Education When Information Is Free

"The whole system perplexes me. We live in an age where the flow and breadth of information has never been more inexpensive and readily available, yet colleges are more expensive than ever. The whole thing feels like a house of cards." -- Will Federman

Every so often, through the miracles of the interwebs, ideas will crash into each other and inadvertently produce provocative wreckage. That happened this week when Will Federman’s tweet and Deborah Williams's Inside Higher Ed piece about English composition saving the world came across my screen.

Federman’s tweet reflects a commonly held view. If information is less expensive and more easily accessed than it has ever been -- which it is -- then what, exactly, are colleges doing? Why are they so expensive?

Although probably written separately, Williams’s piece offers the beginnings of an answer.

As longtime readers know, although my doctorate is in political science, I spent two years in graduate school teaching English composition. Most of us in the various social science disciplines did, though I don’t know if that’s still true. Mercifully, the English department put us through a several-day crash course in writing instruction. It was the only “teaching how to teach” that I received in graduate school, and it was outside my own discipline.

It was revelatory. I went in thinking of writing instruction as largely about error detection and avoidance; I came away realizing just how destructive that approach can be. The point of the class was to get students writing, and editing, and rewriting. Errors of growth or ambition should be distinguished from errors of carelessness. The class didn’t have “content” in the same sense that, say, American government did. It was about building a skill.

It was a difficult class to teach, due largely to the grading. But it pushed me to rethink how, and why, I taught other things. The point of the class was the student, rather than the syllabus. If I wanted to prepare a student as a writer, or as a citizen, I had to construct the class around what I wanted students to do, rather than what I wanted to say.

(If you’d like to see me stumble through a TEDx talk on this theme from 2015, exhausted, under-rehearsed, having just driven back from an unsuccessful job interview, you can see it here. It was literally in the middle of that talk that I suddenly realized the function of PowerPoint: cue cards!)

Williams’s piece is a bit distant from institutional realities for my taste, but it gets one big idea very right. Writing is central to undergraduate education, even if colleges (cough, not just universities, cough) sometimes treat it indifferently. It’s central not only because students write papers, although that’s true, but because it’s where students have to test-drive their understanding of what they’re learning. It’s where they move from consumption to production. That’s a fundamentally different role.

As any frustrated writing instructor can tell you, developing that skill takes time, practice, mistakes, more time, more practice, more mistakes and impressive amounts of feedback.

The internet doesn’t change that.

Education isn’t just about information. If anything, the internet makes the distinction between education and information more relevant.

If I need to know who Harry Truman’s vice president was, I can look it up. (Bonus points to anyone who knows without looking!) But helping a student develop the ability to write clearly about difficult topics, to reason quantitatively, to synthesize information from various fields, to see nuance and to develop the confidence to stand as a producer of worthwhile ideas takes more than an app.

Put differently, education now can be less about the material and more about the student.

I don’t mean that in a “selfie culture” kind of way, but as something closer to self-awareness. What matters to you? What gifts do you have that others don’t? How should you live your life? How should we, as a society, live our lives? And how do you communicate those things so that other people can understand them?

Those answers aren’t in Wikipedia.

Historically, education along these lines was the exclusive province of the elite. The masses were relegated to training, if they got anything at all. Part of what makes public higher education so important is that it’s supposed to be available to everyone. We sometimes forget just how remarkable, and how fragile, that is.

When information is everywhere, discernment matters more than ever. This is not the time to abandon higher education for everyone. It’s the time to double down on it.

Tuition levels are another matter …