The value of education is not purely as an investment. Education also provides some degree of consumption value.

This observation kind of throws a wrench in human capital theory, because it will be difficult to decide whether certain forms of education spending were worth it in the absence of information about the value that that education had to students in virtue of merely consuming it, apart from any job they subsequently got or whatever. The consumption value of education is subjective, and will vary widely from person to person. But the fact that education’s consumption value is difficult, or impossible, to observe and measure does not give us good reason to ignore it.

The consumption value of education came to my mind frequently as I recently read “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Throughout the book, the authors stress that college students today emphasize the social value of college to an extreme degree, some of them going so far as to say that the relationships that they form and experience in college are significantly more important than anything they may learn in the classroom. Unfortunately, gaining extensive social experience in college is, to some extent, at odds with performing well academically: for instance the authors show that, while participating in a fraternity or sorority may improve academic performance somewhat, studying in groups is less effective than studying alone. And, because our time is finite, hours spent socializing are mostly hours spent not studying, reading, or writing, activities which occupy less of college students’ time today than in the recent past, apparently to their detriment.

Now, socializing at college may itself have some investment value, particularly at elite colleges (i.e., “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”). But college students engage in many social activities simply because they are enjoyable. As such, social opportunities and experiences constitute much of the consumption value of going to college, and students self-report that this is a very important aspect of college life to them. Yet, practically daily now there is a story in every major news outlet, describing the shock, frustration, anger, and sadness of college graduates upon realizing that they are unable to trade their college credentiala for a high-paying job, or even any job (here’s an example from the NYT).

My assessment of the situation: Stuff doesn’t acquire investment value just because you want it to. Students and parents realize, on some level, that the value of college consists to a large extent in consumption. This is why they speak frequently of the college “experience” and make college decisions taking things like sports, dorms, and dining hall food into account. But then, when it’s time for the degree to hit the fan and for interested parties to see what kind of investment value that expensive education really had, they are unable to bite the bullet and admit that college is greatly about consumption.

Notice that another aspect of the consumption value of education consists in students’ simply enjoying attending classes (your author is the queer sort of creature who often enjoys it immensely) and partaking in other academic experiences available only through institutionalized education. This should be kept in mind when we think about students’ decisions to attend graduate school and pursue careers in academia, despite the dismal job prospects. Many of the requisite educational expenditures should be understood as (maybe) overpaying for educational experiences, rather than as failed investments.

Opinion on the Independent Project is mixed. For example, E.D. Kain, at Forbes, praises the Project for offering a self-driven and creative educational experience that stands in stark contrast to our assembly line-style, testing and accountability-obsessed public school system. On the other hand, Liam Julian, over at Flypaper, criticizes the NYT piece for hastily generalizing that Independent Project-type reform is an across-the-board solution to serious problems in education today.

I really don’t know what to make of the Independent Project. I am highly sympathetic to unschooling and other forms of unstructured learning, but I try not to be dogmatic about it. So I’ve been thinking this stuff over for a few days, with the goal of being critical of the Independent Project where I would otherwise be tempted to praise it unreflectively.

Basically, I really can’t tell what the significance of the Project is, as it raises a variety of issues:

• Did the students perform well in large part because the stress of grading was lifted? (If you already have a strong pro– or anti-traditional grading position, then it’s hard not to view the Project in that light. See the work of Alfie Kohn for compelling arguments against grades).
• Was the Project successful because students don’t work well on inflexible time schedules? (More flexible school days can be arranged, without necessarily giving up on a structured curriculum).
• Was it the self-chosen curriculum itself that motivated the students? (A more student-centered curriculum can be implemented without necessarily giving up on traditional grades).
• Were students simply reacting positively to a display of faith in their autonomy and judgment? (This can perhaps be achieved by more respectful and democratic school environments, while retaining grades and/or some curriculum).
• According to what benchmark did the students’ learning improve? (If their previous teachers weren’t that great at their jobs, or were a bad match for the students, then that would provide a lower standard for the Project’s results to exceed than if each of the students had previously had a really excellent teacher).

The strongest reason not to understand the Independent Project as having wide-reaching implications for education reform is that its participants were self-selected (although one participant reports initial reluctance in the IDEA video about the Project, there is no indicator that any participant was coerced). Although the group was diverse, including both honors students and near-dropouts, that doesn’t mean that the students weren’t similar along the most relevant dimension: aptitude for self-driven learning. Contrary to what unschoolers tend to argue, this aptitude may not be universal, in which case we would not expect to see situations like the Independent Project working equally as well for all groups of students. In other words, the Independent Project, like so many concepts in education, may be a good and valuable practice that, sadly, cannot scale up.

