Lots of people these days -- some old, some young; some in suits, some not -- are advocating that we use video games for learning, education, health, social change, and other "non-entertainment" purposes. However, lots of people who understand games, don't understand books and lots of people who understand books, don't understand games. There are 10 key truths we know about books. They happen to be equally true of other "meaning making technologies" like television and video games. Thus, in these 10 ways, books and video games are the same. They are both tools suited for certain jobs and best used in certain ways. So here are the 10 truths (for citations to the literature, see my book Situated Language and Learning, Routledge, 2004):

 1.  Books are a powerful technology. They can lead to aggression and violence (witness the Bible, the Koran, and the Turner Diaries in the wrong hands). Nazi Germany was a highly literate society. Games, so far, do not have this much power, but some day they may.

 2.   Books can lead to peace, tolerance, and charity if (and only if) they are read in a society and in families devoted to peace, tolerance, and charity.

 3.  For good learning, books require talk and social interaction with others around interpretation and implications.

 4.  Books can make you stupid by not questioning what they say.

 5.   Books can make you smart by supplying vicarious experience, new ideas, and something to debate and think about.

 6.   Books are often best used as tools for problem solving, not just in and for themselves.

 7.   To get the most out of them, books require the reader to read like a "writer" (a type of designer).

 8.   Just giving people books does not make them smarter; it all depends on what they do with them and who they do it with. For young people, it depends, too, on how much and how well they get mentored. Mentoring is, in fact, crucial.

 9.  Connecting books to the real world and to other media is good for learning, not doing so is bad for learning.

 10.  Books tend to make the "rich" richer and the poor "poorer" (those who read more in the right way get to be better and better readers and get more and more out of reading; those who don't, get to be poorer and poorer readers and get less and less out of reading. The former get more successful, the latter, less). This is called "the Matthew Principle."

 However, games do have some special properties that set them aside from books (and books have special properties that set them aside from games). Some of these are:

 1.  Games are based not on content, but on problems to solve. The content of a game (what it is "about") exists to serve problem solving.

 2.  Games can lead to more than thinking like a designer; they can lead to designing, since players can "mod" many games, i.e., use software that comes with the game to modify it or redesign it.

 3. Gamers co-author the games they play by the choices they make and how they choose to solve problems, since what they do can affect the course and sometimes the outcome of the game.

 4. Games are most often played socially and involve collaboration and competition.

[This piece repeats some of what an earlier one said, but is revised and with a diffferent follow up and ending]

COMMODITY COLLEGES

A commodity is a relatively inexpensive, widely available product or service.  After an initial period in which goods and services are expensive and owned by only a few, modern technologies usually drive them to become commodities.  Computers, HD televisions, and cell phones are current examples.  Because commodities are the source of stiff price competition and low profit margins, companies often attempt to market their products and services as “special” in some way and not just as commodities.  Only thereby can they can charge more and earn more profit, 

 Today most college degrees are commodities.  College courses and credits have long been standardized.  Most colleges have largely equivalent faculty, class rooms, courses, degrees, majors, departments, and policies.  Of course some departments are better than others at any college and research universities vary significantly at the level of training graduate students.  But from the point of view of the undergraduate “consumer” it is hard to distinguish many colleges one from the other at an academic level.

 It is true, of course, that colleges and universities can and do distinguish themselves by size and status.  Since courses, credits, and the basic format of a college education are standardized, high status colleges can only charge premium prices by claiming their faculty are better, their students are smarter (or richer), their students will make better contacts for their futures, or that they have august histories.  Small colleges must claim that faculty interactions with students are more personal and intense.  Both of these—status and small size—cost more and are not always what they are claimed to be.  Small colleges often have nothing like the resources of larger ones and many high status ones often have faculty no better than good state universities.  Further, in many cases, elites colleges are really selling their students to each other, students who are rich and elite, and not their faculty, who are not better than faculty elsewhere.

 Until recently, there were basically two types of colleges: inexpensive low status colleges and expensive high status ones.  The former were commodities and the latter were special products (you paid more for status as a “special sauce”).  There is one wrinkle, though.  Thanks to state subsidies, in the past some colleges were inexpensive but high status (e.g., the University of California at Berkeley).  Offering special products at commodity prices violates today’s current free market principles (“neo-liberalism”) and, in any case, state after state has raised the cost of all public colleges.

