Ed Links (Post Holiday Edition)

Orthodox Economic Education, Ideology and Commercial Interests: Relationships that Inhibit Poverty Alleviation (pdf)

Many factors have been cited for the continuing, intractable poverty condition in most poor countries. . . . However, there is still another cause that has been insufficiently elucidated. That cause is the combined and iterative impact of three unwholesome relationships: (1) the relationship between the narrow, ideological graduate economic education and the orthodox development perspective held by the international agencies - a perspective that emphasizes growth of output without emphasizing distribution effects; (2) the relationship between international agency policies and the ideological foreign policy interests of the USA and UK, interests that some argue seek to gain control over poor countries' resources while promoting implementation of a pro-democratic, free market ideology; and (3) the relationship between development policies introduced by the international agencies and the commercial interests of multinational corporations and international banking firms, the interests of which are interlaced with USA and UK foreign policy interests.

Top 100 Living Geniuses

British geniuses feature heavily in a recent list that notes the greatest living thinkers of our time - proportionately more than any other country. The top 100 living geniuses was compiled by a panel of six experts in creativity and innovation from Creators Synectics, a global consultants firm. [FYI--#1 is the inventor of LSD. By turns a weird, irritating, and fascinating list. Mostly white men, of course. No bias here. . . .—AS]

A Fascinating Condensation of New Knowledge: The Edge Annual Question — 2008

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science. WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY? Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?" [Lots of psychologists and neuroscientists and other related stuff. For example “I set out to show that language didn't affect perception, but I found exactly the opposite. It turns out that languages meddle in very low-level aspects of perception, and without our knowledge or consent shape the very nuts and bolts of how we see the world.”—AS]

The Genetics of Language

Researchers are beginning to crack the code that gives humans our way with words.

Percent Who See America As Divided Between Haves and Have Nots.

[Note that the largest difference is between republicans and democrats—AS]

Disordered Eating Less Common Among Teen Girls Who Regularly Eat Family Meals

Adolescent girls who frequently eat meals with their families appear less likely to use diet pills, laxatives or other extreme measures to control their weight five years later, according to a new report.

Chimpanzees May Build Their 'Cultures' In A Similar Way To Humans

Scientists have found cultural differences among chimpanzee colonies. Socially-learned cultural behavior was thought, until now, to be unique to humans.

Why It Pays To Be Choosy: The Co-evolution Of Choosiness And Cooperation

Given that cooperative individuals can often be exploited, it is not immediately clear why such behavior has evolved. A novel solution to this problem has been found by scientists who show that when individuals in a population are choosy about their partners, cooperativeness is rewarded and tends to increase.

Physical Education And Active Play Help Teens Maintain Normal Weight As Adults

Adolescents who participate in physical education at school are more likely to maintain a normal weight as young adults, according to a new study. For each weekday of physical education at school the odds of being an overweight adult decreased by 5 percent. Participation in all five days of physical education decreased the odds of being an overweight adult by 28 percent.

Divorce May Widen Distance Between Teens, Fathers

The typical distancing from parents by adolescents is exacerbated by divorce for fathers, but not for mothers, according to a recent study. Although research demonstrates that fathers' involvement with children has increased in recent decades, mothers continue to do the majority of childcare while fathers are the less involved parent.

Lack Of Imagination In Older Adults Linked To Declining Memory

Most children are able to imagine their future selves as astronauts, politicians or even superheroes; however, many older adults find it difficult to recollect past events, let alone generate new ones. A new study reveals that the ability of older adults to form imaginary scenarios is linked to their ability to recall detailed memories.

Social Standing May Be Linked To Body Mass Index In Teen Girls

Teen girls who perceive themselves as being lower on the social ladder appear more likely to gain weight over the subsequent two years, according to a new report. Between 1999 and 2004, the percentage of American teen girls classified as overweight increased from 14 percent to 16 percent, according to background information in the article.

