This is from a few days ago. Today, it’s snowing again. I had hot chocolate with ginger marshmallows as a warm celebratory beverage after work, and let me tell you – proper marshmallows are a thing of great beauty. I’m not sure about the candied ginger bits, although they were quite tasty.
Oddly enough, I feel like I’ve got far too much to say to even know where to start. How completely ridiculous is that?
Let’s see. It’s a weekend, so the internet is empty (I can hear it echoing), and I can say pretty much whatever I want to, right? (Unless I take so long to write this that it’s Monday by the time it gets posted…)
Heck, it’s my internet-cave, and I can make whatever cave-paintings I feel like making. Although, actually, that particular metaphor falls apart rather dramatically: if this is all just scribblings in charcoal on a cave wall, I think I must be some kind of post-modern Platonic theory. And I can say with some authority that being theoretical causes all sorts of snags in everyday life. People ignore you when you’re trying to order coffee, that sort of thing …
Right. Where was I? Trying to come up with a solution to two related but nonetheless distinct problems: how to make a living, and how to be serious about making without going into debt for grad school.
Well, actually, there’s a nebulous idea for solving both of those problems with one fell swoop. It’s an idea I may have mentioned before, in which the metaphorical “we” break down the walls of an unfortunate profit-oriented institution: so-called higher education.
I say so-called because … well, remember how I spent two years in grad school? When I’m not feeling charitable, I maintain that in terms of educational institution motivated challenges, I peaked in elementary school. Seriously. My eighth grade, unfortunate poker games instead of math aside (and I’d probably be better at math if I had actually played poker; I was always more interested in the other card game), was more challenging than my second year of graduate school. Some of this, I could have seen coming if I’d bothered to sit back and look at specifics: honestly, what did I expect from the University of Alabama? Intellectual rigor is not what they’re known for, and with good reason. I’m not, let me clarify here, knocking the program – it does deliver more or less what it promises. It turns out that I have very little patience for the veneer of historical and theoretical context over a poorly-executed pseudo-apprenticeship. I think, probably, an apprenticeship – one which was honest about what it was - would work. Or a situation in which history and theory were taken seriously – and probably taught by more than one person. I find that only having one viewpoint in the instructor’s chair is rarely adequate. And let’s face it, I don’t like following some “authority” blindly. I’ve known that since I was a wee child – I’ll argue with a signpost. Which is not necessarily a negative trait (though it does make working in retail quite difficult), but it does mean that I’m prone to burning bridges.
Which isn’t relevant, actually. Or it is, but … not in terms of what I’m actually looking to do with this thing. My motivation is mostly, yeah, that what I wish to pursue intellectually is a path I’ve chosen, in a context which allows me to poke at interesting details and create diversions occasionally. Like, actually, my undergraduate degree – which was made easier by the rigor of my high school, because I escaped most of the worst of the curriculum requirements – which may have been a major in art history on paper but in terms of what I actually studied was a degree in the seventeenth century (and remind me, later, to talk about how like the seventeenth century the twenty-first is).
This is what I’m looking for.
Wide-ranging, focused, multi-disciplinary. By choice, not by demand of institutional requirements. I mean, I assume that anyone who is interested in this sort of intellectual pursuit already has a pretty solid grounding in, if nothing else, the knowledge of everyday life. I’d assume, also, some curiosity about a particular field of study – and a dissatisfaction with the current environment in “traditional” universities.
The original proposal for this came from some radical, dissatisfied professors – who would like, in their students, a certain amount of actual interest in what they’e studying. Which makes sense. It’s not asking much, but at the same time if none of your students want to be in your class … it’s disheartening. One of the things they wanted was absolutely no exchange of funds. I’m going to throw that out the window, I think, and try to structure it, when I get to the appropriate point, such that there is a donation-based income stream. Unless we can make it into a project which brings participants room and board … but that’s unlikely. I think, instead, some provision for educators and students to keep themselves in groceries is simply integral to the project. It’s not about profit – it’s about paying people for their work.
The key, though, is to keep sight of a particular part of the goal – an educational paradigm that doesn’t rely on profit. Or, rather, which defines profit as something not necessarily money.
What else is going on with this idea? Well, among other things, it’s difficult – if not outright impossible – to figure out where to start, and which texts are genuinely useful (specifically, secondary sources) without some guidance from a reliable source. It’s useful to have an instructor who can at least provide some assistance in where to begin one’s research. It’s also useful to have a community both of fellow-students and instructors to provide feedback on one’s work and suggest paths that one might otherwise have missed. Thinking in a vacuum tends to get messy, and some external nudging into a tidier – and possibly more comprehensible (as I look at my near-total inability to write anything that isn’t bizarrely convoluted and with a tendency to run off in unexpected directions) – form is, in the end, more or less what educational institutions are all about.
It’s just that all the trappings associated with profit – and with education as something unpleasant that one has to simply get through, rather than a joyful experience of learning – really screw up the whole academic institution. My – our – goal has to be returning to higher education as something which is useful, entertaining, and valid on its own merits. It is not something to be suffered in the interest of obtaining a higher paying career path, or what have you.
Anyway. I recognize that I have quite a lot to learn, and I wish to find those who would teach. Basically, when you get down to the basics. (One of the problems with this proposal is that it lacks any real provision for arts of making – for example, how would I learn to make shoes from a widely-separated network of participants? Right – did I remember to mention that the underlying theory of this whole project is also to make the educational “institution” one which exists as a social network – not a physical campus, but as an online nexus, in order to make it feasible for interested students to connect with distant scholars in a manner that even the brick and mortar academic institution may not make possible? It is, after all, most important to find instructors and advisors interested in teaching and advising in a manner which suits one’s own needs and interests. Removing the limitations of distance … goes a long way to solving problems associated with that particular aspect.) Shattering the barriers created by financial demands, in theory, gives those who have given up academic pursuits for lack of funds an opportunity to change their path – and provides a potentially very interesting community of fellow-scholars.
Good grief. It did take me until Monday to finish this, and I’m not even entirely sure it makes sense. That said, it’s going out in the world anyway – because if I keep poking at it like this, eventually the path to both a clear proposal and a solid idea of its mission will come up out of it. I’ll just keep throwing words at it until there’s a foundation, and then I’ll work on walls and things.
One conceptual note, which you might have already thought of: Thinking about whether something is or is not “for profit” might not be the ideal framework this. In most transactions, at least where demand is elastic and nobody can exploit anybody else, both sides come away with something they value more than what they exchanged for it. So the flip side to “profit” is “consumer surplus” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_surplus). If people are merely “getting paid for their work”, then nobody is creating any value, because goods and services aren’t moving to people who value them more.
A second point is that in a system with interns, apprentices, and research assistants, you can have everybody come out better off in real economic terms without any actual money changing hands.
As to the shoe-making example, the problem there is that you might need a whole shop worth of equipment. A social network could still help you find apprenticeships in the same city.
Okay, my turn to post this instead of just sitting and staring at it.