 Today, a great many less than high status colleges are commodities in the sense that they pretty much offer just what every other one does.  Let’s call these colleges (and universities) “old style commodity colleges”.  Many of these colleges, however, are becoming over-priced thanks to a loss of state subsidies and the cost of research-based, tenured, and tenure-track faculty.  When commodities become expensive, problems arise.  Since they are relatively easy to produce, others will seek to supply them at lower prices and undercut the competition.  And that is, indeed, happening to today’s old style commodity colleges.  Intense competition is occurring and will increase.  This competition comes from for-profit colleges, distance degrees, and cut-rate extension programs operated by many colleges far from their home campuses.  These programs and degrees are often staffed by adjuncts and part time faculty without tenure and not on a tenure track.  Let us call these latter programs and degrees “new style commodity colleges”, even if many of them are, in fact, run by old style commodity colleges, who are, thus, competing with themselves.

  To the extent that an old style commodity college carries no great distinction and is more expensive or less convenient than a new style one, it will eventually lose in competition with new style commodity colleges.  These latter can be cheaper and can be run more efficiently by evading many of the constraints old style commodity colleges face because of old style commodity colleges’ lower course loads, higher salaries, and tenure.

  Old style commodity colleges will be caught in a bind.  They already lose top (and top paying) students to elite colleges that can offer prestige at a high price (and have little need for innovation, since prestige will do).  One new threat from such elite colleges is that they will, more and more, offer relatively cut-rate distance or extension versions of their degrees and name.  This will allow more students to evade old style commodity colleges and gain some (though reduced) prestige. 

 Old style commodity colleges will lose other students to new style commodity colleges which offer low cost, flexibility, and customization, though no prestige.  Why pay premium for X-State College when you can get the same standardized content and credits—often in a more flexible and customized format—from a cut-rate competitor (which might actually be X-State itself offering cut-rate discounted degrees via e-learning or off campus programs)?

 What is an old style commodity college to do, with its physical campus, tenured faculty, and research obligations?  Does it have any advantages over the competition?  Yes.  It has beer nearby in the local college town and it has warm social bodies in the dorms.  These are two things e-learning cannot supply.  Undergraduates—the people who pay the bills—want socialization with other students.  But this is not much of a leg up when it is only coupled with today’s standardized courses, credits, lectures, and majors.  There are other ways to get beer and bodies.

  So beer and bodies are not enough.  One thing an old style commodity college could offer is socialization that goes much deeper than beer and bodies.  Such a college could offer learning-centered, collaborative, problem-focused, passion-driven social groups with a shared mission.  More on this later.

 In my view, many style old commodity colleges will survive only if they become specialty products.  But they have to become specialty products of a special sort.  Since, for the most part, they cannot offer the high prestige of elite colleges, they must either stay close to commodity pricing (while offering more than a commodity) or offer some other type of distinction than the prestige of elite colleges.

 As old commodity colleges become new specialty colleges, whose specialty is not the status or a Harvard or Yale, they must remain place based.  Indeed they must greatly enhance their place-baseness by creating a distinctive and alluring physical and social space devoted to learning.  Yet they must also bring the virtual, the imaginary, and the distant world into full interaction with this real place-space.  This mixed model, mixing the real with the virtual, is a big advantage over new style commodity colleges that offer only e-learning or unattractive physical spaces and shallow face-to-face social spaces.

  Collaboration and collaborative problem—forms of cognitive socializing, the mixing of minds and not just bodies—have to be at the center of the college.  Collaboration can no longer be seen as a form of cheating.  Today’s young people want to learn and play socially.  Today’s workplaces want people who can collaborate on teams that are smarter than the smartest person on them.

  Finally, and most importantly, standardization must go.  Standard courses, credits, disciplines, and majors need to disappear.  So do grades.  Grades are, in any case, meaningless in an age of grade inflation.  One thing that most certainly must change is time.  The goal has to be mastery not the time it takes to achieve it.   It matters not whether a student with a good head start or lots of time masters something in six weeks and another student, without such a head start or time, takes six months.  What matters is commitment to mastery.

 Now claiming that the goal is mastery is controversial.  We are all aware that many students today view college more as a social and networking experience than a cognitive one.  So it will be tempting for old style commodity colleges to offer “camps” for young people, with college work a not too serious side attraction.  Indeed, many colleges for many students today are just this.  But this is neither a moral thing to do, nor one that will lead to much profit for most colleges, since setting up good camps is actually another business altogether.  Creating good camp colleges can be—and will be—done better by entertainment organizations.

 LEARNING AS A DRUG

Many an old style commodity today is a place where many an undergraduate is more interested in beer, bodies, drugs, and socialization than in courses, term papers, and majors.  But here is a well kept secret: deep learning is a drug for humans.  It is as attractive and addicting as real drugs and sex.  It fills a primal need in humans.  Schools have obscured this by making learning noxious, as they would with sex if they taught that.  However, out of school, popular culture has learned that hard learning is sexy and sells.  Popular culture activities like the card game Yu-Gi-Oh and the video game Civilization are as complicated and hard as anything most kids see in school these days.  They require effort, commitment, persistence past failure, lots of practice, and eventual mastery.  They also make tons of money.

