With investment bring driven by government support in colleges as in medicine, this reminds me of the housing bubble that led to the collapse of 2008. Education, housing and medicine are worthy causes, but there doesn’t seem to be a brake on investment and speculation. Not sure what will happen if growth is not restrained in the next few years…costs of both higher ed and medicine are skyrocketing. sorry, this is somewhat irrelevant If the moderators wanted to remove it, that’s fine.
Perhaps it makes up in importance what it may lack in relevance – but either way, I am provoked (with my “participant hat” on and not my “moderator hat”) to add to your comment:
We (in a modern, capitalistic-oriented west) don’t seem to have any drive towards moderation or stasis, and in fact have inclinations away from those things. Hence we may develop what some seem to think of as the “best” medical care in the world, and yet (in the U.S.) it flunks due to non-economically viable deliverability; - the same reason that the best term paper in the world still flunks if a student can’t deliver it where it needs to go. The C-student who can at least get her papers turned-in rightly gets the passing grade.
Education seems chained to the same kind of drive, with universities wanting to compete for reputations, endowments, and spacious front lawns to put on the brochures. And we reward them for it by chasing all those things ourselves. But we do seem to run by a credo that insists (to put it in transportation terms) that the only options we will develop and push for are stretch limousines or else you walk. Nothing in between is deemed acceptable.
What science educators, and educators more generally, need to reflect on is: how does what I teach contribute toward hope in the future? That is ultimately what education is about. We invest a lot less in curiosity cultivation when we feel that tomorrow’s survival is in question. And I recognize the privileged perspective on full display in that last statement … vast swaths of people here in the U.S. and elsewhere would respond:
“You’re worried?! Really? Welcome to our daily life.”
But hope springs up in seemingly unlikely places. And privilege-mentality seems to be a more fertile ground for fear than it is for hope. Perhaps among the privileged we need to be teaching that lowered expectations are the secret to the good life. (how often do you hear an educator say something like that?) And no, I don’t relish being the one trying to sell this to parents who are busy grooming 2nd-grade Billy for the Ivy Leagues.
To borrow Anne Lamott’s turn-of-phrase: “Expectations are resentments under construction.”
At least that’s the dark side of high expectations, anyway. I do know that high expectation also still fills an indispensable positive role in education as well.
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I think that’s right–when we grade our success on what others can do, we try to keep up with the Joneses. Not until we get Christ’s perspective (the Kingdom of Heaven; also 1 John, if you see a brother in need and do not help him, you are not of God, as we’re studying in church this month) do we realize that the rich man who gave away all his riches to follow God found eternal life.
It’s also a set up for understandable jealousy, Communism and the anti-Wallstreet demonstrations, among other things. It may be more than a stock market fall that results from this attitude; perhaps a revolution.
C S Lewis warned of “Christianity and Water,” where we tried to make the faith more appealing by jiving it with the fad of the day. Christianity and Capitalism may result in excesses typified by what you wrote of above; the French and Russian aristocracy; and is no better (and perhaps worse) than reactionary, anarchist movements in favor of the poor. In Leviticus 19:15, God demands a tall order: “'Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.”
We struggle with that yet. Thanks.
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He wrote that on a Blog. Online. On a Computer. And in that blog, online, on a computer, he said that no one uses Math after graduation?
wow. He doesn’t know much about math. All of those things work on math.
I dual majored in College in Biological Chemistry and MATH.
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