More or Less (Part Two)

- By Woody Brown

MORE OR LESS

A Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course

(in Seven Easy Lessons)

(Link to Lesson One)

Lesson Two: To the Letter of the Discourse

“This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press.
--Professor Anant Agarwal, President of edX

People talk about MOOCs in much the same way Apple talks about a new iPod—with a frothy mixture of frenzied enthusiasm and arrogant overstatement that to the fan sounds like truth and to the uninitiated feels inordinate and vaguely alarming. Both are reacting to the tendency of digital enterprises to promote their products and services as not only good, but good enough to solve problems that may be only tangentially related to, say, listening to an .mp3.[1] The anxiety we may feel when we hear the slogan/command, “Hold everything,” which Apple used to advertise its sixth generation iPod, or Time Warner Cable’s campaign, “Enjoy better” (a command with which Slavoj Žižek could have a field day) is an implicit admission of the veracity of the company’s claims. The agreeable audience says, “Right!  That’s exactly right,” and the anxious audience says, “I’m worried. I’m worried because I feel that you’re right.” And who can blame those who are worried that proponents of MOOCs are right? The advocates and founders and investors are in many ways a bloodthirsty bunch.

Much as I began this essay by outlining a problem that we must work out, the conversation about MOOCs tends to begin by painting a picture of higher education as a structure in dire need of urgent, disruptive reform.  Note, however, that higher education itself is fine; it’s just that is costs too much. Bill Gates:

“After all, what are we trying to do?  We’re trying to take the education that today the tuition is say $50,000 a year, so over four years $200,000, education that is increasingly hard to get because there is less money for it, the capacity’s not there, and we’re trying to provide it to every kid who wants it, and only technology can bring that down, you know, not just to $20,000 but to $2,000.”

The MOOC suggests implicitly that higher education is more than good at what it does. Every aspect of a MOOC has as its ultimate goal the replication of some effect that traditional colleges and universities already achieve. The forums that abound in MOOCs are supposed to serve as substitutes for in-class discussion and the video lectures are intended to replace in-person lectures. For all of the discussion about MOOCs revolutionizing education,[2] it would seem the only real change to which the MOOC machine aspires is to encourage the student to be physically solitary.

The cost, they allege, is much too high, or at least it is higher than the value of higher education, and for that reason they have given us the MOOC, an instrument that will “end the university as we know it.” But what is the value of higher education really? To answer this question, the conversation often turns to a graduate’s earning potential: How much money can a college graduate in a given industry reasonably expect to earn? Is that enough to offset the cost of (or “the initial investment in”) the student’s education at a four-year college or university? These questions are perhaps more suited to an examination of the sciences and social sciences, where a graduate’s desired professional title is often the name of the major plus an “-ist” (e.g. a biology major becomes a biologist, a psychology major becomes a psychologist, an economics major becomes an economist). Science majors become (or at least are able to become) scientists.

But what of a major in the humanities? Does she become a humanitarian? A humanist? If so, how does that translate to her making enough money to pay for her college education?  The humanities have been a bit of a thorn in the side of MOOCs. Whereas a computer science course might conceivably be graded by a computer program, albeit one that considers measurable numbers like the amount of questions a student answered correctly or the amount of the available video lectures a student watched, it is hard to imagine a course in the humanities, which course would by definition teach a student how to write effectively,[3] that would translate equally well (or well at all) to the MOOC format. This is not for lack of imagination, but rather for several actual, irreducible reasons.

The push in favor of MOOCs is predicated on the devaluation of an education in the humanities. A teacher, who is by definition someone concerned with the education of fellow humans, can and should be largely replaced, according to MOOC proponents like Nathan Harden, who writes, “a reduction in the number of faculty needed to teach the world’s students will result […] Because much of the teaching work can be scaled, automated or even duplicated by recording and replaying the same lecture over and over again on video, demand for instructors will decline.” And in any case, the various disciplines that we call the humanities comprise exactly those majors whose apparent unprofitability casts them as indulgent wastes in the United States of the recession.

The issue with most lamentations of the alleged demise of the humanities, however, is that they do not recognize that the fall in the popularity of an education in the humanities makes sense. It is the logical conclusion of American capitalism. The humanities do not have a clear or definite value: in the strictest, most close-minded sense, they are worth nothing. The problem, however, is that the contemporary discourse misrecognizes the humanities as valueless instead of as what they are: invaluable.

Certainly they can be assigned a value, but this assignment is an act of misrecognition.  The actual value of the humanities is by definition nonmonetary, and any attempt to repair the monetary value of the humanities does a disservice to the recognition of the true nature of the humanities; namely, as a discipline that is specifically outside of the defined borders of American valuation. “An education in the humanities prepares a student to be a skilled writer, thinker, and educator,” we might assert, and the voice of American capitalism responds, “An educator of what? The humanities? So the humanities teach students how to teach other students the humanities? A writer of what? Of books? So the humanities make students read books so they can write books to be read by other students of the humanities?” The humanities are reduced to a masturbatory circle of elitism and exclusivity, one whose value to those outside the Ivory Tower (the ostensible doers and makers) is at best insignificant.[4]

But the humanities as a whole are interested in the sort of subject who knows more than she thinks she knows when she acts, the subject who knows without knowing it, and the “unknown knowns” that Donald Rumsfeld omitted from his curt formulation of knowledge in February 2002. Analysis in the humanities asserts that the object of inquiry has said something unbeknown to itself. The case I am making here is that such analysis is valid, essential, and, as I said earlier, invaluable.

Woody Brown is a writer living in Buffalo, NY.  He graduated from Amherst College in 2011 with a degree in English.

(Link to Lesson One)