Author: Greg

Friday night being Burns Night in Scotland, I told my 12^th-graders about it during Friday’s lesson[1]. It was a good example of Kenneth Koch’s dictum that interest precedes understanding: I chose a Youtube clip of a recitation in very broad Scots of “To a Mouse.” The amusement was palpable, for my students could barely understand a word. As I hoped would happen, a few of them whipped out their pads & raised the poem so they could follow along, though the poem is written in somewhat broad Scots too. To one student’s question whether Burns wrote songs, I answered that many of his poems have been set to music, including most famously “Auld Lang Syne.”

It turned out that that student knew more about Burns than I had realized. Over the weekend I had an email from him directing me to some Youtube clips of “A Red, Red Rose.” His favorite, and his classmates’, is of the school’s combined choirs singing it at last year’s Homecoming Concert, accompanied by three soloists from the combined orchestra. The reason it is the favorite is that it was the last school concert conducted by the very popular music director and dean of culture before he became headmaster. My student is in the choir, though he has other accomplishments, too: he is the captain of the cross-country team, and next year he will be enrolling in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) program in Oxford.

(I was at that concert, memorable not just for Burns but also because it ended early to allow people to get home before a typhoon made landfall on Hong Kong.)

Yesterday was Parents’ Day at the school, when parents confer with teachers. As is the Chinese practice, the parents, the student, and the teacher meet together. Though the dynamics can vary, the usual approach is for the parents and teacher to come to an understanding with each other and with the student about how things are going and what if anything needs to be done. The parents tend to be supportive of the teacher’s aims, and will often reinforce what the teacher says. (Sometimes the teacher supports the parent’s aims, as I did with one mother, to whose plea that her son be neater and tidier I added my bit. The student took it without sullenness.) It is an excellent way to see how the family dynamic works, which in turn allows the teacher to understand why Junior is the way he is. And it often allows me to find out helpful things. I had been worried that a particular student of mine had some kind of problem with his fine motor coordination affecting his handwriting. Mom & Dad were able to confirm that it had been diagnosed by a doctor, which will make matters simpler if we decide to ask the IB Organization to allow the student to type his exams instead of handwrite them.

And today The New York Times published an article about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s generosity to Johns Hopkins, where he went to college. An undistinguished student in high school, Bloomberg received his fat envelope on the promise of things to come rather than on quantitative measures of value addition. He reports his escape from the “crushing boredom” of high school to an undergraduate program where he felt as if he’d “died and gone to heaven,” a reaction I sympathized with: I sometimes tell my students when I think they are receptive that my own undergraduate career was like being born a second time. Now, Bloomberg’s successes at Johns Hopkins, while they included “a smattering of As,” had more to do with his political and social success as a class leader: president of his class and his fraternity.

What these three days have in common is their location in real life and real interactions among people. It is hard to see how our soon-to-be-Oxonian could have achieved his fondness for Burns from a “functioning learning module.” How could I know as much about my students as I learn from them and their parents while meeting with them? Where would Mayor Bloomberg’s fondness for his alma mater be if instead of a BMOC he had been a BMOLCD?

Such dutiful chattels are we

That, caught in the digital spree

With the budgets all shrinking,

We give up our thinking

And cheer for the on-line degree.

 

Apologies to the friend who sent me the original limerick: I reworked it a bit, but the theme is important. My friend, who works at a public institution of higher learning, made the alarming discovery that a sister institution now awards on-line master’s degrees in “instructional science and technology.” In an acronym too good to be true, the program is called MIST. A visit to its web pages will reveal the FOG within, but first we must allow Thomas Kuhn to shed some light.

Kuhn says that scientific knowledge exists within “disciplinary matrices.” I have suggested that this is true not just of science but also of any home base of learning. We must therefore examine not just an offered array of “knowledge” but the matrix in which it is held in order to make full sense of it.

The MIST program’s chief aim is to respond “to the increasing demand for professionals who understand learning theory, instructional design and technology, interactive media, assessment and research.” I immediately wondered where this demand is coming from. In my own twenty-five years of experience teaching, I have not encountered a demand for a “professional” who “understands learning theory.” Nor am I sure what is meant by “understand…research,” which could mean a number of things: know how to conduct successful and useful research, know how to abstract educational concerns from the classroom systematically, know how to help students in their researches, or know how to write a second-rate pseudo-scientific monograph on education and have the patience to read one[1](or the good sense not to).

