hope it is clear, I believe have substantial value. (Or put another way, a student can learn through a passion for video games, but cannot be learned unless s/he can do math and understand history and know how to learn and how to become what s/he hopes to become.)

What does this look like in the real world?

It starts with places that already make money (albeit only a little) on learning--people who offer piano lessons, or teach art, or host writing groups.  Martial arts studios and driving schools.  Their offerings expand and become more sophisticated so that they attract teens and 20 year olds.  The learning places then expand their offerings more to include formal instruction leading to AP tests.  So a music school would eventually offer music theory courses, a game shop eventually graphic design, etc.  As students succeed with those passion-specific tests the schools expand to offer more traditional topics--English or History example--that could also be assessed through standardized exams.

The central value would be in the connection of what are now disparate efforts.  The company--let's call it Play and Learn--would build a network of people offering the intro lessons.  It would also provide curricula, training, and the business infrastructure.  As learners became more sophisticated, their learning would be more centralized--so that Play and Learn corporate would offer the direct instruction on AP preparation, sparing the piano teacher from having to become an expert on music theory. That higher level instruction could easily be delivered remotely, with open content materials.  At the same time, expansion of the company be distributed--either through franchises or distributorships.

As students progressed pricing would rise (this is already the pricing model for these learning on the margins sorts of places), with substantial fees associated with the AP or other college credit granting exams, since they provide a cost -savings over having to pay tuition for college classes.

Let me close by saying that for me the ultimate benefit of this model is not financial but social and educational.  We know that there are millions of people who do not get the education they need because schooling does not work for them.  And we know that colleges and universities lack the capacity to serve all of those people who need college educations.  And we know that nearly everyone is passionate about learning something, and that such learning provides personal satisfaction and public good.

Any takers?

the perils of pithyness; more on capacity and technology

On pithiness
 Having long prided myself on running a dull blog doesn't always protect me from saying dumb but dull stuff.  That is what happened in my last post, which I started as a way of thinking about capacity and infrastructure issues, but which I ended by trying to be pithy.  An anonymous commentator caught the enormous holes in my "cheap schools + cheap technology = deep learning" formulation.  That person wrote:

Gary,
Your equation lacks one main thing. Quality teaching. And as soon as you add words like quality, the price goes up. So then it is not cheap.

Add to all this the difficulty one has with determining quality. Quality as posed by the other author could be about time on task. But some would argue it is about content knowledge (which is why k-12 teachers now must pass Praxis content tests) or about engagement or community based.

If we could borrow from some of your other posts I would develop a new equation that looks like this:

quality teachers + appropriate contexts + useful technology = deep learning 

to which I can only say "Anonymous, you are absolutely right.  Thanks."

 On capacity

I have been thinking more about the capacity problem in the context of my own community.  Three things are true: 1. we need more educational capacity to reach anything like the goal of having a fully educated workforce; 2. there are no empty campuses sitting around waiting to be populated; 3. there is lots of excess capacity sprinkled throughout the community.  Given these three facts, we ought to think about how to take advantage of the capacity.

Here is what I mean.  In my town, there is a perfectly serviceable theatre that sits empty in the downtown area.  Across the street here and there are unoccupied offices and an un-used gym.  Every town is the same, especially in those areas that were once small towns but have been swallowed up by sprawl (or passed over by it), leaving the downtown area decimated.

Why couldn't a college or university take up that excess capacity, even as it is sprinkled around?  After all, the one thing that technology can surely do is connect disparate places.  So while good learning almost always has a face-to-face component, that doesn't mean that a college has to be contiguous to get that learning.  Offer a theatre program in Pleasant Grove, business classes in the empty space on Main Street in American Fork, and humanities courses in the meeting rooms of the Orem Public Library.  The result is that higher ed fills in some of the excess capacity (in much , the way that Clay Shirky thinks we can leverage the small bits of excess capacity in the days of busy people to jointly solve big problems), expands its reach, and still provides the sort of face-to-face interaction that many potential students desire.  In this scenario, higher ed flows into the open spaces, the unused buildings, and the openings in people's lives, rather than forcing them to flow into ours.  And higher education does its part to strengthen both the intellectual and built infrastructure of our communities.

"Going to the edge to report"

Later this week I will be spending two hours with elementary and secondary school teachers in a conversation about the Declaration of Independence.  My job is to engage them in thinking about how the Declaration came about, and in what it might mean for them, as teachers of children, in Utah.

Schools tend to approach the Declaration as content--something to be learned about, something that contains information that is useful.  I've been wondering again, though, about the Declaration as a practice, something that was performed as much as it was written, and something that should be performed today to be understood.