 Now this is the new product old commodity colleges could offer: Allow students to recover from what schools have done to them.  Allow them to engage in learning and mastery as addictive as good video games.  Allow students to rediscover their learning muscles and rediscover (something they knew as babies) that learning is, along with sex and food, a primary need.  Allow them to find new identities as producers, knowers, and movers and shakers in the world.  This is a different sort of camp: a boot camp for designing a better world.

  Old style commodity colleges cannot offer the prestige of elite colleges.  They cannot compete with cut-rate discounted e-learning and “off brand” degrees offered in strip malls, even by themselves.  They cannot compete with for-profit colleges that are unabashedly vocational and falsely guarantee jobs and a good income.  But they can offer a “specialty” customized education that elite colleges need not.  And then they can beat the e-learning colleges through building a face-to-face community worth being in, but one that still draws fully on the virtual, the digital, and the distant.  Let’s call such colleges of the future “new specialty colleges” to separate them from the old specialty colleges like Harvard, Smith, and Vassar. 

  This niche is virtually unfilled.  So the first colleges into it will thrive.  However, given the inertia of colleges and the lure of standardization, the niche may never be filled.  In that case, the day may come where Kaplan and off campus e-degrees (new style commodity colleges) and Williams and Amherst (old specialty colleges), and their respective ilk, will be the last colleges standing.

 Let me be clear.  I am talking about colleges that keep their physical plant and their dorms.  I am talking about colleges that keep their faculty and students in personal face-to-face contact.  No one wants to go to a virtual summer camp.  They want a real forest and lake.  Many people do not want to go to a virtual college.  They want to see real faculty and other students.   The Army doesn’t run boot camp virtually, since people who have to fight together must learn to live together and trust each other.  The same is true of a student body committed to fighting to redesign the real world (the world where people die because they have no food), the public sphere, and the future, as we argued in the last chapter they should be.

HOW TO PROCEED

There are lots of ways colleges could innovate and we should encourage lots of experimentation.  I do not want to propose one standard way to engage in innovation.  I will, however, make some suggestions about one shape innovation could take.  But first let me say that like most innovation, there is an initial high cost to development and implementation.  After that, costs go down and will, indeed, be significantly less than today’s old commodity colleges, especially those with lots of research-based faculty.

  Let’s call the college I propose “New College”.  It could be any old commodity college with vision and guts.  First New College tells its students that there are billions of things worth knowing and studying in the modern world.  Furthermore, information and knowledge transform rapidly in the modern world.  The old model of education is based around everyone knowing the same things: “What every educated person should know”.  This model is profoundly out of date and never worked that well anyway (All Americans do know the same thing about science, for example, namely nothing). 

 At New College, every student must find his or her passion or passions.  This passion must be connected to some big generative question, though addressing this question will require pooling people with different passions.  So a person with a passion for public health may work with a person with a passion for urban design and one with a passion for education, as well as others around a generative big question like: How can we enhance life-long health and happiness in cost effective ways?  In the domain of their passion, students will work collaboratively to achieve mastery.  This will require “grit”: passion plus persistence.  Students must also demonstrate that can teach others in their domain of passion and that they can create new learning tools for people in that domain.  And they must pool their skills to contribute to work on a big generative question with people with other passions and skills.

  Students must demonstrate, as well, that they are prepared to learn new things from others who have mastered other domains of passion when they need to.  That is, they must show they are expert learners and well prepared not just for future learning but a lifetime of new learning and mastery.  Finally, as we have said, the end goal is that they must demonstrate, in their work on one or more big generative questions, that they can pool their expertise and mastery with other people’s to engage in collaborative problem solving that requires a team with different specialties but the ability to integrate skills and domains of passion (areas of expertise).

  The old model was about everyone knowing the same things so that people could share some common ground as citizens.  The new model is about people sharing abilities to learn, teach, listen, and collaborate.  Arguably these are the foundations for national and global citizenship in the 21^st Century.

  New College will ban standardized classes or courses.  It was never the case that everything worth learning could or should be taught in the same time-frame and format.  Courses that are just based on professors giving students information face the dilemma that students today can now look up information in minutes on the Internet (and often find out, in the process, that there is more controversy than the professor told them).  Standardized courses are based on the idea that because a group of students is sitting together in the classroom they all need the same thing and can proceed to learn in the same way.  This is next to never true for undergraduates.