Also, who caught this line in the NYT piece?:

“[The Independent Project participants] have all returned to the conventional curriculum and are doing well.”

Ah-ha. Perhaps students just periodically need a change of pace, an opportunity to express their individuality, or some of the kind of attention and praise that the Project offered them. Providing these things consistently to all students would require considerable education reform, but maybe not of the kind that the NYT gushingly recommends. And, in any case, more study is required to attempt to tease apart the various factors of the Project discussed above.

All this is great news! But I wonder whether the article itself displays some stigma towards HIV/AIDS sufferers. Why would I think such a thing? Because, of all the couples they could have picked to feature in the article, they chose one in which the HIV-positive partner “contracted HIV through contaminated blood products when he was a child.” As such, he is sexually innocent, having played no part in his contracting HIV. We should be glad that he is able to get married, because he didn’t do anything wrong.

The reality of the matter is that nowadays few people contract HIV through contaminated blood products and most contract it instead through choices involving sex and drugs. Many individuals play russian roulette in this regard, and some lose. CNN passed up a valuable opportunity to portray the reality of the matter: that most HIV/AIDS patients are not victims of circumstances but of their own choices. However, that does not make them terrible people or undeserving of valuable relationships, it’s just the way the disease works. With the loving understanding of their partners, people who have made all kinds of mistakes in the past, even including those resulting in HIV/AIDS, can participate in successful marriages.

With the help of friends, family, and medicine, HIV/AIDS patients are now more able than ever take control of their futures and enjoy lives well worth living. This is something to be celebrated, regardless of whether the patient in question was a drug user or did not conform to rarely practiced ideals of sexuality. Let (s)he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Selling Lesson Plans Online Raises Cash and Questions

Basically, some teachers have made quite a bit of money by selling their lesson plans online to other teachers. Some teachers’ employers are wondering whether they should be receiving a cut of the profits, and one educational expert warns that the practice “reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”

I have mixed feelings about this. In general, I definitely support a person’s right to sell the products of her labor to a willing buyer at a mutually agreeable price. However, there are some wrinkles here.

First, how many of these lesson plans were produced during teacher work days, when the teachers were on the clock? Surely at least some of them. Maybe there’s no good way of figuring it out. But, if the teachers produced the lesson plans they’re selling on their employers’ dime, then they have a moral, and maybe legal, obligation to share the proceeds.

Second, some of the teachers’ quotes seem to suggest that, considerations in the previous paragraph notwithstanding, they deserve the money because they are underpaid.

“Teaching can be a thankless job,” said Ms. Bohrer, 30, who has used the $650 she earned in the past year to add books to a reading nook in her first-grade classroom at Daniel Street Elementary School on Long Island and to help with mortgage payments. “I put my hard-earned time and effort into creating these things, and I just would like credit.”

Margaret Whisnant, a retired teacher in North Carolina, earns an average of $750 a month from lessons based on her three decades of teaching middle school classics like “The Outsiders,” enough to pay for new kitchen counters and appliances.

“I have wanted to redo my kitchen for 20 years, and I just could not get the funds together,” she said. “Well, now I’m going to have to learn to cook.”

Oh, cry me a river. There is lots of evidence that teachers are paid quite well, and the benefits as well as virtual immunity from being fired can’t be beat. If it does turn out that teachers must legally share the profits with their employers or stop selling the lesson plans altogether, violators will have no moral justification for disobeying the rules, at least not on the basis that they were bullied into accepting poverty-level wages or something.

Finally, while I don’t think that selling lesson plans will inevitably lead to the collapse of education as we know it (although that might be welcome), it simply isn’t clear what effects it will have on instruction. On the one hand, it could be that genuinely good teachers do the best at selling their lesson plans and, as a result, some students receive higher quality instruction than they would have received if their teachers had developed their own curriculum. On the other hand, there isn’t any reason to believe that the consumers of lesson plans are competent judges of decent curriculum. In fact, their very status as buyers might indicate that they are not competent. The lesson plans that they purchase might be as bad as what they would have come up with on their own, possibly even worse. And, unfortunately, I have no idea how any of this would be tested.