Novel Mechanism For Long-term Learning Identified

Practice makes perfect -- or at least that's what we're told as we struggle through of multiplication tables and piano scales -- and it seems to be true. That's why neuroscientists have been perplexed by data showing that at the level of individual synapses increased, repetitive stimulation reverses gains in synaptic strength. Neuroscientists have now discovered the mechanism that resolves this paradox. The findings are published in Science.

Mom's Obesity During Conception Phase May Set The Stage For Offspring's Obesity Risk

Researchers have examined whether fetal exposure to gestational obesity leads to a self-reinforcing viscous cycle of excessive weight gain and body fat which passes from mother to child. The results of a new study suggest they do.

Evolution Education Is A 'Must' Says Coalition Of Scientific And Teaching Organizations

A coalition of 17 organizations is calling on the scientific community to become more involved in the promotion of science education, including evolution. The introduction of "nonscience," such as creationism and intelligent design, into science education will undermine the fundamentals of science education, according to the coalition.

Blacks, Hispanics Less Likely To Get Strong Pain Drugs In Emergency Rooms

Despite increases in the overall use of opioid drugs to relieve severe pain, black and Hispanic patients remain significantly less likely than whites to receive these pain-relievers in emergency rooms, according to a new national study. Opioids are narcotic drugs used to treat patients with moderate to severe pain.

Bad Dreams Associated With Difficult Temperaments In Children

Bad dreams in preschoolers are less prevalent than thought. However, when they do exist, nightmares are trait-like in nature and associated with personality characteristics measured as early as five months.

Which Intervention Would Do The Most To Improve The Health Of The Extreme Poor?

Experts were asked to name the one intervention that would improve the health of those living on less than $1 a day. The collected responses--from health researchers and activists, journalists, academics, and communities living in poverty--highlight effective, low tech, and remarkably cheap ways to make a profound difference to the lives of the poorest people on the planet.

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OLPC skepticism/hope

Early last month, Aaron Schultz explored some of the skepticism towards the OLPC project. On Sunday, Aaron Barlow was skeptical of the value of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, Nicholas Negroponte's vision of putting a cheap, energy-efficient computer in the hands of millions of children worldwide. Aaron's not alone. Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum has gotten his digs into OLPC (twice, in September and December), as did the Putting People First blog and Alexandre Enkerli. While there are some dissenting views from an anthropological perspective, and while one of the Red Hat programmers on the project had a much more sophisticated view of technology's use context, I can't deny some of the more extreme versions of patronizing/ignorant attitudes I've seen, either examples from within the project (one naive view of one of the Abiword/Write (word-processor) app programmers) or by some of the enthusiasts at OLPC Forum (see this thread on the software being "child-centered").

So what perspectives can social foundations offer OLPC and its green-and-white XO (the name of their machine)? Negroponte's utopian vision is that inexpensive laptops will revolutionize the education of children in poorer countries. There are two lines of criticism that overlap. One relies on the history of education (and the history and sociology of technology), while the other from the world of comparative education. In both cases, the point is similar: technology does not exist outside a social and institutional context.

As an historian, I'd note that Negroponte's argument is a fairly standard educational technology fairytale, perhaps the 21st century equivalent of Thomas Edison's claim that movies would eliminate the need for textbooks. In Teachers and Machines, Larry Cuban points out how in the U.S., technology evangelists have often ignored the existing culture of schools as organizations. It's one of the themes he and David Tyack explored in Tinkering toward Utopia (where they discuss computers explicitly, if briefly), and the most vivid example he uses is a geography class that's in a plane, and the teacher is in the front of the cabin in a fairly standard lecturing style with student desks arrayed in rows, just as if they were in a standard school. No one is looking out the window at the ground below.

Thus, I agree with Bruce Nussbaum: the omission of teachers from the picture is deeply troubling and shows too little thought about the XO operating within a school context. That doesn't necessarily sink the project entirely, but it's discomforting. The "child-centered" ideology so often tossed around is abstracted from a social context, and in this case suggests too little thought about relationships between children and adults.