Another of the program’s aims is to have its participants “construct a functioning learning module using interactive multimedia software, information technology, and media.” Nowhere in this description is it suggested that the participants will actually get real live students to learn something, as how could they in an on-line program without a practicum? In that context, what can “functioning” mean? Powered on?

A hint appears in the program’s summary of its offerings in “assessment and evaluation”: the participants will “develop techniques for judging the performance of instructional delivery.” Well, “instructional delivery” is either a bad metaphor for good teaching, or it is a good metaphor for bad teaching, since good teachers are not Culligan Men. What is more, every experienced teacher knows that sometimes the student does not “accept delivery.” There is also the problem that bad assessment, usually multiple-choice, can manifest the montillation effect, whereby a student scores well on a test of something he doesn’t really understand. If assessment cannot or does not tell the difference between a student and a Chinese Room, we may well ask what good it is.

And then there is the aim of getting participants to “explore and develop real-world methods of assessment through the use of psychometric techniques.” I wonder what real world they have in mind as using psychometric techniques for the assessment of learning. The last time I examined it[2], psychometry measured not learning but psyches. Maybe they want the participants to construct “instruments” for “measuring” “assessment,” but it all seems rather meta, if not futile.

Finally, we have the program’s aim of getting its participants to “conduct…tests” of “instructional and learning management systems.” After reading this, I felt a vague unease that sharpened as I examined the other descriptive material, failing to find in it anything about conducting tests of students. I also wondered what it could mean to be a testable element of an “instructional and learning management system.”

And so we come back to the disciplinary matrix in which this “knowledge” is located. It is an alien place, abstracted from reality and specificity. It seems more concerned with systems than with students and more concerned with technology than with brainpower. Whatever workplaces its graduates will be going to are no workplaces I can recognize as schools. I must therefore ask where the “demand” is coming from that this program is designed to meet. No good answer suggests itself, and bad answers crowd in. Maybe the reality is as “virtual” as the program.

The recently released publication U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health is an eye-opener for many reasons, not least its findings that American children (and adults) are in worse health than those of other OECD countries. But this is a blog about teaching and learning, so I will focus on its findings about the effect of poor education on health.

Diane Ravitch has long and often argued that children’s health and their education are strongly interconnected. Hence her recommendation that “education” should start with antenatal education and preparation of poor and otherwise disadvantaged mothers, and continue in a public program of pre- and post-K education combined with parental support. But the US Health report gets down to detail:

• In 2006 the life expectancy of 25-year-old American men without a high school diploma was 9.3 years shorter than those with a bachelor’s degree or higher education; the corresponding disparity for women was 8.6 years.

•  Early-childhood education helps shape early childhood development, which in turn shapes readiness for school and ultimate educational attainment.

•  Knowledge, problem-solving skill, and a “sense of control over life circumstances” come with education, and these “psychosocial factors” have been strongly tied to healthful “behaviors.”

•  While some research shows that unhealthful “behaviors” and poor education merely have common antecedents, other evidence supports “causal connection” between education and health. (I suppose that given the way social “science” goes, someone has got to “prove” that people take better care of themselves when they know how to do so, and that I should be grateful for the grunt work. Thank you, grunts!)

Their concluding “Next Steps” include, as recommendations for countering the “social factors” in poor American health, improved education for children and young adults. Readers of these postings know that I have sometimes disparaged “scientific” results that seem to “prove” what everyone already knows, but when “science” and humanity coincide in the important recommendation that poor kids get the care they need, it is worth reporting.

(Who knows? It might raise some of the blame from the teachers of these children, who even now are being disciplined or fired for “value-added ratings” that are due to circumstances beyond their control.)

 

The most startling result in a recent BBC report on “self-esteem” among U.S. college freshmen is that in the last fifty years the proportion of those who think of themselves as “gifted” at writing has increased by half, from 30% to over 45%. This amazing self-estimation coincides with an average SAT I writing score of 488, down slightly over the last six years and undistinguished at any time, particularly in a test that appears to reward length and ignore errors. And other tests can confirm that this groundswell of self-esteem is groundless.

