Education versus Business

Following the election on Tuesday of a new Michigan governor, one who promises to put everything, and especially education, on a "business" model, I had posted on Facebook that I disagreed with such an idea. My niece Tassina, whose intelligence and analytical thought I value very much, said that she felt that education was already on a business model and talked about her experiences with college. Despite being gifted, she has not succeeded at college because as a wife and mother of three, she cannot always attend classes regularly. I told her I would once again address this issue. So Tassina, this blog's for you.

First, no two colleges are the same. In my experiences of teaching at everything from a community college to a Research One University, and including one women's college, I believe the problem might be that Tassina has not yet had a chance to attend a liberal arts college. She has attended college as a career-preparation task-oriented student. The best college experience for someone as smart as she is would have been to live in the dormitory of a liberal arts college. She would have been a perfect fit for Stephens College in Columbia, MO. However, that choice is likely no longer an option, so I'll try to explain what I see as the difference.

The schools Tassina has attended thus far have been ones that catered to people who are going to college in order to get trained for a specific job. The people who teach there are teaching in a way that fulfills the college's mission, which is not to educate people to be thinkers. Education serves two purposes that are contradictory: to train people to be obedient workers who are not encouraged to think for themselves, and/or to train people to be independent critical thinkers who often are rule-breakers, not rule-followers. When a person like Tassina attends the wrong college, she feels cheated, angry, unfulfilled, and disgruntled with the whole concept of education, seeing it as a "business" that doesn't work especially well.

Had Tassina attended college where what was valued was not attendance but participation, not obedience but independence, then she would have felt challenged and satisfied. I myself take attendance only for the first couple of weeks of the semester, more to learn students' names than for any other reason. I don't bother with it the rest of the semester. I repeatedly tell students that what I am concerned with is whether they learn. I don't penalize late work or (horrors!) refuse to accept it because students learn by doing. If they don't do the work, they don't learn. If their work won't be accepted, or will be penalized so harshly that they may as well not do it, then they don't do it. Therefore, they don't learn anything except that their teacher is a bitch or a bastard. And for all those people out there who say that that isn't how the real world works, I beg to differ. It is exactly how the real world works. I've seen over and over that the world of work does provide leeway and second chances. The problem may be that many teachers have no work experience outside academia, so they are merely guessing at what non-academic work looks like.

But back to the argument that the business model doesn't work perfectly as an education model. The business model values profits and efficiency, as well it should. However, students aren't products and they aren't consumers/customers in the same sense that the person buying a car is a consumer/customer and the person paying for a weight-loss experience is potentially a product (i.e., a walking advertisement for the business's effectiveness). Education is a messy convoluted process. It's often one step forward and two steps back. It circles, lands, takes off again. It creates chaos and havoc. The well-ordered brain becomes the well-ordered brain because it has spent hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, as a brain in search of connections and causes-effects.

In short, real education is a drastically different animal than "training" for a particular job. Yes, education can occur during training, and training can occur during education, but their purposes are quite different. Tassina, until you engage in real education, you will continue to be dissatisfied. Training is just fine for someone who has little curiosity, who sees the world in black and white, who is content to live a traditional constrained lifestyle. Training alone is not okay for someone like we are, my beloved niece. We will continue to bend and break rules, simply because we ask, "Why?" and do not receive satisfactory answers. If your education continues to be self-regulated (reading on your own), then so be it. Just don't stop. Don't give up.