 As I argued, however, in Chapter X, face-to-face encounters and dialogic interactions with professors who know their craft will remain crucial.  The purpose of such encounters is not to gain information.  Rather, the purpose is to learn how to think about, assess, and use information, principles, tools, technologies, and theories to solve problems.  It is to see a master at a certain craft or “game” engage in that craft or game.  It is to see academic work at its best as a “form of life” committed to challenges, knowledge production, problem solving, life-long learning, and a continual openness to falsification of one’s claims, to transformation of ways of thinking and doing, and to new ideas.  It is, in the end, to learn “taste”: What makes a question a good question?  What makes an argument a good argument?  What is a good way to proceed?  How can one get around blocks?  When should one work to extend a well worn path versus blaze a new one?  These are matters not of algorithms or recipes; they are, in science as well as the humanities, matters of art, craft, experience, and taste.  You would not want to learn to appreciate wine from a taped lecture or an Internet site.  You need actually to taste the wine.  But you also need to drink and savor wine with masters who can model how to talk about it, appreciate it, select it, and not abuse it.  The same is true of learning any domain of knowledge production.

 New College will ban majors.  Majors are usually named by discipline labels like anthropology and biology.  These labels now name only budgetary departments, not coherent fields of study.  Real disciplines are lower-level units (e.g., medical anthropology or genetics) than academic departments.  Furthermore, as we all know, there are today a great many new disciplines and sub-disciplines arising all the time (in part caused by changes in technology).  And a great many of the most productive faculty do not work “in their discipline” alone but as part of teams that do not just pool different disciplines but integrate them into new forms of shared language and methods of inquiry.  Majors will be replaced by work on one or more big generative questions coupled with the deep development of a specific passion that can contribute to that question when pooled with other people’s passions.

 New College will ban grades or make transcripts with grades on them only for the convenience of students seeking to go on to traditional graduate programs.  People do not develop “grit” (passion + persistence) because of grades and grades can kill passion.  Mendel was in the monastery garden growing peas and discovering the foundations for modern genetics because he had failed the qualifying examination for becoming a science teacher.  Grades will be replaced by assessments that are much more integrated with learning and much better indicators of growth across time and the development of specific and manifest skills and dispositions.  More on this later.

 New College will know that failure is necessary to learning; it is often something to seek; and never failing is a sign of a domain not worth learning.  A low cost of failure encourages risk taking, exploration, and hypotheses testing.  All are necessary for innovation, as well as for deep learning and mastery.  New College will never punish failure.  It will only punish a lack of persistence past failure, a lack of effort, a lack of being proactive about more learning (including at times seeking more failure), and a lack of collaboration.   In turn, facile successes will not be rewarded at New College.

Passionate Affinity Spaces

There is today a new learning system competing, in many respects, with our school systems.  It is a learning system that is embedded in popular culture.  Popular culture is more complex today than it has ever been, as we will soon see (Johnson 2006).  Many different things happen in popular culture, good and bad, deep and superficial.  Here I want to talk about one type of learning associated with popular culture, a type that is, I argue, complex, deep, and knowledge-producing.

 There is no “official” name for this type of learning, so we will have to make one up.  We will call it “passionate affinity-based learning.”  Passionate affinity-based learning occurs when people organize themselves in the real world and/or via the Internet (or a virtual world) to learn something connected to a shared endeavor, interest, or passion.  The people have an affinity (attraction) to the shared endeavor, interest, or passion first and foremost and then to other people because of their shared affinity.  

 Just as school is, in one sense, a place or space where people (students and teachers) are “in school” or “at school,” passionate affinity-based learning is done in a place or space, what we call a “passionate affinity space,” which may be real or virtual or both.  A passionate affinity space, and the learning that goes on in it, requires some people associated with the space to have a deep passion for the common shared endeavor.  It does not require everyone to have such a deep passion, but it does require them to recognize the value of that passion and respect it, in some sense.  The passion is the “attractor” in the space.

 Young people learning and playing the video game Civilization or playing chess in a club or via the Internet (or some mixture of both) are in a passionate affinity space, if the conditions are right.  So, too, are people building and testing robots or model cars in competitions; people writing fan fiction; people designing land, houses, clothes, and furniture for The Sims (a video game); or people sharing learning and expertise about gardening or cooking.  The list of such endeavors today is nearly endless; in a recent book I have written about people organized to share a passion for and develop knowledge about cats and cat health.

 What are the right conditions for a passionate affinity space in which people engage in passionate affinity-based learning?  Passionate affinity spaces are a type of interest-driven group (Ito 2010).  [However, we are trying to avoid words like “group” and “community,” since in a passionate affinity space and many so-called interest-driven groups, who is “in” the group is not always easy to define.  A person who goes once or rarely to a passionate affinity space for resources or “lurks” in it is in the space, but are they in the “group” or “community”?  The point is that different people are in the space in different ways].  These spaces must have additional features as well. 

