True Reform

Educational reform to this point simply has not gone far enough. Over time I have tried to scout out the educational reform terrain to see whose ideas are worthy of implementing into the radical pandidactic turnover. What I have found is a great number of people living inside the broken box and failing to think outside of it.

Part of the reason people fail to truly think innovatively about reform is simply in our verbage. We Americans have carefully trained ourselves to treat "higher education" and "college" or "university" as synonomous. As such, when we speak of higher education being broken, people perceive us to be saying that we believe that colleges and universities are broken and need fixing.

The truth is - and most reformers would balk at my saying this - colleges and universities are not broken. Colleges and universities, for the most part, function as intended - they provide motivation and easy access to information for all those who are able to afford it. Of course, there are a few pesky side effects to colleges and universities, such as massive student debt that one will be paying instead of feeding their children after graduation, and the fundamental transfer of educational ownership from students to educators. But, overall, colleges and universities are managing to provide people with degrees and jobs (which has really been the collegiate goal in the modern era - to provide not a genuine education, but validation and employment).


No, in our reform we have failed to acknowledge that what is broken is education itself: the way that we think about education, our excessively high dependence on so-called educational institutions, the isolation that occurs across the board as part of the learning process, transferral of educational ownership from a very early age resulting in a lack of motivation to learn that most people simply take for granted. We as a society have taught ourselves that education is a painful but necessary evil. We have established altogether the wrong goals for ourselves as well. We have taken the term "get an education" and synonymized it with "get a degree," when in fact the two concepts are very near to being mutually exclusive.


So I cringe to hear some of the solutions that have been proposed for our broken higher education system. In a recent debate at the Miller Center (resolution: "The business model of higher education is broken") Daniel Hamburger, CEO of DeVry University, proposed that the quick-fix to all of our woes is to provide more funding to all types of collegiate institutions and make learning more available through mediums such as online universities. Gail Mellow, president of LaGuardia Community College, insisted that, in addition to increasing education funding, we must ease for students the transition between high school and college.


Whoa, kids, let's take a step back and look at our criminal misapprehension. It is this: most of us believe that in order to fix higher education, we must fix colleges and how they do business. This is simply not the case. Education has existed since long before colleges came into being and it will exist long after they go extinct. Education and how well it succeeds or fails has little or no bearing on the status of institutions who claim to provide it.


Now, the money pinch since the 1980s has obviously made the college system less and less efficient, and I am actually grateful in some ways. I am grateful because hopefully the current crisis will help us to wake up and recognize the lunacy that we are engaging in. I hope that it will make us realize that the answer to our woes is not to continue to throw money at an artificial system. And colleges absolutely are artificial. They are a human attempt to streamline an organic process. We have not, thankfully, institutionalized the physiological development of infants. I don't know why we would begin to try to institutionalize the psychological development of adults. The answer is not to throw more money at this artificial system.


The answer is to change not the way they teach but the way we think and the way we learn. For therein lies a true education. Education is the process of acquiring knowledge, developing reasoning powers, and preparing oneself intellectually for mature life. And all of these have everything to do with the inner workings of the mind - our very thoughts. So if we can change the way that we think we can fix education. To attempt to fix education by restoring dilapidated campus buildings or increasing the salary of college professors is nothing more than tilting at windmills - it will serve to be utterly ineffectual in the fight for the minds of America. In point of fact, pouring cash onto failing programs may have about the same effect as pouring gasoline on the already-raging fire of inadequacy. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will begin to reform education until we try to reform men and women from the inside out.


Impossible!, you might say, but I say that it is not. To reform mankind from the inside out we must begin by turning our own thinking inside out. This may prove to be the most profound difficulty in fixing higher education. Not only have our parents socialized us to believe that higher education is something it is not, but thousands of years of history have formed our civilization into one that believes higher education is something it is not. But the work begins within the mind of every woman, man and child who embraces the principles of pandidactism and chooses to embark on a quest for education on their own terms. Each of us must recognize our own intellectual failings with regard to our view of learning and correct them. And we must teach others to recognize these failings within themselves as well.


It could be so simple. All that is required to turn an upside-down civilization back onto its feet is a simple realization. What profound power can emanate from that one act of introspection. First we must disabuse ourselves of a few notions, the first being that the responsibility for one's education falls not on the institution but on the individual, the second being that the standard student-teacher form is a necessity. Then we must change the goal of our study from getting employed to getting a genuine education (of course, it isn't ignoble to desire employment - the opposite is of course true - but it should not be the end-all-be-all of our educational pursuit).

But we never achieve self-actualization simply by removing negative thoughts from our minds. Such thoughts must be replaced by their positive counterparts in powerful ways. So, after we have chosen not to believe that anyone is responsible for our education but ourselves, we must choose to take control of that education. I think one of the most dangerous symptoms of this transferral of ownership and responsibility is studying on someone else's terms - studying that which someone else sees as important in someone else's style other than our own. One powerful way to replace this kind of negative behavior is to make a plan regarding that which one wishes to study and how one wishes to study it. This usually includes making a list of subjects that you have a genuine desire to learn and deciding the most exciting road to take to get there. And then take that plan in hand - make it happen.

Likewise, if we are to stop believing the false notion that the only way to learn is from professional teachers we must replace that negative belief with a positive one. First of all, it's clear that there are better ways to learn. While we retain about five percent of all knowledge gained in lecture, we retain ninety percent of that knowledge gained from teaching. So, if we are to harness that energy and stop learning in this inefficient way, we should make a choice to teach everything that we learn. A convenient way to make this happen would be the pandidact's meeting, in which students learn for an hour and then immediately teach that which they have learned.

The last negative mental roadblock is probably the most difficult to conquer - the attitude that the goal of education is not learning but gainful employment. This attitude has several sinister side effects. First, learning ceases to take place as soon as we obtain employment. Second, we begin to perceive education, as mentioned before, as a painful but necessary evil to be endured if we are to become financially comfortable. The replacement for this belief we have already discussed, and that is to make a plan to study that which we desire to simply as a matter of love of learning, whether or not it may increase our capacity to earn.

What power there is in a simple cognitive shift! In the act of realization, lives are made, light replaces darkness and society changes forever through genuine, lasting reform.

So, in terms of actual verbage, I agree with the reformers: higher education is in fact broken. But when I say that, I am saying something utterly different than what they are: education is broken. Not colleges, not universities, not state funding, not pell grants, not teaching styles or classroom techniques or the emphasis that we place on one discipline or another, but education itself. And so I challenge you to muster up some courage and look inside yourself to answer the question: what are you doing to fix your education?