Interestingly, I always ask my first-year students whether they’d be taking different courses if university were free or close to it. The vast majority say yes. The cost of higher suppresses our innate curiosity, and thus our possible futures, individually and as a society.

This is true, but Brown also has a system that encourages experimentation and breadth of inquiry and “core competencies” that are civic in nature. It’s not a system that’s designed to facilitate quick, off-the-shelf, narrow specialization so much as open exploration like we’ve been discussing.

Lobby your administration! You deserved the chance! Maybe those who follow you can benefit….

Civics education is a lifelong thing, and I hold the somewhat unusual opinion that so should access to education. I don’t think some careers require more study than others, really - I think we should all be able to access inquiry with experts our whole lives in a true democracy.
🙏 for the good talk!

The thing is that at age 17, when I went to college, I didn’t know who I wanted to be yet. I needed to explore. If I had been in the most common Euro model, I would have been behind, and there are psychological and social costs to asking children to set their whole life path. (Incl. class rigidity)

A lot of US colleges/unis allow you to place out of gen ed courses you have taken in high school though, giving you a chance to finish in 3 years or take more electives. Or to choose among courses for requirements so you don’t replicate what you’ve already done.

That’s a worse model than the rigid class model common in many (not all - Europe is not homogenous) European countries, most of which are also undergoing disastrous rightward political crises. But Euro models are also worse than a broad and flexible access to expertise, civically and economically.

But that is because for the last 30-40 years the idea of accessible broad education hasn’t been the reality in the US- it’s been the capitalist corporatist model where the student-customer can be milked for profit because they are promised (falsely) that what they are buying is a lifelong good job.

The answer is a system that provides broad and affordable higher education to everyone, throughout their life, and doesn’t just see education’s value as job training, esp. in an economy that is volatile and is going to require maximum flexibility of skills and knowledge from us all.

Yes, you are 💯 right about cost and the inaccessibility of higher ed being the core of the problem. But the answer is neither commodity education nor the European model, which is itself v. problematic in entrenching the status quo of a more rigid class system/ abetting the rise of fascist politics.

sides of the continent were founded with a mandate to be as close to free as possible so that they would be widely accessible. We’ve fallen away from that because corporate interests/conservative politics persuaded us to see uni as an elite commodity to purchase skills that will profit shareholders.

So university is an extension of that work for adults who have gained maturity and cognitive capacity from where we are in grade school. It’s only inaccessible to most citizens BECAUSE we regard it as a commodity to be purchased. Public universities like the one I and my dad attended on different

, Holocaust history, Personality Psych, Taoism, Slavic Literature, Art History, Middle English, Italian, Classics from some of the great scholars of these fields and I think about them constantly in the years since, while making ethical choices and considering whether I’m being manipulated.

That’s a good question, and my colleagues in grade school education would say they are doing this kind of work. But universities and colleges allow you to be exposed to the highest level of expertise is a vaster array of subjects than any grade school can. As an undergrad I took Astronomy…

In those systems, certain fields are regarded as the sole purview of the wealthy and aristocratic. In the systems that value a broad education/ experimentation, the reasons are expressed as civic goods - creating good citizens and societies, not just good workers and managers for the profit machine.

There are countries that don’t value breadth and diversity of higher education, and that is often an expression of strict, hierarchical, and exclusionary class systems that lock you into a specialization before you have a chance to be exposed to anything else.

The cost of education is a crime against students. But the answer is not to embrace the commodification and narrowing of education - that’s how we got here. Don’t write off breadth of knowledge as having real personal/professional/social values - advocate for universal access and public funding.

Using a wide variety of texts is about seeing how language works on humans, not just argumentative structure. And we are teaching how analyze and make arguments about that textual evidence, not just using it as a model.