| James N. Markels | ||||
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by
James N. Markels But if I thought my undergraduate experience was a blast, it clearly didn’t hold a candle to what today’s undergrads at UC-Berkeley are getting right now. Sure, Berkeley is a campus that views The Nation as slightly conservative and they put the hammer and sickle on a campus T-shirt, but those people know how to party. They even have classes based around partying. Now that’s a liberal education. Berkeley has pioneered this new kind of teaching called “democratic education,” or “de-cal.” In essence, students are given the opportunity to create and teach their own one-to-three-credit classes about whatever they want, so long as they get a faculty member to sign off on it. In looking over the offerings, there are a handful of classes presented that sound pretty informative and useful, like “Hot Topics In Civil Liberties” or “War and the State in the 21st Century.” On the other hand, a vast majority of them are about things like “Star Wars,” “Blackjack,” “The Grateful Dead,” and “The Coen Brothers Mystique.” No, I’m not kidding; you can earn credit toward a degree at Berkeley by learning how to count cards at blackjack. What has really blown the lid on de-cal were recent events involving the class on “Male Sexuality” (popular enough to have three sections), wherein students visited a nearby strip club for a class project and an extracurricular party intended to introduce members of the different sections together resulted in an orgy and pictures of the partygoers’ genitalia were taken and distributed. Media reports describing these events resulted in the classes being temporarily suspended, but recently they have been reinstated with a promise of more faculty monitoring—perhaps through a zoom lens. The even more popular “Female Sexuality” class (six sections) has the tastefully-named textbook “Cunt,” written by Inga Muscio (apparently “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was too conservative). The class “aims to empower women through discussion, readings, guest speakers [like porn star Nina Hartley], field trips, and writing,” and “[t]o create a safe environment in which women may learn about their bodies and explore their sexualities.” All well and good, but since when were fellow students qualified and mature enough to handle these things without creating a real danger of abuse and predatory incident? Judging from my fellow undergrads, this all would have been put under the general header of “kegger.” Do I get credit for bringing the beer bong? But de-cal joking aside, it seemed to me most interesting that a far-left campus would embrace student-choice education when the political left stands against educational choice before college. Savor the irony of “democratic education” promoters allowing individual students to choose their school and, with practically no supervision, make their own classes and guide their own education, when they would similarly deny K-12 students any choice in their place of education whatsoever. Judging by the arguments raised before the Supreme Court last week in the landmark voucher case, it seems to boil down to religion; namely, nobody should be allowed the choice of religion when it comes to education. In the Cleveland voucher program now considered by the Court, 82 percent of the participating schools were religious, and 96 percent of the vouchers were used toward paying tuition at a religious school. Surely the program is just an excuse to fund religion, right? Not if you look at the realities of the educational industry. Right now public schools are enjoying what is considered to be a monopoly over the K-12 educational industry. Public schools cost nothing for parents, while private schools have to charge tuition. As antitrust types are so fond of pointing out with Microsoft, how can you compete against a business that charges nothing for the product you are trying to sell? In such an environment, it’s clear that the only private schools that could survive are those who cater to the rich or the religious schools that can afford to be dirt-cheap because of the heavy volunteerism and financial backing from the church. The reason why parents in the Cleveland voucher program are mostly sending their children to religious schools is because the value of the voucher is $2,250, which is roughly a third of what Cleveland public schools are spending per child. The only schools who charge that little are the religious schools. As The Washington Post editorial board noted last week, if the value of the voucher was raised, more secular schools would be able to enter the field and compete. Voucher programs are only biased toward religious schools if you set their value so low that the market has not effectively been changed much. What really amazes me is that several studies have been conducted on the students in the voucher program, and none found the students to have fallen behind. At worst, they’ve drawn even. Consider that for a moment: An experimental program with only a third of the money was able to generate roughly equivalent results to the existing public school system. I have a feeling that the Supreme Court will find voucher programs to be constitutional, but I wonder if the de-cal students will ever take time during their “Joy of Garbage” class to realize the power the educational choice they take for granted could mean for younger students, especially those stuck in failing public schools. They probably won’t, though. They’re having too much fun being undergrads. |
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