from I Like to Watch - Salon.com: internet criticism + review of PBS series on internet use
My bosses at Suck.com, meanwhile, accurately predicted that the Web would soon become something between a gigantic mall catering to the lowest common denominator and an infinite tabloid echo chamber. Their mantra: Sell out early and often. Why? Because those of us musing about murderous robot showdowns (or scratching out angry cartoons under a pseudonym, for that matter) would all go back to grabbing ankle for The Man sooner than we thought.
What they didn't know, and never could've predicted, was that the Web would also transform itself into an enormous, never-ending high school reunion (See also: hell).
For liberals, one of the goals of education is to make upward mobility possible, and upward mobility is usually though of as somehow egalitarian. There are two problems with this way of thinking.
1. every individual wants their own children to have only the best
2. all schemes for upward mobility through education implicitly recognize that some will be left behind
socialist egalitarianism or free-market social Darwinism. The former holds that all work is of value, and that all workers deserve good lives. The latter believes that mobility rewards the talented and hard-working, and punishes the others.
realities of education today put several obstacles in the way of upward mobility through education
1. higher education has become increasingly expensive
2. higher degrees in the humanities are not necessarily a good way to raise one’s class status
3. many academics too comfortable with the elite status
career prospects for new PhD’s, especially in English and history: when writing in the humanities came to be defined as productive work, or as the scientific production of truth, its nature became falsified...they cannot have the rigor and exactness that science do
alternative model
Historically culture-producers were monks, gentlemen of leisure, military aristocrats, lackeys and retainers of the aristocracy and the church, and déclassé riffraff. Only in the nineteenth century did scholarship come to be defined as a job
What are the purposes of the university? It’s a hodgepodge: the production of scholarship, science, and technical innovation; the production of ideological justifications for various public and private corporate groups; general cultural education; education in citizenship; job training; entertainment; and the ratification of class status.
Tenured professors are the meritocratic elite, and theoretically the undergraduates are trying to move themselves up the ladder.
Who pays for the university? What match is there between the universities’ goals and their funding? Very little.
education is
Part One: Humanities Education Today
For liberals, one of the goals of education is to make upward mobility possible, and upward mobility is usually though of as somehow egalitarian
Essay by Walter Benjamin. Source: UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television; Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.
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