 First, people are associated with them because of their shared endeavor or interest, not because of their “credentials” (e.g., degrees).  They can achieve expert status regardless of their official credentials.  Such spaces cannot be defined around or restricted to “professionals” in any credentialing or institutional sense.

 Second, some people (usually, but not always, around 20%) must have a deep passion for the common endeavor, not just a passing interest (Gee & Hayes 2010; Shirky 2008).  This passion may be reflected in different ways, such as an extended commitment of time to the interest and space, high levels of production, and so forth. Others in the space will have many different degrees of interest and may come and go in various ways.  But they must affiliate with others in terms of the common interest and show that they respect and value the passion that fuels the most active people in the space.

 Third, in passionate affinity spaces, everyone can, if they choose, produce (produce knowledge, create things, do things) and not just consume what others have produced.  Of course, there can be and usually are standards—high ones—about what counts as good production and people who produce must accept (or seek to negotiate) and meet those standards.

 Fourth, in passionate affinity spaces, people sometimes lead and sometimes follow.  Some people lead in some situations and others lead in others.  Leadership is flexible, and takes different forms, such as managing the site, introducing new ideas and practices, and helping others.  People sometimes mentor (“teach”) others and sometimes get mentored.  Mentoring is flexible. 

 Fifth, knowledge in the affinity space is “distributed” in the sense that different people know different things and can share that knowledge when necessary.  Often the space has good tools and technologies that store and facilitate knowledge.  No one person has to or is expected to know everything all by themselves. 

 Sixth, the affinity space is not closed, though there may be requirements for entry, and takes in newcomers (“newbies”).  It refreshes itself.  Unlike school, people do not “progress” all at the same pace, age, or “grade.”  Movement in the space is quite varied; people may focus on one narrow aspect or explore the entire breadth of the interest area, spend as much time as they want on a particular set of skills or practices, and otherwise pursue quite different learning trajectories.

 Seventh, affinity spaces are about sharing a common endeavor where people learn things, produce things or knowledge, and can, if they wish, become experts (“professional amateurs” or “pro-ams”, see: Anderson 2006; Leadbeater & Miller 2004).  Even these experts believe there is always something new to learn, more to discover, and higher standards to achieve.

 Passionate affinity spaces are one distinctive type of interest-driven group.  People can be nice or mean within them.  Some operate quite cordially and collegially and some do not.  In some, people flame each other and “haze” newbies (to ensure that they are “tough” enough).  Both caring and cruel passionate affinity spaces can produce knowledge and learning.  Both are, in that sense, alternatives to our traditional school system.  We prefer caring passionate affinity spaces, as we prefer caring schools. 

LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT

New College will help design and implement such passionate affinity spaces around specific passions, but ones that will also be linked to collaborative work on an important big generative question.  So, for example, a person in an urban planning passionate affinity space might also be working on a big generative question with a person in an educational reform passionate affinity space as well as someone in a public health passionate affinity space.

 In their passionate affinity spaces and in their work on big generative questions, students would engage in challenges (what might also be called “quests”).  Challenges would involve a group producing knowledge, a tool, or a product related to their shared passion.  Students over time would engage in a number of different and increasingly more complex or demanding such challenges.

 It is important that an assessment model—a model of evidence for learning—be incorporated into each challenge.  There should be no final tests.  Challenges should be built in such a way that finishing them guarantees learning and mastery.  Good video games are already built this way.  Good video games are designed in terms of levels.  Each level requires players to practice a good deal, deal with failure, and persist until certain skills are mastered.  Mastery is displayed by finishing the level.  Often a level ends with a “boss fight” that tests whether the player has mastered the skills of the level in a high degree and whether the player is prepared for new learning on the next level.  Each level ratchets up skills and integrates them in such a way that by the end of the game one is sure that finishing is a good signing of having mastered the game.

 Well designed learning—and thus our challenges—does not require a final test.  Finishing means at least a degree of mastery.  People will raise the issue of transfer.  But transfer is simply tested by the next game one plays or challenge one faces.  If you want to know whether using geometry to design buildings in Second Life transfers into doing geometry elsewhere, simply design a game or challenge that asks players or students to move from Second Life to the new game or challenge and see how well Second Life prepared them to learn in the new game or challenge, which, of course, may very well be in the “real world”.

