… now that books are extremely cheap, universities should long since have adapted:
University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
As Brad Delong has been pointing out for years the very method of university teaching arose from a technological issue. Books were expensive. No, expensive. A scholar might amass a library of 50 volumes in a lifetime if they were assiduous at the game. Hundreds indicated an active collector spending significant sums. At which point, to educate the impecunious – students have never been known as the rich – it makes sense for education to be one person with a book reading it to a room full of others. The lecture that is.
Books are now cheap. That education method no longer needs to be.
So too with this idea of essays. Sure, it’s a good thing to be able to research, write down an argument and all these things. But that world out there has changed. Getting someone else to do it for you is now cheap. Less than the money you could earn pulling pints in the time it might take to do it. Well, -ish, -ish, around and about.
This is also all global. Changing UK law to ban the [essay] mills isn’t going to change matters a jot. Nor tittle in fact.
What needs to be changed is the method of education which leads to students being asked to produce essays unsupervised.
What’s so odd is that the educational establishment is near entirely Marxist. The state of technology determines the mode of social relations of whatever it is. OK, technology has changed, the mode of educational relations needs to change.
Essays – just as an example here – must be produced under exam conditions. Done, problem solved.