As Larry Cuban has noted several times, computers hold the promise of being different from other technologies. As flexible tools, they are closer to the flexible tools that are now considered semi-automatic in U.S. schools—chalkboards or dry-erase boards, or overhead projectors. And there is some evidence that computers are making that transition, as some teachers look to computers for the connections to the internet and the wider world rather than as drill machines or programming boxes. But technology still exists in a social context, as historians and sociologists of technology would tell us. Those contexts vary from country to country, and the bravado of OLPC may ignore the local nature of adaptations and use.

Comparative education researchers and anthropologists would point out the long history of top-down efforts at educating children in poor and moderately-poor countries, paralleling all sorts of humanitarian efforts that ignore the realities on the ground, the local context. Read Putting People First's views on culture and technology, or listen to the lessons Randy Martin describes from his efforts at Mercy Corps USA, to get a sense of how that context can change and how important it is to consider what educators and communities in an individual country think is needed from their perspectives. Thus, Aaron Barlow's criticism of OLPC for a top-down set of decisions about what the developers thought must be needed in poor countries. Or Alexandre Enkeril's suggestion that maybe a better project would be One Cellphone Per Child.

There's another blind spot in OLPC, the assumption that there is a device that can be aimed at a hypothetical lowest-common denominator of poor countries. This has driven the creation of a fairly ingenious device that requires little power, that is sealed against the elements, and that has a bimodal display that can be used in the dark and in bright sunlight. Yet that model oversimplifies both the potential market for computing devices and also misunderstands the last 40 years of educational history worldwide. OLPC is attributing the loss of the bid for the first 150K machines in Brazil to Brazil's national protectionist policy to nurture its IT industry. That shouldn't surprise us, that countries poorer than the U.S. are nonetheless ambitious enough to want to build its own industry. The pilot program whetted the country's appetite... but not necessarily for the XO, or at least not just to provide computers to schoolchildren.

The educational system in a country is also relevant. In many of those countries with established primary education systems, the OLPC's first machine is going to look inappropriate, for multiple reasons. While I disagree in some important theoretical respects with John Meyer, Aaron Benavot, and others who have argued that we've witnessed the worldwide diffusion of a system of education, it is true that there are plenty of countries where at least primary education is well established. Those are going to be the best markets for the XO, yet they may not be satisfied with it. Apparently one of the reasons for Nigeria's selection of the Classmate PC is the ability to integrate it into the country's curriculum planning (or maybe integrate the national curriculum into content loaded onto the machines). In addition, the XO truly is a machine built for small children, hard to use in secondary schools.

And yet I was optimistic enough to pop for the give-one, get-one program, and we've had an XO in our house for two weeks. I think there is a chance for the machine (and the project) to be much more than a patronizing waste, for a few reasons. First, the three-year lead-time from Negroponte's proposal to the first machines, plus the existence of competition from both the Classmate PC and national IT industries, has allowed countries the opportunity to decide if they really want the XO, something else, or nothing in terms of computers (as India apparently has decided). Brazil popped for the 150,000-machine bid because President Lula da Silva had committed to closing the digital divide early in his term and committed his country to open-source software to reduce expenses. Countries that are choosing the XO are doing so with more information, in a competitive environment.

Second, the smaller roll-out will give the OLPC group the opportunity to do what they evidently failed to do: Work in local contexts to understand local needs. If OLPC had succeeded in gaining millions of orders by the end of 2006, the architecture would have been set in stone for all of those machines. Now, there's a chance for the OLPC staff and allies to modify, adjust, and react. And a chance for the concerns of individual communities to be heard.