Two of the best books on the period of the Declaration make the point that it was as much enacted as written.  Pauline Maier's American Scripture notes that Americans of all stripes were declaring independence from the British at the same time that the Second Continental Congress was arguing about doing it as a collection of states.  Maier's book makes two points--that the document was less significant than the act itself, and that since World War II Americans have given ever more attention to the document than to the act.  The other book, Gordon Wood's Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different concludes with the point that the founding generation, in declaring independence, opened the door for the demise of their class--the educated, well-bred political class that could expect deference from the public. Wood puts it this way: "In the end, nothing illustrates better the transforming power of the American Revolution than the way its intellectual and political leaders, that remarkable group of men, contributed to their own demise."

I wonder what role schools play in the making it possible for people to enact independence today.  In many ways, education is less about becoming independent than about linking a person into a system of connections--jobs, communities, classes, etc. that make people dependent on each other.  This is undoubtedly a good thing, both for personal prosperity, but also for the well-being of democracy.  After all, it is the connection to other people that makes it possible for the public--the demos--to rule itself or to respond to the ruling impulses of the powerful.

At the same time, though, there is a sort of independence that schools ought to do more to inspire. Rebecca Hoffberger, the founder of the American Visionary Art Museum, describes it as "going to the edge to report"--that is, it is the sort of thirst for learning that drives people to the edge--of art, of physical experience, of politics, of community--in order to report on the deep meaning of being human.  In this interview, Hoffberger connects this going to the edge with liberty, the center panel of the Declaration of Independence's triptych--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Schools do very little to encourage this sort of experience, or to help students make sense of it.  But we could. More and more students have edge experiences--living abroad, committing huge amounts of time to service, creating things--music, art, drama, dance--on their own.  (I once met a student in a history class at Westminster who had taught himself to make chain mail...) But we do almost nothing to help them report, or to listen to those reports.  And so creativity, independence, and the good they do are relegated to the "creative majors" while the rest of us learn about independence rather than learning to be independent, and by becoming independent, gaining the power to go to the end to report.

Learning through repair

Last weekend I spent several hours figuring out how to replace a valve and solenoid on the 32 year old sprinkler system at my house.  The week before I finished reading Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.  The two events together got me thinking about the power of learning by fixing things that are broken.

Crawford's book is made up of a story and two arguments.  The story is autobiography.  Crawford grew up fixing things on a commune, worked construction while in high school, learned to fix motorcycles, got a PhD in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, ran a Washington DC think tank, and after a period of great doubt, abandoned the think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, VA.  The arguments are these: that by devaluing craft work, trade skills, and production, the educational system alienates all sorts of people and demeans meaningful work; and that the United States is desperately in need of building the sort of values associated with repair work: thrift, creativity, humility, self-reliance, and learning through labor.

These arguments are of course nothing new.  There is a long history of advocacy for production over consumption (and "knowledge work") best told in Christopher Lasch's The True and Only Heaven. And we are in a craft moment in American history, with "alternative crafts' springing up everywhere, and televisions replete with series focusing on re-use or repair: American Pickers, Pawn Stars, Extreme Home Makeover, etc.

I can't say whether it is possible to remake society around production, repair, and re-use.  But I can say that you learn some things by fixing broken sprinkler systems that you wouldn't necessarily learn elsewhere.  Here are the three lessons of my as-yet-unfinished repair of my sprinkler system:

1. Even the right tools don't mean you can do the work.  There is a lot of tool-focused education speak.  WE buy "tools" for assessment, or for teaching.  Students develop the tools they need to succeed in the real world, etc.  I own all of the right tools to replace a valve in a sprinkler system.  But it is still a damn hard thing to do when you have never done it before.  (BTW, instructions don't help a lot either.  they describe the ideal way to fix things, not the real experience of repair.)

2. Always dig the hole deeper and wider than you think you will need it.  Inevitably fixing something means fitting something meant to be assembled in a new system into an old system.  Which means you lack the clearance, the vision, the access to make the switch.  Too much of education still assumes students are learning new things rather than clearing space in a world view for new approaches to the truth.  I'm not sure the "deep, wide hole" rule holds in neuro-cognition, but without that space new ideas just don't fit.

3. In theory, doing the same thing again hoping for a different outcome is folly.  In practice, it is the way you repair.  Replacing a part means tugging on it, cleaning it, tugging on it again, catching your breath, looking at the piece again, tugging, getting it loose, tightening the tool, tugging again, doubting and so pushing a different direction, then tugging again.  Similarly, the learning of crafts requires the same perseverance, endurance, and obstinacy. Playing a musical instrument, writing research papers, nearly every task asks that you repeat the same steps again and again until your body is tuned to the problem.  Only science imagines that you can tune the world to your work.  For the rest of us we learn by coming up against our current weaknesses and then getting stronger by repeating our failed actions.