 Success at each challenge will earn the student a badge or qualification.  Different students within one and the same passionate affinity space can earn different badges.  A set of such badges would constitute a “major”, but reflect the specific way the student has customized their movement through the passionate affinity space as a learner and contributor.  Students, of course, could “double” or “triple” major by working in more than one passionate affinity space.

 Each student will work on continuously with other students, with other passions, on one or big generative questions.  These groups will be higher order passionate affinity spaces.  In them each students must work collaboratively to teach and learn, mentor and get mentored, so that they can work in so-called “cross functional teams”.  Such teams are composed of people with different types of high-level specific expertise, but people who can integrate their specific skills with other people’s specific skills to create a whole that operates better than any individual in it.  Work on one or more big generative questions will gain students higher-order badges or qualifications, further customizing their education.  In the end, a student “transcript” in New College is a “passport” filled with badges (that cohere in a certain way) that represent where a student has been and what a student has accomplished in “knowledge space”.

 When students from New College graduate, they can continue, if they choose, to work in and contribute to the passionate affinity spaces in which they worked and lived as students.  They will become mentors and a sort of (free) faculty working with newcomers and official New College faculty.  Alumni will remain in the college, perhaps for a life time.  There is no real reason to ever leave college.

PROBLEMS COLLEGES FACE

Almost everyone—regardless of political ideology—agrees that college in the United States is broken.  At research universities, undergraduate education is often short changed in favor of graduate education and faculty research agendas.  Every tenured or tenure-track faculty member at a research university well knows that status and rewards are tied to research and publication, not undergraduate teaching.  Undergraduates at many colleges and universities are turned off by what they feel to be irrelevant lectures and an education tied to academic information more germane to graduate students.  And, too, in the pursuit of students and tuition, college has in many places become dumbed down and more and more expensive.

 The pursuit of money and short-term gain, leading in to an intense competition for students and ever higher prices, is only one of the problems facing higher education.  Another problem is that learning out of school—starting with very young children and extending to adults—is today organized in radically different ways than is learning in schools and colleges.  Yet this out-of-school learning appears to be more popular, effective, equitable, and even more profitable.  While it is true that this boom in out-of-school learning has been fueled by digital and social media, it is fueled also by a different theory of learning and teaching.

 I will have more to say about today’s out-of-school learning later.  Let me here give just one example.  In the video game Civilization players have to think about how history works in terms of why things happened as they did and how they could have happened differently.  They have to solve historical, geographical, political, and military problems for a civilization they build over long periods of historical time.  They have available to them an encyclopedia of information about history and cultures across time.  They can, if they wish, use software to modify the game and make up their own historical challenges (e.g., succeed across time without warfare).  This is a far cry from a textbook of inert facts or a lecture full of dates and big names.

 Colleges and universities have sought to tie into this out-of-school learning boom by offering more e-learning courses and programs.  But in the vast majority of cases, this e-learning is just a digital version of what already goes on in higher education.  It is recorded lectures, lots of texts, talking heads, and paper and pencil tests.  Furthermore, such e-learning is often dumbed down even further than are regular college courses.  Discussion isn’t usually real time or face to face, but a long record of text.  In no way does this form of learning match the way the best learning works out of school today, either in theory or practice.  It is just a ruse to make money more effectively.

 Let me give one example of how non-innovative much e-learning is.  Outside of school, for video games and other digital media, there has been years of intense research on how to make good interfaces between the user and the software.  These interfaces (think, for example, of a good interface in a real-time-strategy game like Rise of Nations or Age of Empires) are meant to be user-friendly, inviting, customizable, and to facilitate effective and motivating communication and problem solving.  In much school-based e-learning today, the interface is no better than opening a book, attending a lecture, or reading a long, rambling, and unedited discussion (with perhaps a few pictures or links). 

 Why has digital learning outside of school spent so much time and effort on good interfaces, while school e-learning has not?  It is because, outside of school, people are actually motivated to learn and will not pay for learning that does not work well.  However, in colleges and universities today, students are often paying for a credential and not for any learning they care much about or that works all that well for them.  This may be a sustainable model when the credential is highly prestigious (as at Harvard or Yale).  It is not a sustainable model when the credential is not particularly prestigious and when everyone knows the credential does not prepare students for (or correlate with) success at work or in the world.

 One cannot reform higher education—nor talk about how it can face the challenges from out-of-school learning—without knowing what the purpose of higher education is.  I think we can all agree that that purpose should NOT be to charge unmotivated undergraduates premium prices to be trained as mini-graduate students in academic disciplines they will never be in.  Beyond that there is little agreement.

 One cannot reform higher education either without knowing what the purposes and accomplishments of earlier stages of education should be.  Too often today colleges and universities are just offering undergraduates another shot at a high school education to make up for the poor high school education they already received.  But what should the purpose of higher education be if high schools actually achieved some real purpose and what should that purpose be? 