Third, the smaller roll-out gives some of the technology ideas to spread to other machines. In particular, the lower-power design and the dual-display screen are significant achievements that should be licensed to commercial firms. (In some ways, OLPC could have succeeded without nearly as much acrimony if they had done as the Rocky Mountain Institute has and consulted with commercial manufacturers instead of trying to produce a machine.) If Enkerli is right and cell phones are going to be better choices, the cell phones can still use dual-display technology so they can be read in sunlight.

Finally, the OLPC idea will have social spin-offs as well as technological ones, and while I'd like to be able to look around corners on this one, I can imagine one social consequence: greater internet access for teachers, who have generally been ignored in all the OLPC hype. Even in countries with rigid curricula, giving teachers internet access will change their ability to learn as adult intellectuals. And that's a heady idea.

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If Business is to Decide What Education Will Be, We Must Decide What Business Will Be

Posted, too, at Schools Matter:

The New York Times has this piece and the CBC this on the millions of disappearing birds that have been displaced and killed off by habitat destruction, pesticides, and other chemicals. Last year a big back page story was the wholesale evacuation of billions of bees from their hives, an unsettling phenomenon that still remains largely a mystery today.

The sad fact that these stories do not resonate or even register on the attention meter of most Americans is the tragic tribute to another generation mis-educated toward satisfying the most crass and debased forms of self-interest, with "self" ontologically roped off by ceaseless standardized competitions for disembodied infobits that disallow the essential development of individual human beings in ways that encourage or even allow community values, democratic values, or ecological values.

Instead, the only value that matters enough to affect what goes on in school is now "economic competitveness for the global marketplace," which serves to instigate among us a socially-atomized clawing toward the top of a treacherous pinnacle that has less and less space for more and more aspirants desperate to get there--or to hold onto their place by pushing others over the edge. Meanwhile, nearly 30 percent of Americans now live alone and never notice that the forsythia is now blooming in many places before New Year's Eve.

Can you imagine how the next generation might come to view the world if our schools injected some concern to ground the rabid consumerism, some care to temper the torpid competition, some connection to inform the caricatured capitalism?

Jane Roland Martin did not come up these three Cs, caring, concern, and connection, in order to devise a new set of courses to add to the curriculum alongside the 3 Rs. She envisioned the possibility of our existing courses developing standards that would infuse the 3 Cs into every aspect of school and every course. For instance, can you imagine that our Earth would be moving now toward the boiling point if previous generations of students had learned the science of caring for the Earth while learning the earth science? Do you think we could so blithely neglect to take note of the imminent extinction of large swaths of species if we had learned that our own lives are connected with the lives of frogs and birds and bees? Is not the continued presumed health of the global economy dependent upon our surviving its success?

These are facts of science, too, but ones that have not been included or that have been marginalized in our education that, instead, focuses our learning earth science in order to more efficiently exploit the Earth's resources for, what else, "economic competitiveness in the global marketplace"--while ignoring the underlying facts that show clearly the unsustainability of our present cultural and economic course. These are the facts we ignore, and unfortunately, the facts we ignore reveal the values we don't have or the ones we prefer to forget.

For me this year, 2008, must point to re-focusing the purpose of education toward the sustainability of life on Earth--which introduces the fourth C, Commitment. I can't think of a better beginning than this essay by Svi Shapiro, It's Time for a Progressive Vision in Education!, in Tikkun. The intro:

The primary debates are an exceptional vehicle to make, as the educational philosopher Maxine Greene put it, “the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” They are, in other words, an opportunity to pose serious questions about the conventional wisdom that guides our public policies and practices, as well as a time to suggest radically different visions for how we might do things in our society and in our world. At least as far as education goes, the candidates have failed miserably in both regards. They have neglected to ask the deep questions about what is really happening in our schools. Nor have they even begun to offer imaginative possibilities for what education might be about in these early but difficult years of the 21st century. This is both sad and troubling, not merely because of the limitations of what these individuals have had to say about this one sector of our culture, but, more importantly, because education in many ways instantiates the root metaphors that guide and structure how we think about the purposes of human life and social relationships. What we have to say about education is intimately bound up with what we say to the young about the meaning of our lives, the aspirations we value for them, and how they should understand their relationships and responsibilities towards other human beings. In this sense education is always about the qualities we favor in human beings as reasoning, moral, and spiritual beings, and about our capacity to teach these to young people. Sadly, the candidates ’ shallow banalities and overwhelmingly predictable discourse about schools has done little to point the public in new and more meaningful directions in thinking about what it means to educate the young in these turbulent times.