I have been teaching for half those fifty years, and while I have had a number of students who wrote well, I would say that only two of them had outstanding talents for writing. One of them, a West African girl, had lived in the U.S. for a number of years but returned to Africa. The other, a Syrian boy, was fourteen going on fifty. Actually, so was the West African girl, now that I think about it. They were both extraordinarily aware of themselves and of others, having a powerful imagination harnessed to a strong, verifiable sense of reality. They also had a flawless ear.

Unlike Dede and Susu, the students reported on in the BBC article seemed to have a rather weak sense of reality. Jean Twenge, the US psychologist featured in the report, claims that “[w]hat’s really become prevalent over the last two decades is the idea that being highly self-confident—loving yourself, believing in yourself—is the key to success. Now the interesting thing about that belief is it’s widely held, it’s very deeply held, and it’s also untrue.” Another psychologist, Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, notes that while there is often a correlation between high self-esteem and success, he was unable to say which way the causation ran: was it that self-esteem caused success or the other way around?

It may be Baumeister’s scientific duty to be unsure, but my sense of human nature and of the nature of students tells me that success causes self-esteem. Further, a sense of success in accord with reality means achievement at particular things or kinds of thing. And it means genuine success, not the sort of fakery associated with, say, certain writing tests that “certify” bad compositions as good.

The problem with empty or fruitless self-esteem may be that it has no such connection to testable reality and is based on airy claims. Harry Frankfurt in his book On Bullshit investigates the proliferation of BS and thinks that it may be partly due to a retreat from the belief in standards of truth, rightness, and quality to refuge in a kind of sincerity in which personal claims are privileged against testing and questions. The problem with this refuge is that it is preposterous: “As conscious beings we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them.” What is more, “[f]acts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution” and “[o]ur natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial.” One can only conclude, he says, that “insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit”—as is self-esteem, when based on privileged and untested claims.

What the young people being surveyed should be receiving is not indoctrination in baloney. They should instead be receiving instruction in how to do real things, success at which can lead them to esteem themselves in accordance with a strong, verifiable sense of reality. If they are not as gifted at writing as Dede and Susu, we may still get them to write as well as they can and to recognize their accomplishment realistically. Then, unlike Ben, who can’t tie his shoes but is aiming for Brown, they will judge themselves and their prospects accurately and justly.

Everyone has heard superlatives about UC Berkeley: numbers of Nobel Prize winners on the faculty, top world rankings in hard and applied sciences, best public university in the world, etc., etc. And the students it attracts or attracted: one former colleague, the valedictorian of his high school class, who had his wedding reception at the Faculty Club, a lovely old building designed by the peerless local architect Bernard Maybeck; another, admitted at the age of fourteen after getting a perfect SAT score, studying philosophy under John Searle of the famous “Chinese Room Argument;” etc., etc. And the place: situated on a hillside with splendid views of San Francisco Bay when fog permits, the tallest hardwood stand in the country in one of its groves; a stream flowing through the campus, bordered by canyon walls, a botanical garden, and in these straitened days, planting a bit more disheveled than formerly, etc., etc.[1]

This needs “rebranding”? Someone evidently thinks so. The University has an office of “marketing communications,” and this office has devised a “plan,” called Onward California, “meant to give the university a new visual identity, attract new students and articulate a vision for its schools.” Just what a splendid-looking campus with excellent students and carefully planned programs needs. The office thought the University’s 19^th-Century seal, with its book and rays of metaphorical light, was too old-fashioned, and tried replacing it in “marketing communications” with a bizarre shield that looks like a dented blue and gold washing machine.

Students and alumni think of the university as a functional community, and a pretty good one. They do not think of themselves as collectively needing a makeover with a nip and tuck here and a washing machine there. And they are right: a fine university is not improved by branding and baloney. It is improved by the public’s unpropaganzided conviction that a splendid public university and public schools are a precious resource. For a while it looked as if California was moving away from this conviction. Perhaps it still is, but recent events may suggest otherwise. Groups of Californians both large and small seem to be deciding that in a real community some things are worth paying for, e.g., the state’s voting in Proposition 30 to raise taxes for schools, universities, and other programs, and the City of Alameda’s voting in a property tax surcharge for its public schools. And they seem to be deciding that some things, like branding makovers, are nonsense. Alumni even got the washing machine banned. These good moves are very promising, though I would be pleased also to see the office of marketing communications closed, its funding applied to hire gardeners and maintenance crews. Splendid schools and universities don’t just exist; they don’t just appear as if in a glossy brochure; they are made and kept that way, both physically and intellectually, by real communities at real work.

