Education

Class Mobility in the University

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Education

Minor change of plans today, in that I’m not in Adams Morgan but NoVa, King Street and St. Asaph; I’m meeting Jennifer in a couple hours here in Old Town for dinner. Lots of white shoppers carrying Gap and Banana Republic bags (the latter, being made of cream-colored paper rather than blue plastic, we all know to be more prestigious), wearing Claiborne or sometimes the now-less-ubiquitous ‘Crombie. Hot, muggy day.

My minor insight yesterday, however obvious it may have been, led me to think about how the interaction between economic and cultural understandings of class plays out in the university context. I made some overly facile distinctions about the concerns of the upper classes being less directly linked to the material, which I think are inaccurate, or at least not generally true.
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Teleological and Other Fancy Words

preterite Education

So I was all happy about what I thought was this terrific insight about the vocational model of education, and after thinking about it for a couple days, I realize that I was actually just excited about using a big word, and actually kind of misusing it, to boot. My misguided notion was that the vocational model is teleological in nature because it looks to final causes (getting a good job) as the motivator for going to college.
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Wages and Technology

preterite Computers, Education

Mankiw names labor as one of the “factors of production” (two other important ones are land and capital) that shape the production of goods and services. “Supply and demand,” he states, “determine prices paid to workers” (398), said price being the price paid for labor, or a wage. And the wage is equal to the value of the marginal product of labor (Mankiw 400), with the marginal product of labor being defined as the change in output (as output increases) divided by the change in the number of workers (as output increases). Apparently, in most cases, having some over-large number of workers will cause a negative profit, usually because of limited tasks and facilities at which to work (there are no infinitely long assembly lines, and Universities have a finite number of classrooms in which to pay their teachers to teach first-year writing), which explains why output doesn’t increase geometrically with the number of laborers. So where do computers come in?
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I’m Doing It Wrong

preterite Education, Writing

I’ve been going on a bit about writing as commodity/product, and how it circulates, and I just this afternoon got through Mankiw’s chapters on monopoly in Principles of Economics, and also read Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker’s wonderful chapter “Blogging Thoughts” (874K PDF) as helpfully recommended by teachtjm. (If it’s not already obvious from this research-dissertation-weblog project itself and the debt of inspiration it owes, I’ve been following Jill’s weblog for a long time, but hadn’t actually taken the time to check out many of her longer writings. Now I wish I’d done so earlier.) I think, taken together, Mankiw and Mortensen & Walker help me figure out some useful things, but also (argh!) add to my reading list.
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Writing Instruction as Commodity

preterite Education, Writing

An “externality,” according to Mankiw, is “the uncompensated impact of one person’s actions on the well-being of a bystander” (206). And, also according to Mankiw, “the consumption of education yields positive externalities because a more educated population leads to better government, which benefits everyone” (211). Well, that’s not the only side benefit of education, but I’ll buy it. Your education benefits not only you (because you’re a more well-rounded person, and because you can get a better job, among other reasons: again, I’m wanting to look beyond the vocational model of education), but society in general. Mankiw shows some supply and demand curves to support his contention that “Positive externalities in production or consumption lead markets to produce a smaller quantity than is socially desirable” (212), which helps me understand the scarcity of education as a commodity, although — besides looking at the pictures of the supply and demand curves — I don’t understand why it should work this way. And, also, I’ve still got some questions about this education-as-commodity thing, and about considering writing as a commodity, too. So here we go.
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Rationing Education

preterite Economics, Education

The foundational assumption of economics is that goods are scarce: there is not enough of every thing in the world to supply to every person in the world. The post-Fordist economy has posed some interesting challenges to this assumption, with infinitely reproducible digital media. I’m more interested by the challenges posed by understanding other sorts of information as goods: like, say, education. So one question would be: is a college education a scarce good?
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Reasons for Blogging

preterite Education

I’m actually not talking all that much about blogging here; more about digital genres in general and how they fit into the composition classroom. But “Reasons for Blogging” sounded so much pithier than “Reasons for Composing Web Pages and Other Digital Genres.” Anyway: Clancy Ratliff’s recent post on how to fit student weblogs into her course raised some interesting questions for me. My response to her involved a construction of weblogging as “low-stakes” writing, sort of the wired public forum equivalent of the way some composition curricula use journals, but I find that to be an incomplete answer.
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