Moral of the story: There is no good prima facie reason to indict entrepreneurial teachers solely on the basis that they are selling lesson plans to other teachers on a purely voluntary basis. However, these teachers likely have moral and maybe legal obligations to share the profits with their employers. And it will be important for interested parties to keep an eye out for anecdotal data as to whether commercial curricula benefit anyone other than the teachers… like, perhaps, the students, whose interests so often go curiously by the wayside in educational debates.

New York’s cabbies howled when the city began forcing them to take credit cards. Some even went on strike, calling the requirements a kowtow to tourists and a burden on drivers.

But two years later, the back-of-the-cab swipe has emerged as an unlikely savior for New York’s taxi industry, even as other cities’ fleets struggle to find fares in a deep recession.

Overall ridership and revenue have increased. More and more fares are being paid with credit cards, even for shorter rides. And tips for drivers, usually an early casualty of tough times, are up sharply, double over the pre-plastic days.

Even cabbies are conceding that credit cards are good for business. “It’s better,” said Naveed Shah, 35, a driver for five years, as he gassed up his Ford Crown Victoria recently. “If there was no credit card, people aren’t going to take taxicabs.”

The tone of this article concerns me. The author and the cab drivers themselves seem to have the attitude that the regulations were, on balance, a good thing. That’s because at least some of the taxi drivers admit that they were wrong to resist the regulations, that they boosted business, and that the government really did know best. But that is really besides the point. It is a business owner’s right and responsibility to make business decisions, such as whether to install credit card processing equipment and on what terms. Sometimes business owners make these decisions well, and other times they don’t. The refusal of some cabs to accept payment via credit card violated no one’s right and posed no threat to public health or safety. Thus, no regulation was justified. The cab drivers’ ultimate endorsement of the credit card readers is neither here nor there. It does not retroactively legitimize the regulation.

Parentism is a less discussed cousin of racism, sexism and classism. On my interpretation, parentism consists in discriminating against people on account of their parental status, or in individual actions and attitudes or institutional arrangements that favor persons of a particular parental status unjustly.

While surely there are cases wherein people are unjustly treated because they do have children, I am more interested in cases wherein people are unjustly treated because they don’t have children.

I got interested in parentism of this kind during a period in my life when I was thinking alot about whether I want to have children, and why or why not. I read especially about the “childfree” movement, whose members prefer to view themselves as having made an active and legitimate choice to pursue values in their lives other than those associate with childrearing, and who seek to avoid the pity garnered by the usual label of “childless.” While I’m still not sure whether my husband and I will have any children, I am glad to have explored this issue on my own before we married.

These personal explorations helped me to realized how biased some thinking and practices are towards the majority of people who do have children. This is something of a strange realization because, as a newish feminist, I simultaneously realize that in the US there is a serious lack of institutional support for parents, and mothers in particular (stingy leave policies, difficulty in taking even mandated leaves, continued wage gap, etc). I think this must be a case where commitment to a value is more established in principle than in practice.

Anyway, I was reading the New York Times and came across a flagrant example of parentism. Take a look at this seemingly innocuous article on the non-family friendliness of working at the White House:

“Family Friendly” White House is Less So for Aides

(free but login is necessary, you could try bugmenot.com)

The article is devoted to telling the sympathetic tales of White House employees whose jobs are so demanding that they don’t have time for their kids. Here’s an excerpt:

White House advisers often work 60 to 70 hours a week and bear the scars of missed birthdays and bedtimes, canceled dinners and play dates, strained marriages and disgruntled children, all for prestigious posts that offer a chance to make an impact and unparalleled access to the president. At a time when the nation is in recession and at war, the public expects no less, many argue.

Still, the Obamas, who also have young children, remain committed to making life more manageable for their aides who are parents, officials say.

First, let me say that I applaud the author of this article for exposing the fact that the lives of White House employees and their children are not the same as the lives of the first family, despite public proclamations by President Obama that he is committed to family friendliness. This is a legitimate issue and, while I’m sure the President’s words are sincere and his intentions in this regard are good, achieving family friendliness is easier said than done.

However, I am dismayed that this article makes absolutely no mention of the White House employees who do not have “families” (read, children). Unfortunately but predictably, it does not seem like equal consideration is given to them. Surely these childfree employees also have lots of things they’d like to be doing with their evenings and weekends — such as seeing their parents, siblings and friends, or doing all the valuable things that can fill a healthy and well-rounded life other than childrearing (attending cultural events, developing non-work-related skills, participating in various associations, resting, etc etc).

Stories of missed time with children tug at many readers’ heartstrings, but stories of childfree peoples’ missed dates, parties, yoga classes, sleep… not so much. And this is parentism in action.