A good friend and former colleague of mine, now sixty-seven, still lives on the farm that next year will have been in his family a hundred twenty-five years. In his father’s heyday it produced dairy foods as well as crops, but my friend manages just the crops these days, including the maple syrup I once had for breakfast at the farmhouse with him. The farm being in a northern state, he spends much of the summer preparing for the winter, repairing the barn, bringing in the harvest, and chopping, sawing, and stacking cordwood, the farmhouse’s only source of heat. His main concession to what passes in him for age has been to leave the farm during midwinter for warmer climates.

His education was the result of the same kind of hard work that characterizes his farming: an excellent undergraduate career at the state university followed by a graduate fellowship in history at Harvard. That education took place in the 1960s, but in the intervening years it has become more difficult for people of modest means, whether from the farm or the ‘hood, to attend university: half again as hard, according to one measure.

The exception to this trend is Asian-Americans. A particularly interesting locus of fascination is California, whose people voted some years ago (Proposition 209) to end the use of racial preferences in making admission decisions in public universities.  Now, of the twenty colleges in the U. S. with the highest percentage of Asian-Americans, nine are California public universities, including all but one campus of the University of California.

What Asian-Americans often seem to have in common with my former colleague is a capacity for hard work, the result of a solid upbringing not particularly dependent on the advantages money can buy. But success will have its detractors, and so young Asians get the reputation of workhorses with résumés, who have been whipped into college by horrifying parents. One writer reports that the absurd stereotypes even go so far as to disparage the violin and piano as “Asian instruments” that white children would do well to avoid learning. Most remarkable are reports that minority enrollment in California public universities has declined since the passage of Prop 209, their authors seeming to forget that Asians are a minority—and one with a sad, dark history in California.

Before my career as a teacher I worked in another line that took me into offices in and near San Francisco. Three of my bosses, Japanese-Americans, had spent World War II in “internment” camps, one of them having been born in a camp. Another one of them one day raised his usual curtain of silence to tell me about his experience being uprooted from home at the age of ten and returning after the war to find that the family’s land was sold, or transferred, or something, to others. I am sure that his story was not unique. He went from being almost a refugee in his own country, penniless and landless, to the University of California, where he received his undergraduate and professional degrees. He died last year at the age of eighty-two, having retired from the firm that bore his name.

My current career in teaching has taken me to China, where I have had a chance to teach at schools whose student bodies are mostly Chinese. I need to deal with some stereotypes here, too. At my current school the students are applying to colleges, many of them in the U.S. They have heard what a 2009 study claims, that white students are three times more likely to be admitted to selective universities than Asian students with the same academic record. One of them, a championship debater in English with a SAT I score of 2400 and an IB predicted score of 43, has already received his first rejection, though I am sure he will receive some acceptances “before the season is quite over[1].” He and his classmates are hard-working, but they don’t go around with circles under their eyes or weal-marks on their backs. Most of the music students specialize in instruments other than piano and violin, including some real Asian instruments like the erhu. They field athletic teams that any school would be proud to have; indeed, their swimming and tennis teams would probably thrash most other schools’. And can they think independently? Hong Kong’s PISA scores of reading “reflecting and evaluating” are the third-highest in the world, suggesting that they do not just memorize, a result my experience confirms.

My former colleague on his farm in the Northern Tier would probably find some kindred spirits among these urban students fifty years his junior on the other side of the world. It is to be hoped that the people admitting them to selective colleges in the U.S. will recognize the kinship too.

[1] He was eventually accepted at Columbia from the wait list.

My annual wish list with something for the current season:

May your classroom be full, but not too full, of eager students.

May your students not be jaded.

May they have had a good night’s sleep.

May they greet you when they come in and bid you goodbye when they leave.

May they look you in the eye but not get in your face.

May they never say “whatever.”

May they get their work done—by themselves.

May the sparks in their lives be of interest not notes.

May their parents appreciate what you do for them.

May your classroom not enchain you with gadgets or constrain you with needless routines.

May its main source of light be sunshine.

May your bag of tricks be bottomless.

May the only added value in your life be the value added to your abundantly deserved retirement accounts.

May your administrators be educators.

May they see the paradox in preparing individual students for standardized tests.

