by Prof. Steve Lockwood, MSU-Northern
From one view this concentration of effort on distance delivery of courses seems a strange commixture of wish fulfillment. On the one hand is the wish among corporate Americans that was sparked and fanned by Frederick Taylor at the beginning of this century. Taylor's Scientific Management via measurements--of time and motion--promised that management could be scientific, and that it could become so by quantifying the right combination of employee motions. And since for much of the 19th century mathematicians had believed they were about to unlock the mysteries of the universe, aligning corporate management with mathematics promised to unlock the riches of civilization. (See, for example, Morris Kline's Mathematics and the Loss of Certainty, especially chapter 4). To many of our corporate heads of education, who call themselves CEOs these days, distance learning promises efficiencies undreamed of in Frederick Taylor's philosophy: no buildings, no classrooms, no campuses, and in some cases no teachers, just videos and cash registers to count the take. Instead of continuing as a subsidy, education might become profitable, the Whittle experiment notwithstanding.
On the other hand, to those who have never experienced a love of learning for its own sake, distance learning seems to offer a means to be sanctioned by higher education as having the qualities imparted by a university education, without actually acquiring them. In short, it seems to offer what today's instant gratification society requires: the baccalaureate degree without the effort. The Billings Gazette this past fall [Thursday, 10/16/97, I think] said of the Western Governors' University that it's a resurrection of the correspondence course idea of the 1930s with this difference, that the skills one gains now are to be deemed equal to a university degree. Thus will we have a society of new graduates certified to serve corporate America, but actually unable to do so.
It is ironic that the present endeavor to "streamline" education should be so eagerly embraced by corporate America. Early in this century, businessmen, labor leaders, and educators collaborated to design a K-12 system that would civilize and socialize America's labor force as the country shifted from an agrarian society that pursued individual ends to an urban one that (it was hoped) would cooperate in great corporations to the benefit of the entire country. "The result of this thinking," as Joel Spring has pointed out, "was a differentiated curriculum and vocational guidance" (Education and the Rise of the Corporate State 21). Now, what our university systems propose to offer as curriculum focuses almost exclusively on vocational guidance. The early goal of socializing the worker, of instilling common values, a mutual sense of history, and universal literacy under the theory that education would provide the antidote to the specter of class warfare, seems to have been abandoned in favor of a ready supply of labor, albeit one not appreciably more suited to corporate needs than the hoards of unwashed immigrants and husbandmen who flooded into New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore at the turn of the last century.
In other words, although promoted as the means of deliverance from the high costs and strenuous class work of today's university education, technology seems instead about to deliver us, Hollywood style, 100 years back to the future.