As educators, we stand at the intersection of childhood and maturity, welcoming each new generation of children into the world of the mind (and the heart, I hope) and sending them out at least partially prepared to take full advantage of all future education has to offer them.As we continue to move through the worst public health crisis of the past 100 years, it’s encouraging to recognize that, to paraphrase a well-known quote, the arc of the universe bends toward health. Pediatrician Perri Klass reminds us that while the old may be facing a relentless plague, for youth it’s still A Good Time to Be Born. When the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919 was ravaging both the old and those in the prime of life, the youngest in the world were among the most vulnerable to still-incurable fatal diseases. Klass captures this in her first sentences: “Our grandparents and great-grandparents and all the parents before, throughout history, expected that children would die. It was a known and predictable risk that went along with being a parent. Now we expect children not to die.”
Class and wealth were no protection: John D. Rockefeller and Leland Stanford each founded an eponymous institution in memory of a grandchild or a child who died before their 16th birthday. As Klass observes, scientific ignorance, fiction, religion, and the sheer weight of numbers caused most eras to assume that childhood death was a permanent burden on society.
But things would change as both public health authorities and doctors, as well as parents themselves, began to rebel against the losses, led in large part by a new figure on the scene: the woman physician. When women began teaching other women in medical schools, and women and men began listening to mothers’ stories, the unhygienic conditions of tenements, dairy farms, and other sources of illness began to be corrected, with huge impact. Next came vaccinations that diminished viral and bacterial risks of infancy and childhood and, finally, simple precautions like car seats and safer cribs, all of which led to a nearly tenfold decline in infant and child mortality. Despite continuing inequalities, this, as Klass pronounces, “can be seen as a unified human accomplishment—maybe even our greatest human accomplishment, at least for pediatricians and parents.”
Expanding Reach
A new cohort of students will soon return to elementary and secondary schools to a new, perhaps even improved, normal. It’s highly unlikely that the changes already underway since the advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs), Zoom, and expanded career education will be slowed or reversed.Take the future vision of Scott Galloway’s Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity. Galloway is a contemporary hybrid who could hardly have been imagined by the college students even 30 years ago: a professor of marketing at New York University’s (NYU) Stern School of Business and “a serial entrepreneur.”
Galloway points to his own Stern course as a model for the future:
For 10 years, I’ve taught brand strategy…to a full auditorium of 160...that’s our largest classroom. In 2020, however, Stern went virtual, and so that limit was lifted. Now there will be 280 students in my virtual auditorium for fall 2020.
The good news, according to Galloway: “The incremental cost of almost doubling the class? I’d estimate $2,000–$3,000 (an additional graduate student instructor to handle grading).” At minimum wage, the grad student would receive $17 to $25 per pupil and therefore would be expected to spend about 90 minutes reading each student’s five “deliverables,” aside from any other involvement.
Lest you think I’m cherry-picking, here is Galloway’s thesis:
Technology puts a stake in the heart of the friction and barriers administrators have erected to support their premium pricing: distance…[H]igher ed’s late embrace of technology could change society. Scale will allow individual schools—and individual professors—to exponentially expand their reach. This provides the potential to correct one of the great inequities of the last half century—the artificial scarcity of elite education.
In recent years I have taken several MOOCs from prestigious universities around the world and from superstars such as Peter Singer (Princeton University) and Paul Bloom (Yale University). But I never dreamed I was actually studying under them, as I once did in a four-person class whose teacher asked each of us to speak in detail about our reading assignments before he ever said a word, or with a grad school teacher with whom I met over coffee at semester’s end when he told me he’d be using the organizing thesis of my final paper as the structural concept for next semester’s course.
Access for all
Just after reading Galloway’s book, I learned that NYU’s recently retired president, John Sexton, had published a book titled Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age. Sexton had, in his own way, revolutionized higher education by opening NYU campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai and designing a 21st century world campus in which students and faculty can freely move across borders to enhance and cross-fertilize their thinking.It’s hard to imagine either author would recognize the other as talking about the same school, though Sexton admits “our higher education system is a symphony orchestra of offerings. And each section of the orchestra is different from the others and indispensable to the orchestra. This is a strength.” For one thing, Sexton eschews technology, flying across the world regularly to teach small seminar classes at all three of NYU’s campuses, even today as he nears the end of his eighth decade. (The one area where Galloway and Sexton agree is that we need to eliminate the “scarcity of elite education,” which takes up a full fourth of Sexton’s book as he lays out specific and viable means of creating “meaningful access for all.”)
Sexton’s universities, though obviously including such credentialing entities as business schools, are essentially classical institutions, “protected areas for thought and dialogue,” which, because of their very protected nature, “have a duty to mobilize outward from their protected position to become even greater forces than they now are for the advancement of thought and dialogue in society generally.” They are places for testing ideas to the edge of destruction because “at least ideally, the work in the university is inherently dialogic and collegial. Critique and commentary are part of the process of validation.”
No one has more at stake than the independent school as these visions clash in the coming decades.