May they not think that schools are a business or education a product.

May they share your horror of baloney and pink slime education.

May your school’s mission be expressible in under ten words, none of them a superlative.

May nothing in your building leak.

May your school’s network work.

May you possess or achieve the serenity to accept the human condition and the keenness to relish the good things you have.

—and two wishes in light of current events:

May you and your students be alive and safe a year from now.

May the friends and relatives of those killed in their classrooms find the strength to endure their loss.

One of the earliest postings on this blog was about my discovery that Googling “McLearning” on a lark brought up a very unlarklike mother lode of junk in education. It was called “blended learning” by its profit-making proponents, and touted as a “solution” in the war of pink slime education on the old-fashioned kind provided by live teachers in real places. I guessed then that its main drawing power would be that it was cheap and could “deliver” “instruction” en masse, sidestepping reliance on the pesky and expensive human beings who traditionally help young people get an education.

It is no longer a guess. The schools of Manchester, New Hampshire are now planning to introduce “blended learning labs,” in which students take courses on line during the school day. The “labs” would be under the supervision of a “facilitator,” who… what? Facilitates on-off switching? Facilitates brightness and contrast? Facilitates the removal of chewing gum from tables? It is not clear how someone not acquainted with the subject being taught could “facilitate” learning it, which is what we would expect of a teacher rather than a “facilitator.”

The Manchester schools superintendent, saying that the introduction of pink slime education would “deal with…the need for students and school districts to catch up with technology,” puts the cart before the horse. Technologies may be introduced to schools once the technologies’ capabilities  “catch up with” the classroom’s educational needs. If a technology cannot provide coaching, if it cannot provide Socratic questioning, if it cannot provide formative assessment, there is no need for teachers and students to “catch up with” it.  As usual, the Canard of the 21^st Century is confusing the issue, which is actually very clear: education is being debased, and the debasement needs stopping. The Manchester parents and teachers opposing pink slime are right to do so.

One of the arguments used to promote the “delivery” of recorded “instruction” is that excellent lecturers can reach more students on record than if they spoke live, and that they could replace lousy live lecturers. While this claim may have some validity, it needs further examination. An old colleague of mine, still teaching at the school where I began my career, reports that the school’s move to introduce one “blended learning” course per student per term has met with resistance and dislike by the students, who prefer the dynamic of a live classroom and interaction with a live teacher.

When I was a first-year teacher at this school, I used to visit the classes of teachers reputed to be excellent. One classroom I visited was that of Mr. C., who taught the school’s A.P. American History courses. His pedagogy was old-fashioned: lectures and papers. His results, among the best in the state, were due not to his adopting more up-to-date means of “delivering” “instruction” but to the quality of his lectures and the pains he took with them. He would frequently come into the faculty room after a class and collapse in one of the armchairs, sometimes in a sweat. I remember walking under the second-floor windows of his classroom and hearing his voice peal out to make a point or tell a story. He was also an accomplished amateur musician and had a fine singing voice that  he would use once a year in his annual Elvis impersonation, given to each of his classes, which would cheer him to the echo—his “fun[1]” for the year. He allowed only one recording of his speaking: a tape he made of Jonathan Edwards’s hair-raising sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God[2].” While it was an impressive performance, it couldn’t hold a candle to his live classroom, even when he was not being so pyrotechnical.

The answer to the problem of dull lectures is not Mr. C. in a can: it is the instruction of student teachers in platform technique for when they give a lecture as part of a varied classroom offering, so that students may enjoy it, or at least benefit from it, as well as the other things on offer. It is probable that few student teachers will turn out to be as good at the lectern as Mr. C., but they can surely be brought to the point of talking well, of planning well, of questioning well, of correcting well—in short, of teaching well, which is teaching live.

Back when Ansel Adams wrote his spoof The Trudgin’ Women for an early 1930’s Sierra Club high Sierra trip, he could count on his audience knowing something about ancient Greek drama. The trudgin’ referred to backpacking, not to the experience of reading Euripides’ The Trojan Women or other ancient Greek drama. That experience was (generally thought to be) anything but trudgery or drudgery.