Tonight I buy the final correct coupling for the sprinkler system.  More learning ahead.

Festivals and learning on the margins

Last weekend my family and I attended the Scottish Festival and Highland Games at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, UT.  We have been four years in a row, each time standing in the rain for several hours to watch musicians, dancers, and the other assorted groups that congregate at events like this.  My brother-in-law plays in a pipe and drum band; my daughter danced with an Irish dance team this year.

Though Scottish Festivals are everywhere, they are at the margins of the mainstream culture.  You never see one featured on television; no cultural icon has emerged from the Scottish Fest circuit; they shape no political movement; they make no dent on the economy.  And the festival at Thanksgiving Point (and its little sister in Payson, UT held every July) are on the margins of the margins—small towns, small festivals, no massive clustering of Scots in the surrounding district.

But the festival is evidence of the power of learning on the margins.  While a few of the people there may make some money from their participation in the event (small merchants, for example, who deal in henna tattoos, kilts, swords, and Celtic memorabilia), all of the participants are dedicated experts in their fields.  My guess is that most are self-taught, or that they learned their skills in a self-organized setting.  My brother-in-law’s band, for example, has no paid staff or instructor.  More-skilled pipers and drummers teach their less-skilled counterparts.  My daughter’s Irish dance troupe is the sort of endeavor that exists everywhere—a few teachers leading a passel of young kids in a skill that they themselves picked up from another teacher years ago.   Representatives from various Scottish clans trade genealogical wisdom. And the participants in the Highland Games who toss bales, or throw capers learn that skill by practicing in parks and competing week after week in festivals.

Festivals like this one play three roles in marginal learning.  First, they unite the subcultures that otherwise exist apart from each other, showing them that their efforts add up to something big (I would guess 3,000 people attended, paying $12/ticket to enter the festival).  Second, they create new cultures, as fans of genealogy brush up against partisans of Celtic music who rub shoulders with a gothic/new age group who sees some convergence in paganism, environmentalism, Asian art, and heavy black make-up.  That is to say that Scottish festivals are building new cultural understandings between people who otherwise don’t talk.  And third, they are public proofs of learning.  When dancers dance for prizes, or pipe and drum bands compete, or sheaf tossers break records they are demonstrating learning as surely as students do when they take a test.

If learning outside of the system of schooling is essential for the well-being of communities and humans, and if that learning will be largely self-organized, then the festival takes the place of the school building.  It is the infrastructure for learning on the margins, the place without which learning remains simply an individual pursuit.

In praise of fiddling while Rome burns

The Roman emperor Nero is famously said to have fiddled while Rome burned, a bad thing, the story goes, and the predictor of the decline of a great empire.

I had an experience yesterday, though, that made me wonder if when we hear the phrase "fiddling while Rome burns" we really ought to be more concerned with the quality of the fiddling than with the decline of imperial power.

I was invited to a lunch yesterday with the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach.  It was a small event--the other people at the table were all major figures in Utah's civic life--3 university presidents (Westminster's President couldn't be there hence my presence representing both the college and the UHC board), leaders from the media, state government, religious leaders.

Chairman Leach is in the middle of a 50-state civility tour, in which he is trying to turn the focus of public attention to the decline of our public life.  He spoke at the Utah Humanities Council's 35th anniversary gala, and is the commencement speaker at Westminster's graduation today.

As you might imagine, the conversation around the table was strongly supportive of the view that our civic conversations are coarser, less friendly, and less productive than ever before.  After all, the people there are people whose presence immediately messes with the group dynamic of a crowd.  They were nearly all lightning rods, certain to bring out both adulation and scorn in any audience.

The conversation sought explanations (the internet, uncertainty in the economy, a polarized political system, Glen Beck and his left-wing counterparts) but the tone was nostalgic--hearkening back to a better time, when public discourse was kinder, more polite, people trusted their public officials, and those officials could cooperate more easily.  Most acknowledged that there had been times in the past when discourse had been as bad or worse (including the very recent past, truth be told--remember the culture wars?), but the story still seems to be that we are entering a dark age.   Rome is burning.