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Ed Links (Holiday Edition)

In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life

If contemporary culture were a school, with all the tasks and expectations meted out by modern life as its curriculum, would anyone graduate? In the spirit of a sympathetic teacher, Robert Kegan guides us through this tricky curriculum, assessing the fit between its complex demands and our mental capacities, and showing what happens when we find ourselves, as we so often do, in over our heads. In this dazzling intellectual tour, he completely reintroduces us to the psychological landscape of our private and public lives.

No, Things Are Not Getting Better: Economic Mobility of Black and White Families

Whereas children of white middle-income parents tend to exceed their parents in income, a majority of black children of middle-income parents fall below their parents in income and economic status.

From Bookforum.com: The head trip

From American Scientist, a review of Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science by Margaret A. Boden; the functionalist's dilemma: A review of Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure by Ray Jackendoff; and a review of Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory by Katherine Nelson. A review of Social Neuroscience: Integrating Biological and Psychological Explanations of Social Behavior. What your brain looks like on faith: Sam Harris ventures into brain science, with a study that he contends is the first to show how the brain processes belief. A review of The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren. How to excuse yourself from your body: Once you see—and feel—a virtual self, your mind can move into a mannequin.

Fair giving is hardwired
New research suggests that spite is uniquely human - and necessary for a successful society

Born to Shop: How Marketers Brainwash Babies

Marketers are targeting kids at disturbingly young ages, compromising the nation's health, creativity and democracy.

Tom Hurka Interview on Bernard Suits's The Grasshopper

The bulk of The Grasshopper defends an analysis of the concept of playing a game - the very concept that was Wittgenstein's prime example of one that can't be analyzed. Yet Suits's definition is both persuasive and tremendously illuminating. It's the best piece of conceptual analysis I know. The book then argues for the central place of game-playing in a good human life, arguing that in a utopia where all instrumental goods are supplied, people's prime activity would be playing games. This is philosophically very deep.

Guests in the Machine

Guest worker programs may be the best hope many of the world's poorest people have for improving their lives.

MY TIME IN THE INDEXING TRADE

MEMORIES OF AN ANCIENT KINGDOM

Gentzkow, Glaeser and Goldin on how the press became informative

Abstract: A free and informative press is widely agreed to be crucial to the democratic process today. But throughout much of the nineteenth century U.S. newspapers were often public relations tools funded by politicians, and newspaper independence was a rarity. The newspaper industry underwent fundamental changes between 1870 and 1920 as the press became more informative and less partisan. Whereas 11 percent of urban dailies were “independent” in 1870, 62 percent were in 1920. The rise of the informative press was the result of increased scale and competitiveness in the newspaper industry caused by technological progress in the newsprint and newspaper industries.

Orphanages Stunt Mental Growth, a Study Finds

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up. Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.

What's The Rush? Taking Time To Acknowledge Loss Is Not That Bad

There are two guarantees in every person's life: happiness and sadness. Although lost opportunities and mistaken expectations are often unpleasant to think and talk about, these experiences may impact personality development and overall happiness. A seven-year study indicates that individuals who take time to stop and think about their losses are more likely to mature and achieve a potentially more durable sense of happiness.

Sex Education Linked To Delayed Teen Intercourse, New Study Says

Sex education greatly boosts the likelihood that teens will delay having intercourse, according to a new study that is the first of its kind in years. Male teens who received sex education in school were 71 percent less likely -- and similarly educated female teens were 59 percent less likely -- to have sexual intercourse before age 15. Males who attended school, meanwhile, were 2.77 times more likely to rely upon birth control the first time they had intercourse if they had been in sex-education classes.