People like me, who were not classicists, would find a good translation or, often, encounter one in college. My memory of Lysistrata is that it was not drudgery but very funny. My classmates and I read the translation my college required: by Dudley Fitts, a secondary-school teacher who was also a classicist and translator. (He gave the Spartans what a New Englander thought was a Southern accent.) But that was not my first acquaintance with the title. According to a Ralph Story’s Los Angeles episode, which I saw in the mid-1960s, an early 1930’s L.A. production was ordered closed for obscenity by the Los Angeles Police Department. They wanted to arrest the author, but Aristophanes could not be found.

I enjoyed reading Greek drama, but to judge by a recent New York Times article I should have felt as if on some kind of death march of students “trudging through their Aristophanes” instead of over the Sierra Crest, while clever young men like Mark Zuckerberg were dropping out and making their millions. I do not disparage people who seek their fortune in a bright new city or a garage of genius rather than tolerate a mediocre college—or “college,” as we seemingly must call places that do not deserve the name. But I very much dislike the idea implicit in the article, that either university or Aristophanes is somehow ipso facto boring. To a good student a good education will be a pleasure worth having for its own sake. To a student whose aim is not an education but a qualification, the whole process may seem like an imposition—and maybe it is.

More to the point is the article’s horror of the colossal debts being undertaken by young people to get an education, or an “education,” or a qualification, or whatever it is. I treasure my university education, but I am dumbstruck by the thought that today I might have to trudge under nearly a quarter of a million dollars of debt for it. Even more shocking than the price is the possibility that instead of a thrilling liberation, some unfortunate “university” students are getting a Pink Slime Education for that price. No wonder bright young people are seeking alternatives!

I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t have been, to receive an email this week from one of my former students who went with me on the trip to El Alamein that I recently wrote about. This student knew about the 70^th anniversary of the battle, but he also reports that when he goes running in the desert, he usually thinks of that trip. People often have fond memories of school trips, and not just the lavish trips. Our trip was very modest, and thinking about it put me in mind of a South African I knew who as a boy had taken a school camping trip to the Kruger Park. In those days black South Africans were shunted off to the side in subpar accommodation, but he reported on the trip with as much pleasure as if it had happened a month before. What these stories have in common is the vividness of real physical activity with real physical people.

This vividness of actually experienced reality is also what gives an extra charge even to the “ordinary” days at school or university when people are with each other, dealing in all the give-and-take that being in a real group entails. While it is true that some highly introverted or disaffected people would rather not have such an experience, for most people it is, or should be, a welcome slice of life. Much that is valuable in academics also depends on physical proximity and face-to-face conversation. I have taken part in “webinars” and found them immediately forgettable. By contrast, I still remember particular moments around the colloquium tables of my undergraduate education, and I remember visits to professors during “office hours” and the conversations that took place then.

It is against the thought of a school as a place where actual things really happen to people who are physically present that I read about the breathless buzz surrounding MOOCs (I think it stands for Monstrously Oversubscribed Online Courses), the Wave of the Future of the Month. So far the model is that a generously endowed professor at an illustrious and well-funded university offers a free introductory course for no credit. I think it is a wonderful gesture for these teachers to give charitably of their time and thought to something popular but peripheral to the concerns of their alma mater, for such undertakings are peripheral: the students who receive credit still matriculate and pay tuition and go to classes and meet their classmates and teachers. They still form their intellects in discussions at which they are held responsible for what they say in real time by people who are right in front of them. They still receive formative evaluations at conferences where they interact one-on-one with an expert in the field: not always, and not for everything, but for enough that simple knowledge tested in summative evaluations is only a part of the experience.

Only people who are looking for short cuts to “knowledge” and certification—and the reporters and politicians gulled by them—think that MOOCs can be the Wave of the Future of education for any length of time. It is certainly possible that “schools” will form on line, but I have argued that they are schools in only a threadbare sense. It now seems possible also that people can “attend” MOOCs that won’t be troubled by inadequate bandwidth, and that rubrics can be devised which allow certain kinds of crude “crowdmarking;” but that kind of marking can only be summative, and even the fastest online type-chat is not the same as a face-to-face conversation.

These objections probably won’t stop some “schools” from adopting MOOCs in place of physical courses, but I would be willing to bet that the best universities and preparatory schools will remain actual places with actual programs involving physically present people. It’s a pity that what has started as a hobbyist offering by elite universities could end up being the fallback schooling offered by purveyors of education on the cheap—a new Bantu education but without the wild things of the Kruger Park or the deserts of El Alamein to cast back to in memory.