 We can ask the same question of high schools: What should high schools be if elementary schools did a good job at some real purpose we all accepted and high schools did not have to remedy or repeat bad earlier education, as they so often do today?  Finally we can ask the same question of elementary schools: What should elementary education be if families did a good job at getting their children ready for school, which many families do not, in fact, do.  Finally, of course, we have to ask how we can help each level do well what it is supposed to do (once we determine what that is).   I will take up this topic a good deal more later.

THE GOALS OF EDUCATION

A discussion of the goals of education can quickly get highly general and boring, though such discussions do capture people’s competing and often conflicting value systems about life and society.  I will try to keep this discussion as specific as I can.

 Many people see a major divide between two possible goals for college.  Some want college to prepare students for work.  They want to see a vocational slant to college.  Of course, professional schools like medicine, law, engineering, and business already have this slant (and business is the most popular major in U. S.’s colleges and universities).  People who advocate for this focus point to the importance of a college education for upward mobility and the acquisition of a good job.

 The vocational focus has a problem however.  First, in the United States and other developed countries, as well as some emerging economies like China, there are too many college graduates for the sorts of jobs that require them in a modern developed country.  Furthermore, many jobs in the United States that say they require a college degree do not really need such a requirement.  Companies simply use the requirement to ensure that they at least get the equivalent of a well educated high school student.  Making high schools better would mitigate the need for college for this purpose.  If we want people well prepared for work—whether high status or low status work—it would be better to skip college as we know it and simply have them attend vocational and professional schools that make no pretense to be anything else.  There is no reason to call these colleges or universities.

Modern colleges were designed to give people a “higher education”, that is, an education that made people well versed in the historical accomplishments of civilization.  They were designed to make people well versed in things like science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, and history, that is, in the “liberal arts”.  The “liberal arts” are “liberal” precisely because they are not primarily focused on one’s work life, but on understanding the world and leading a life worth living or, at least, thinking about what makes a life worth living.

 Universities were designed with this liberal arts goal as well, but also with the goal of engaging in research that leads to discovery, knowledge, and the improvements in society to which these can lead.  In universities, of course, there is tension between the knowledge consumption goal for undergraduates and the knowledge production goal for graduate students and professors.

 The point of this discussion is this: if the goal of school after high school is job training (whether for being a hair dresser or a lawyer), there is no reason to mix this with college.  If this is all we want, we could just as well get rid of colleges as we know them and set up a myriad of well-designed vocational and professional schools.  And, in fact, for the vast majority of work there is no need for any degree past high school (if the high school is any good) since the most productive job training, in most cases, is done on the job and most jobs do not, in reality, require a college degree.

 So the real question about colleges is this: Do we want a “liberal arts” education for some people and, if so, for which people?  The real question about universities is this: Do we want an institution that engages in research and undergraduate education at the same time?  If not, then we should just have research institutions that engage in research and apprentice new researchers.  There would be no need to call these institutions colleges or universities.  They might just as well be called “research centers” or “think tanks”.

 The debate about colleges and universities, in my view, is really a debate about whether society should continue to sponsor institutions that offer liberal arts education not focused on jobs or job training and, if so, who society should sponsor such an education for.  Once one argues that colleges should be vocational (or if they just become fun camps for young people with money), then we are actually talking about something that need not be called a college at all.  If we continue to call such things “college”, we have simply changed the meaning of the word.

 There is a deeper question and problem here.  If we replace college with vocational training (again, whether for hair dressers or lawyers), then we are in danger of leaving college as a liberal arts institution only to the rich who do not need to worry about jobs too early.  This is, in a sense, where we started.  Until the GI Bill after WWII and the 1960’s college was largely the preserve of elites.  We must, at the least, ask if this is state to which we want to return.

 In the end, then, I will simply set aside college as focused on vocational education.  There is no reason why society cannot set up all sorts of vocational training at all sorts of levels and there is no reason to call any of this college.  When I talk about goals for college and university education, I will be focusing on goals that are not directly related to job training of any sort.  If someone thinks that no level of education should be devoted to learning that is not job related, then he or she should simply propose to close colleges or leave them to those rich enough to pay a premium price for “wasting their time”.

FOUR WAYS TO CLAIM Truth

One way to think about the goals of college is to ask this question: Are there important things that everyone (or some set of people) need to know that they cannot have gotten in their K-12 schooling and that is not a form of job training?  If you answer “yes” to this question, then whatever you take these things to be, that is your goal for college and undergraduate education in universities.  If your answer is “no”, then you see no need for college as I am using the term (for at least some people).