Unsupervised Children Are More Sociable And More Active, Study Says

Youngsters who are allowed to leave the house without an adult are more active and enjoy a richer social life than those who are constantly supervised, according to a new study.

Monkeys Can Perform Mental Addition

Monkeys have the ability to perform mental addition. In fact, monkeys performed about as well as college students given the same test. The findings shed light on the shared evolutionary origins of arithmetic ability in humans and non-human animals.

Teachers Play Critical Role In Adolescent Health Promotion Efforts

Teachers are among the most important influences in the lives of school-aged children, yet relatively little emphasis has been placed on examining the potential role general academic teachers may play in facilitating adolescent health promotion efforts.

Scrooge Or Samaritan: Personality Type Is Key To Donations

Peoples' personality types predicts their donations to charities and noble causes. In a sample of almost 1000 participants researchers found that people with a pro-social personality gave more money to charities and other noble causes. For instance, with donations to 'third world organisations', 52% of people with a pro-social personality gave money, compared to 42% of people with an individualistic personality and only 21% of people with a competitive personality.

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Mr. Big, WordGirl, and Imagineering

Posted, too, at Schools Matter:

Last evening Benjamin Barber was on with Bill Moyers talking about the imminent suicide in the works for American capitalism. While some capitalists work to create products that people actually need to make their lives more livable, the American model is based on using advertising to manufacture a need that no one has until they view the ad. See Elmo and IPhone.

WordGirl, the PBS cartoon superhero actually has a great children's explanation of the phenomenon, but unfortunately, the villainous businessman, Mr. Big, is the only villain we cannot view on any of the clips from the PBS site. I guess we wouldn't want children to start questioning buying practices right around Xmas. So here is Bill Moyers's summary:

On this weekend before Christmas, I'm struck by a paradox. The news is not so joyous. Housing prices and home sales down…more foreclosures predicted…oil near $100 a barrel…the dollar's sinking food prices rising recession looming and yet, on television, and just about everywhere we look, people squeezed to the breaking point are constantly being told to buy buy buy.

AD: Why not let your kids decide?

BILL MOYERS: And if necessary, to go into hock to do it.

AD: Its easy! Even if you've been turned down before, you could be driving."

BILL MOYERS: Commercials even go out of their way to make adults into children and children into consumers.

AD: Make sure you get the right highlighter.

WORLDGIRL: WordGirl!!

BILL MOYERS: There is some resistance to this constant commercializing. Watching early morning cartoons with my grandchildren the other day, I discovered word girl the PBS series of a fifth grade superhero fighting evil with her amazing vocabulary

WORLDGIRL: Listen for the words vague and specific

BILL MOYERS: In this episode, the villain, Mr. Big, has flooded the market with a brand new product called 'the thing' which everyone has to have

WORLDGIRL EXCERPT: "THE THING" can do all sorts of stuff! Get one today at a low, low price.

BILL MOYERS: What is it? No one knows or seems to care but as commercials for the thing hit the airwaves, citizens everywhere are seduced into believing they can't live without it, so they descend in droves to buy as many as they can get. Enter: Word Girl!

WORDGIRL: Everyone stop, you're being tricked! The Thing doesn't do anything!

PERSON 1: Yes it does! It does so much stuff!

PERSON 2: The commercial says I needed one for my boat!

WORDGIRL: You don't have a boat!

PERSON 2: Hon, we need a boat for our THING!

WORDGIRL: You don't need a THING!

PERSON 2: But the commercial says !

BILL MOYERS: Watching all this, it seemed a good time to put in a call to Benjamin Barber. Like WordGirl, he's standing athwart history and shouting stop.

You may remember Benjamin Barber from his international best seller, JIHAD VERSUS MCWORLD. Among other things, he's a renowned political theorist and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos — a public policy think tank here in New York City.

