Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson: "We've got the internet—you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying different lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn't play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need destructive technology for our higher education system."
More misery.
Well, based on the paragraph of flava alone, I was going to comment here, but then I looked at the linked article and saw within the first several comments there exactly the sentiments I'd express here.
ReplyDelete"If people were autodidacts then we wouldn't need videos and the internet to put higher ed out of business; public libraries would have done it more than a century ago."
"Or television, or 35MM film, or the Betamax, or VHS video, or DVDs, etc. etc. This [i.e., Johnson's] argument has been trotted out every time one a new technology arrives. If it was true, Jaime Escalante ("Stand And Deliver") would be teaching calculus to every student in the United States by now."
Some commenter brings up the dozens of entrepreneurs, artists etc. who've done quite well without finishing college. That's "survivor bias", I think: it ignores the millions of dropouts who did NOT do well.
Did he mean "disruptive?" Freudian slip, much?
ReplyDeleteConsidering how the Wisconsin state budget for higher ed has been going lately, I think he said exactly what he meant.
Delete"Have everybody available to that knowledge"?
ReplyDeleteCan someone recommend a good grammar-and-usage videotape to Senator Johnson?
He's functionally illiterate. Obviously. He can suck on a potato. I can provide one from my garden.
ReplyDeleteIncredibly ignorant of how anything works. Gee, what if someone has a question? Wouldn't it be good to have an expert in that field on hand to explain it? I wonder...
In that case I'm sure the good senator is lobbying to increase funding for libraries and universal broadband access.
ReplyDeleteOf course (maybe). But not librarians. Don't need them anymore; we have google.
DeleteI was thinking exactly what Annie's thinking. Who answers the students' questions? Who evaluates their work? Who takes them aside privately and quietly suggests that perhaps subject X isn't really their thing and they might need to adjust their career plans accordingly?
DeleteI just looked Ron Johnson up, thinking that maybe he didn't go to college himself, which might explain a few things. He did. University of Minnesota. He's got no excuse. So he's enjoyed the benefits of an in-person university education, but now no one else needs to? Annie, please get that potato ready.