value and edcuation

A thoughtful post from James Delingpole, who writes:

• The most important thing of all for a teacher is – or should be – to be placed in circumstances where you are properly able to teach.

Delingpole sees the problem in contemporary education as stemming from a cheapening of instruction, wherein the free, state-provided education is akin to

• ...one of those all-you-can-eat-buffets, where the food is so cheap you no longer see it as a dining-out treat but as something almost contemptible.

What is needed is for the institutions, the students and the larger society to perceive and re-assert the value that arises from an education.

This presumes, of course, in higher education, that institutions and professors are supplying an education that provides value in contemporary society, for a globalized world, in an era of profound and rapid change. 

It also calls into question the real worth of MOOC's and the pressures to adopt massive, on-line, distance and remote courses distinct from the personal, communal contact of the real classroom.  As Susam Blum writes learners are people, not isolated test-taking brains.

Update:

•  Education is primarily driven by motivation, and online learning doesn’t do anything to address people’s motivational needs. Why on-line education is mostly a fantasy.