His latest book is CONSUMED, about how the global economy produces too many goods we don't need, too few of those we do need, and, to keep the racket going, targets children as consumers in a market where shopping is a twenty-four hour business. Capitalism, he says, "seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain." Benjamin Barber answered my call - and he's with me now.

The same kind of consumer capitalism and marketeering has struck our civic establishments, including our educational institutions. Choice is first, the customer is always right, and control of market share is based on convincing the customer you have a better deal for him than the next guy. In K-12 education, such thinking is quickly eroding the civic responsibility for educating the nation's children toward perpetuation of the moral and political values of the Republic. Never mind that the charter choices and the voucher choices never get close to offering the pickings of the wealthy who can afford real choices. Charters and vouchers are choices for the poor and are made attractive by advertisers and media and the New York Times, all intent upon keeping the poor quiet and invisible. How else to explain the NY Times headline, "Charter Schools Outshine Others as They Receive Their First Report Cards," when the story goes on to tell how the City cherry-picked 13 charters to get the superior results they need to justify their charterizing.

The marketeering has struck the American university as well, and the advertising battle for students will undoubtedly continue to yield "new and improved" program configurations that can be completed by consumer students in less time with less sacrifice and with more convenience for the consumer/student. Never mind that the adjuncts hired to teach these "technology-rich" courses are choking on the keyboarded and semi-literate "dialogue" that students churn out while lounging in their jammies on the sofa. If the time were actually counted for these overworked adjuncts and instructors in these techno courses, it would probably be less than minimum wage at most universities.

Of course, the Top Tier universities do not have to clamor for customers and, therefore, are not forced to compete in the great unwashed marketplace of compressed credentials. So while the less endowed colleges and universities actively battle with their compression algorithms in the enrollment wars, the Top Tier benefit from a national marketing strategy that has convinced a public, now bulging, yet hungry for more stuff, that a college degree is the THING that everyone needs, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The degree THING does stuff and gets you stuff, right? But we all know the REAL THING only exists in those colleges and universities that don't have to compete for customers, where, in fact, the customers are competing to get enrolled so that they can get the REAL THING.

In the meantime, those who don't have a chance to get the THING, and certainly not the REAL THING, become acquiescent to their fate, and thus, quite convinced to take anything offered them as a way to survive the American dream that no one will wake them from. And those who do get their THING? They find out that everyone they know already has one, too, and it really doesn't do most of the stuff that it was supposed to do. And all those expensive texts and books that haven't been sold back yet? They will go into rental storage or portable storage with all the other THINGS that we have traded the best parts of our souls to obtain. Did you hear that Britney's sister is pregnant?

So our brand of capitalism is entirely bankrupt, and it is only a matter of time until the final death rattle sets in unless things change. But being the avid and ever-optimistic educator, I know change is possible. One small example provided by Benjamin Barber last evening: LifeStraws.

Remember that capitalism used to be about creating and providing products the people actually need? What do most people need now for which there is a great shortage that is likely to get worse? Water. One small Danish company is getting very, very rich on products that people need that can solve a problem, rather than create another one. They call it IMAGINEERING. I love it. Now here is a real holiday gift idea:

There are gadgets that make life more fun, and then there are gadgets that make life possible. The LifeStraw from Denmark's Vestergaard Frandsen Group has the potential to fall into the latter category. A device about the size of a large pen or drinking straw, the LifeStraw is a complete water purification kit that draws its power from the person sucking down the water. The LifeStraw is the product of ten years of development work, based on the goal of creating an efficient, affordable water-purification system for the developing world, where water-borne illnesses are a major killer. When produced in quantity, each LifeStraw — which uses a combination of mesh filters, iodine-impregnated beads and active carbon to remove particulate matter and bacteria — is expected to cost under $2 and be able to provide a year's worth of pure drinking water. . . .

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