The “outcome oriented” educational monster

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

When Cathy Davidson (2018), distinguished professor of English and director of the Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center, CUNY, asks her beginning students when they first realised they were creatures of history, not simply autonomous actors, they frequently name the global financial crisis that began in 2007-2008.

Similarly, when Gary Hall (2016) talks of the “uberfication” of the university and when Richard Hall and Kate Bowles (2016) talk of “re-engineering” higher education, they consider the relevant horizon to be that same global financial crisis. Gary Hall comments that, initially, the 2008 financial crisis seemed to constitute a major threat to the long-term viability of neoliberal capitalism (neoliberalism). However, viewed from 2016, he thinks that it has simply given the advocates of the free market an opportunity to carry out with increased intensity their programme of privatisation, deregulation, and reduction to a minimum of the state, public sector, and welfare system.

 Kenan Malik concurs that, for today's students, this date is of major significance. He writes,

"The lives of most young people have been shaped not by Stalin’s purges or Mao’s cultural revolution, but by the financial crash of 2008, by the austerity policies that have followed and by the gross inequalities that disfigure the world."

Davidson decries what she calls the “outcome oriented” educational monster that the higher education system has become, a trend that began before 2007, it should be said. She suggests that we need to design a “new education” that encourages students not just to cram for reductive tests but to succeed in the harrowing world we have bequeathed to them. Such a “new education" would counter the trend throughout the world in which teachers and professors are increasingly judged not by how well their students think or what they understand in deep and complex ways but how well they do on standardised, reductive tests.

Her view is that the “problem” with university students today is not the students but the educational liabilities that they have been saddled with, as an irresponsible older generation abdicated support for higher education as a public good. They have been schooled to believe that formal education is where intellectual creativity and complexity go to die. Her starting point is courses that support and challenge students not as content memorisers but as content creators, courses that challenge students to take responsibility for their learning by using active, engaged learning principles from Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, bell hooks and Audre Lorde.

References

Davidson, C. (2018). We must reverse the ‘outcome oriented’ educational monster we have unleashed. Guardian, 4 January. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/05/we-must-reverse-the-outcome-oriented-educational-monster-we-have-unleashed [Accessed 17 January 2018].

Hall, G. (2016). The Uberfication of the university. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Available from https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-uberfication-of-the-university [Accessed 10 November 2017].

Hall, R. and Bowles, K. (2016). Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety. Workplace, 28 30–47. Available from http://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/article/view/186211/185389 [Accessed 10 November 2017].

Malik, K. (2018). No reds under beds, but the young are awake to the flaws in capitalism. Observer, 21 January. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/21/no-reds-under-beds-young-awake-to-flaws-in-capitalism [Accessed 21 January 2018].`