When I was a kid, I went to school. I got older and kept going to school for quite a bit longer than most people do. Even now, I’m back doing more school—this time hopefully the last of it. While I succeeded at “school” and I did learn a lot from it, the learning I value most happened elsewhere. This is not some Neo-nostalgic elder millennial rant about the “value of experience” though it is valuable. Rather, I wanted to reflect on what I have learned while leaning in heavily to self-led exploratory learning from the internet. What I am talking about is soaking up information from Youtube, reddit, extension publications, blog posts, magazines and books. Often the process is chaotic and nonlinear. I really enjoy doing it, but it has drawbacks too—I discuss both below

It’s really slow and imprecise
The lack of structured curriculum and self-direction means that this is not a time-efficient method for learning. I’m not convinced that time-efficiency is even a desirable thing once you step outside productivist ideologies. The western capitalist ideal for learning is Neo requesting an upload, looking up and suddenly “know[ing] Kung Fu.” This over-emphasizes the information gained and deemphasizes how the process of learning changes and enriches a person. It also implies a flattened commodified understanding of knowledge and practice. Most masters would acknowledge that it’s never really possible to say that one “knows” their art or craft and only that they practice and are a student of that discipline. But for those more interested in gaining knowledge than in my transformative learning rant, it definitely requires a lot of patience to pursue this kind of learning. You will often go down paths that yield small rewards, and you may initially progress more slowly than someone following a more structured learning path.

You rarely know where to start when you’re starting
Not knowing where to start might be the biggest challenge of this kind of learning. You may jump into content that is too advanced or skip over some key lessons that a beginner in a more structured curriculum might have picked up. As a result you’ll constantly be discovering things and wondering how you missed them in the first place. I find jargon and the defining of terms and principles to be particularly frustrating in this regard. If you jump into the content you are trying to learn and the people are using terms and language you don’t know you have to pause that process to figure out that term. There’s something in this that feels similar to learning language in an organic environment (rather than a classroom). You have to ask what stuff means, you’re going to miss a lot of what is being said, but you are also exposed to so much that you have really compelling learning opportunities pretty much all the time.
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Repetition is important
As a result of the impreciseness and the lack of clarity about starting points you may need to take in content in different formats and from different voices multiple times. I think this is one aspect of this type of learning that mimics some older forms of learning like apprenticeships and guilds. Watching someone do the same process over and over yields different results as the mind of the viewer internalizes the activity. At first you’re seeing broad strokes, often overwhelmed by the details of the process, a second viewing you’ll notice more detailed work and with each subsequent exploration of the content you’ll pick up on more of the fine points. Eventually you’ll connect these fine points back to larger concepts you had learned in the beginning

Notetaking helps a lot
By its nature, this approach won’t include a textbook or fixed lectures or any other notable structure. You’ll have to create this for yourself in one form or another. A few years ago I did some research on how people approach note taking and otherwise organizing thoughts. At this point I use a blend of spreadsheets (when they make sense), and Notes in the basic Apple Notes utility. It may take a few tries to get your notetaking system figured out, but stick with it because it will help you maintain progress and remember breakthroughs you have along the way.

Tradition feels more flexible
I think this is both a positive and a negative of the approach. You don’t have a singular “teacher” and you likely won’t be trained or educated in a single tradition. In many cases traditions are traditional because of redeeming qualities proven across time. In that regard, the lack of formal training can be a downside. If you’re looking for that kind of learning then a more traditional environment like a formal curriculum, internship, trade, etc. might be your best bet. At the same time, tradition sometimes falls victim to dogmatists who insist on rules that would be better stretched or even broken. I think this more chaotic, inefficient, non-linear learning process can help to avoid adherence to dogmatic precepts and even free thinking or creativity about a given topic.

I had a good time this morning presenting to the Central Kentucky Bonsai Society about Development vs. Refinement in bonsai. For those not familiar, the general idea is that when a tree is young, has a thin trunk or branches, or is otherwise not the size you want, it's in development. When it's generally at the size you want, then you start some of the "finishing" steps toward refinement (in reality a bonsai is never finished). I wanted to share my thorough handout here as well as a few pictures my friend Chelsea took. I'll likely create some supplementary videos over on youtube as well.  

​Download the handout here. 

This is an excerpt from a longer paper completed as part of a course for a degree in Higher Education. Download the full paper here. 

Plato presents a strong civic- and collective-mindedness in his educational ideal. Rousseau, drawing on his Enlightenment-era brand of libertarianism, advocates fiercely for education’s role in the development of the individual. Dewey, in a humanistic synthesis of these two ideals presents a view that the philosophy undergirding educational work must foster the individual and her or his interests while also promoting interconnectedness as the basis for democratic society. Nearly 100 years after Dewey’s writing, and almost 2500 years after Plato, what is the underlying philosophical structure of our education system today?