It all left me wondering about fiddling.  After all, the humanities are not just supposed to inform public debate.  That may in fact be one of the least of their roles.  Instead, they are to help sustain intellect, community, thought, creativity, and passion outside of the public sphere as well.  And this seems to be happening in at a scale greater than at any time in the history of the world.  Any casual viewer of YouTube videos sees thousands of amateur musicians plying their crafts.  Visit etsy.com to see thousands of crafters plying their crafts. Blogs are but memoirs in draft form. Spirituality is burgeoning even while organized religions lose their hold on the public mind. Book clubs continue in the hundreds of thousands around the world.  A global youth culture built on hip-hop, fashion, and sports (fueled by Red Bull to be sure) means young people everywhere can begin a conversation. Millions of people have taken control of their own learning, taking advantage of opportunities to learn and content to learn about available everywhere. And people around the globe can turn their altruism to the public good--funding micro-loans, donating to disaster relief, and chatting about a million different things (only some of which are coarse...)

The story about Nero fiddling while Rome burns implies causation--Nero's distraction with music, gluttony, and vice led him to simply watch while politics degraded.  Or argued more forcefully, the degradation of Rome's politics was due to Nero's vice.  But there are other ways to tell that story today.  It may in fact be the case that the rescue of our public life will come from the fiddlers--from people who are wise enough and distracted enough to realize that the political isn't the most important aspect of our lives.

I don't mean to suggest that the massive problems facing the world (war, starvation, poverty, environmental degradation) will be solved by the humanities.  But Rome (by which of course I mean Washington DC, London, the UN, and the other hubs of the global political economy) will face vast temptations to be inhumane as it tries to deal with these problems.  The world could do much worse than hope that those hubs have will have picked up some of the perspective, good will, amateurism, thirst for learning and quirky passion of the world's fiddlers.

Learning on the margin: playing jazz, jazz as learning

Last week I sat in a rehearsal room while my 14-year old daughter and four other junior high jazz students held a sectional. (They all play in the Little Big Band, an audition band that is part of the Crescent Jazz Institute. CJI puts together some very high level groups--its Super Band has twice been voted best high school jazz band in the US by Downbeat Magazine.)

I was the only adult in the room. Their director simply asked them to get better at several pieces before they record them next week. He did appoint a section leader, but the leader had no real power, or at least none not granted by the rest of the rhythm section.

The kids took a long time to get set up, playing with cords, rearranging the drum kit, horsing around. Finally someone asked which piece they would rehearse first. They picked one, the drummer counted them off, and they started playing.

The piece ended, followed by a bit more horsing around, then another piece, which they stopped once for tempo problems. Then they played through their other two pieces. When they finished they still had 45 minutes left. So they dug out a few copies of The Real Book a compilation of hundreds of jazz standards. Someone named a piece they liked. Many in the group had never played it before, so they messed a bit with the changes, and then played it, most of the group sight reading.

They repeated the process four more times, each time playing something that several of the section members didn't know. No perfect performances here, but a lot of good music, including some outstanding improvisation. Then the rehearsal time was over, they packed up and left.

I have long been interested in "learning at the margin"--those places that are school-like (community bands, karate studios, religious retreat centers) in that they focus on learning some discipline, but where the behavior and the learning are un-school-like.

This jazz band, and the sectional rehearsal exemplify what I see as the characteristics of learning on the margin.

• There is an adult leader, someone recognized as having advanced skills and high standards.
  
• That leader expects learning, but the students become responsible for the learning--often driving themselves to very high levels of work without much direction at all.
• Quality comes from the expectation of public performance
• The learning has a transcendent character--that is, everyone is in it for something beyond technical skill

In some ways jazz is a key metaphor for this sort of learning--it has a technical language, a strong tradition, and within those things freedom to improvise. (For a fascinating effort to apply the metaphor of jazz to the American experience, take a look at the great African-American essayist Albert Murray's The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement)

Jazz and learning at the margins also raise some serious questions about education. Margin learning is driven by student passion and commitment. These kids play jazz because they love it; they are good because they drive themselves to be good. Schools cannot count on this sort of passion, at least in their core curricula. There, two students may be passionate, 18 compliant, and five downright unhappy to be there.

Learning at the margins is also, well, marginal. Students do it evenings and weekends; adult leaders live makeshift lives scratching together several jobs to make a living; parents commit plenty of resources to making it happen. Schooling is central--everyone participates, it happens during the day, it is a job for adults and students as well.

I'm not interested in favoring the margins over the center. Nor am I interested in favoring the center over the margins. But I do wonder about the relationship. What at the margins is linked to the center? Are margin learners also better center learners? How do students negotiate their lives in the two parts of learning? What should the whole system--center and margin together--look like for communities to be healthy? For people to feel like they can shape their lives in common? To feel like life itself is meaningful?