/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} In the Press Democrat on Feb. 14, Provost Ochoa was quoted as saying that “…higher education has not experienced productivity increases that other parts of the economy have” and “[we] need to start taking advantage of new pedagogies and new technologies to experience productivity increases in the same way that other parts of the economy have.” He also claims that there are “new pedagogies and new technologies [that can lead to] productivity increases.” So he is “challenging our faculty to actually be leaders in that area.” Surely Provost Ochoa is familiar with the concept of Baumol’s Cost Disease, which I believe to be the primary reason that education has become so expensive relative to the goods we purchase. The basic idea is that technology has given us tremendous productivity increases in many sectors, for example, manufacturing. But there have been few productivity increases in sectors like teaching. Salaries in all sectors tend to rise with inflation, so labor-intensive sectors become more expensive relative to the automated ones. The provost’s challenge and assertions raise the question: Why is he not helping the SSU faculty to implement these new technologies? I thought that was one of the jobs of a provost — to find the resources that can help the faculty do a better job. I’m not at all convinced that these new pedagogies and technologies actually exist. I can certainly speak to the technology issues. If anything, new technologies have made learning less efficient. Perhaps the provost has not experienced the use of cell phones, texting and web surfing during lectures. But it’s the overall message that really bothers me. I believe that education is one of the most important endeavors that a society must perform, probably a close second to defense. Defense is clearly the most important endeavor. If another society kills us, we are done. But given that the purpose of education is to perpetuate the social mores of a society, I submit that education is a close second in importance to defense. I further submit that it is impossible to know how much money to expend on either of these endeavors to ensure their success. So I believe that it is in the best interest of the society to spend generously on both of them. As a society, the U.S. does defense spending in spades!! But nearly every article I see about education talks about how we can save money doing it! And then we wonder why our young people don’t see the importance of education. Duh! Learning is hard work and time consuming. Helping others to learn (teaching) is also hard work and time consuming. We live in a time when technology is allowing incredible improvements in producing goods. Despite what Provost Ochoa says, I do not believe that we have the technology to see similar improvements in education efficiency. If anyone knows of the “killer app” that can make learning more efficient, I would love to hear about it. I further believe that the nature of education is such that we will never see such technologies. More importantly, I hope we never see such technologies, for this would surely mean the end of the joy of learning! I suspect that Provost Ochoa agrees with much of what I say here, but he seems to have taken the politically expedient path of championing more efficient education through the use of technology. I would like to see the provost become an active advocate for the love of learning, speaking about the beauty of spending more time teaching and learning, not how to find ways to streamline the process so it takes less time. Of course this is a hard sell to the general public and the politicians who represent us in Sacramento. But I would like to see a provost who is up to that challenge, not one who challenges the faculty to do something that, at best, undermines the whole concept of learning. What is a student to do about all this? It is tempting for a student to buy into this call for efficiency. After all, who doesn’t want to graduate and get a good job? But this efficiency model treats a student as a widget being produced in a factory. Fortunately, each of us can control our own attitude. So you can choose to look on this time as providing an amazing array of opportunities to learn new things, just for the love of expanding your own appreciation of the world around us. Watch a young child engaged in the learning process as he or she explores the world. Each of us was born with a love of learning. Older people tried to channel our learning explorations. Don’t put a bug in your mouth to learn what it tastes like. Don’t touch something to determine if it’s hot. (I’ve had to relearn that one several times as an adult.) Basically, don’t reinvent the wheel. Somehow this has morphed into “efficiency” of learning, which thwarts our natural curiosity about the world around us. Satisfying that curiosity is time consuming and inefficient. And it’s probably the most joyous of human endeavors. My love of learning was a primary factor in my decision to go into teaching. I’ve been retired almost six years and just celebrated my seventy-first birthday, and I still enjoy learning new things. (My current project is learning about 64-bit assembly language in Windows 7.) As a person who enjoys the learning process, I don’t think about ways to make it more efficient, like a production assembly line. I think about ways of sharing my newly-discovered knowledge with others. Yes, it’s time consuming. And it’s very inefficient. Which, relative to factory production techniques, makes it very expensive. And, I believe, the second best way we can spend our tax dollars. Robert Plantz is a Professor Emeritus in the SSU Computer Science Department. " />
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