My focus here is on the philosophical underpinnings of public higher education in the United States; I have a particular interest in Land Grant Universities, though much of the literature provides a simpler bifurcation of ‘private’ and ‘public’ higher education institutions. I will argue that the dominant philosophical basis for decisions made in public higher education institutions is the enablement of capitalist structures of power, and I will question the assumptions implied therein. This discussion will draw heavily on the literature of academic capitalism—a theoretical framework exploring the integration of market capitalist ideologies and practices into the fabric of higher education institutions (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).  This ideology is made manifest in the curricular environment via concepts like an over-focus on employability, workforce development, STEM, “practicality,” etc.  We can equally observe this educational philosophy in the dwindling of financial support for programs and initiatives deemed less useful to capitalist progress including arts, humanities, and some versions of social sciences (Zuckerman & Ehrenberg, 2009). At the institutional level, the proliferation of market principles takes shape in the ever intensifying view of students as revenue centers with campuses vying for tuition, housing payments, and other expenditures (Hossler, 2006). An often-misunderstood reality of the modern university is that education of students is only one part of its identity and function. As institutions, universities have outsourced housing, dining services, and other amenities in the name of economic efficiency. In the research sector, following the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, technology transfer offices have proliferated and university patenting has grown exponentially in hopes of finding new ways to generate revenue (Morris, 2016). Cutting “unnecessary costs,” building revenue generating programs, encouraging public-private partnerships, and developing research that leads to patentable intellectual property are clear examples of extra-curricular academic capitalism, but are beyond the scope of this paper.

I begin with an interrogation of the scholarly concept of academic capitalism, including its implications for students. I then consider how the university’s orientation toward meeting the needs of the “knowledge-based economy” (as opposed to a knowledge-based society) enabled the internalization of some market ideologies as “common sense.” Next, I explore several assumptions underlying these developments by questioning whether that which is good for the economy is good for society and the student. Economic growth is an unchallenged “social good,” but is it?  I then consider how the assumption that higher education is a path toward economic stability for the individual student undergirds the employment-centric individualism characteristic of capitalist thinking. I’ll also briefly explore whether it is even true that higher education leads to better employment. Finally, I consider pathways for how market ideology has come to dominate our public institutions and discuss what is at stake.

The developments discussed here matter because—particularly in public structures—we must actively and democratically work to ensure that our institutions reflect the ideological and practical values that we collectively hold. Bluntly, the installation of power-laden ideologies without consent threatens democracy, and an ideology uncritically accepted is a worldview unwittingly internalized. Describing and analyzing current realities clearly is the first step toward enabling the difficult work of imagining other possible futures. Contrasting our present with phenomena and value structures from other times or places helps us to understand the present as one among many possibilities.

This is an excerpt from a paper written for coursework toward a degree in Higher Education. Download the full paper here. 

A series of federal legislation in the late 19th and early 20th century established the foundational values upon which the modern Land Grant University structure is built. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 and subsequent legislation in 1994 granted tracts of land (the origin of the “Land Grant” moniker) to states of the union to fund the establishment of universities with the task of educating the children of working-class families in their territory. The Hatch Act of 1887 established supplementary “Agricultural Experiment Stations” at Land Grant Universities “to promote the efficient production, marketing, distribution, and utilization of products of the farm as essential to the health and welfare of our peoples and to promote a sound and prosperous agriculture and rural life as indispensable to the maintenance of maximum employment and national prosperity and security.” Finally, the Smith-Level Act of 1914 established the Cooperative Extension Service to disseminate information from the Land Grant and Experiment Station as well as available from the United States Department of Agriculture “to persons not attending or resident in said colleges in the several communities, and imparting information on said subjects through demonstrations, publications, and otherwise.”  This legislative combination established the so-called “tri-partite” mission of the land grant melding teaching, research, and outreach.

I focus here on identifying and critiquing the primary currents of thought about the 21st century Land Grant mission. More than two decades into the twenty-first century, we find Land Grant Institutions partly modernized, but in many ways still acting in reference to legislation from over 150 years ago. Considering the billions of dollars of federal and state funding allocated to the land universities, but also in consideration of the espoused and perceived promise of these major institutions, it is critical to evaluate modern relevance of land-grant universities.

The unspoken assumption behind much of the dominant land-grant mission discourse is that the primary mission of the land-grant university is to serve the economy: we make workers, technology, and economic development. Scholars in the field critique and promote this view. The expectation that the value of land-grants must be framed in economic terms like short-term return on investment, profit, and dollar value generated per enrolled “butt in seat” underscore this point. We humbly bow and offer market-defined justifications, not as a conciliatory gesture to a flawed, temporary and money-centric administration, but because economics has been accepted as the religion of the institution. First serve the economy and then serve the people you can in the process. It’s not simply that we cut arts programs, de-emphasize foreign languages, or sneer at French Literature majors while building new business schools and lauding those studying Chemical Engineering. It’s that we do these things while shrugging our shoulders at the Economic Truth of it all and forgo calling these actions and thoughts out as expressions of a particular power-laden value system—market capitalism. We may ultimately agree with that value system, but when we accept economic thought as the de facto logical structure for social reality and institutional identity, we ignore the possibility of choosing other values for our institutions and our communities. We deny the possibility that we may invest money with the expectation of something besides profit.
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As a pragmatic materialist, I am not given to proposing abstruse and highly unlikely solutions to problems—though I value those who can and do. I know institutions need funding to function. What I would suggest is that if the influence of funding pulls us so far off our values and mission that it changes it wholesale, then the tail has come to wag the dog and we must seriously reconsider the values we espouse in the “land-grant mission.” My worry is that we are forced to use an economic rubric to make decisions about values that transcend return on investment in any short-term context. We do this, much like our peripatetic CEO presidents and chancellors, at the peril of our long-term well-being.

Coffee is a simple pleasure. It's also an incredible luxury that has been made mundane by the pace of global trade. It's something that we drink in our house every day as more than a vehicle for caffeine. 

Better & Not Worse is a series reflecting on choices and objects that have made life better and not worse. It may be me, or it may be someone else. Either way it just has to meet two criteria: it made your life better, and it did not make your life worse.