"Why Harvard Is Ruining Our Youth"

[MrAmsterdam]

Why Harvard Is Ruining Our Youth

Original article was published in the newspaper "Le Monde" by Philosophy Professor Emmanuel Jaffelin

http://www.worldcrunch.com/knowledge-wo ... -kids/5544

http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2 ... _3224.html
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Teachers As Employees, Students As Clients

From afar, this method of teaching is both interesting and innovative, and it is true that thoughtfulness is better than contempt or humiliation. But Harvard did not invent this motivational method: it flourished in Europe after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. What is worrying about this student-teacher relation has nothing to do with the fact that it is constructive and attentive. It is worrying because it is about pandering to the students. Because tuition is so high, they expect their professors to be knowledgeable, competent and efficient, but also submissive. The client is always right.

This pandering is why students get to evaluate their teachers; those who weren’t deemed “convincing” enough are fired, thrown out like an old piece of furniture! In the country where the doer trumps the thinker, the payer evicts the payee. This is nothing new: Nero’s preceptor Seneca complained in On Benefits that human relations in Rome were based on debt. He wanted to replace this commercial relationship by a more benevolent relationship, like the one between Gods and men.

Letting your children start their adult life with so much debt should be illegal. There is nothing wrong with dismissing bad professors, as long as the student-teacher relation is intellectual and not commercial. At Harvard, the educational is linked to the economic, and the intellectual is linked to the clientele.

Knowledge v. Earning Power

Debt means debtors. American students aren’t as interested in knowledge as they are in income, if only to pay back their debt! It isn’t easy to motivate children to learn; is it necessary to saddle them with debt to transform their meager scholarly appetite into a hyper-motivation for university? Free market economists say debt fosters motivation. Psychoanalysts tell their patients the same: pay to know yourself. One can clearly see how masochistic the system is!
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[Sparky]

In The West's killer apps, as proposed by

Niall Ferguson: http://youtu.be/xpnFeyMGUs8


Of these six:

1. Competition
2. The Scientific Revolution
3. Property rights
4. Modern medicine
5. The consumer society
6. The work ethic

I think "competition", "consumerism", and "work ethic" would be relevant.

If education is a product and produced in a competitive market for those who have a strong "work ethic", who will seek out the best educators, then the less qualified educators will service those who are not motivated to learn through hard work.

The institutions and system will have to change in order to supply alternative, competitive educators, and it will evolve with different problems, as to the law of unintended consequences.