 We can readily see from this question that it is not answerable without also thinking about the goals of K-12 education.  The goals of college are whatever important (non-job-training) learning K-12 has not accomplished.  These goals should not be based on assuming earlier levels of schooling will do a bad job and so colleges need to make up for this situation.  Colleges should not be remedial institutions making up for the sins of K-12 education.  If we need such institutions, let’s just call them what they are: institutions for re-taking earlier levels of schooling that, for whatever reason, failed the first time (and this is something that could be handled well by good e-learning).  Again, there is no need to call these institutions colleges.

 Of course, there is lots of academic content that high schools cannot cover in the time they have.  Some might say this “spill over” can be left for college.  But if this spill over is just additional content in an academic discipline the student will never be in, then there is really no for an institution to teach it.  No high school course covers the treatment of “parasitic gaps” in theoretical syntax (a branch of linguistics).  But no one who is not going to be a linguist needs to know this in any case.

 Historically there are three ways to claim truth.  One is authority.  Prior to the Renaissance, for centuries, truth was determined by authority.  Things were true because an authority figure said they were.  This authority figure might be an ancient thinker (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, or Galen), a priest or bishop, a king or an aristocrat, or a military or government authority.  Authorities were often claimed to be smarter than others or to have some special access to truth (or God).  Authority often implied force, in the sense that some institution or another (church or state) could and would enforce what authority said was true.

 A second historical way to claim truth is ideology (what many today call “spin”).  People have for all of human history sought to make claims that certain things were true because they wished they were or because they would be advantaged if they were.  These people have engaged in lies, distortion, and self-deception to attempt to convince others (and sometimes themselves) that the world is the way they want it or need it to be.  Often they make up convincing stories or sham arguments to engage in persuasion.  Often such people represent not just themselves, but groups, cultures, nations, institutions, or causes.  Often, too, they claim to have or to be related to some authority.  Ideology and authority as claims to truth have often supported each other.

 A third way to claim truth is observation.  From the beginning humans have been able to test whether something is true (or “works”) by observation of the world and of other humans.  For example, humans discovered a great many things about food safety, animal behavior, the natural world, and human psychology long long ago.  Such observation was often not just individual, but a matter of groups collaborating and sharing.  In history, authority and ideology have mostly trumped observation when it comes to power, but observation has often trumped authority and ideology when it comes to survival (eating poisonous food does not work just because authority or ideology claims it does).

 Centuries ago the Greek doctor Galen (born 131 AD) claimed that women, in mind and body, were just weaker versions of men.  Men’s bodies and minds contained a type of “heat” related to the light of the stars.  Women’s minds and bodies did not contain as much of this heat.  This special heat shaped ideas and, as a result, women’s ideas were not “well formed”, while men’s were.  Thus, men were smarter than women and fit to rule where women were not.  Galen derived these ideas from mistaken observations about the body (in an age before scientific anatomy) and from ideology (in Greece men were in charge, women were not).

 For centuries what Galen said was claimed to be true based on his “authority” as an “ancient”.  Furthermore, societies down through the ages were dominated by men and these men had self-interested reasons to believe and argue for Galen’s claims.  His claims resonated with the ideological teachings of churches and governments.

 Presumably for centuries some people—especially women—knew from their own observations that women did not have less well-formed ideas than men.  Galen also claimed that women ejaculated sperm during intercourse and we can bet most women knew this was not true.  But, in most cases, authority and ideology trumped observation, especially observation by the less powerful.

 The Renaissance and the Enlightenment gave rise to a radical new approach to truth.  Thinkers began to claim that truth should be determined not by authority or ideology, nor by everyday observations.  They claimed that truth is to be found through what we might call “disciplined observation”.

 Disciplined observation is like a game with rules.  Claims must be made on the basis of observations of the world, not authority or ideology.  These observations must be repeatable, accessible to others, and carefully managed to control for mistakes (managed via tools, technologies, and collaboration, for example).  Repeated, accessible, carefully managed observations constitute evidence for claims.  Evidence must be shared and made public.  Others must be allowed to check the evidence for accuracy and consistency and to make the observations themselves.  Others must be allowed to critique the claims and to try to falsify them.  Someone who makes a claim must publically acknowledge the evidence, how much evidence there is for the claim, and the quality of the evidence for the claim.

 Disciplined observation is just a high octane version of everyday observation.  It is the basis of science, knowledge production, and discovery.  But it can also be the basis of art, as well.  Science and art are both forms of discovery.  The artist claims to have insight into the world or human experience based on deep, repeatable, and accessible observations of the world or life that are publically shared and open to critique.  Artists need not claim their insights are based on outside authority (e.g., God) or ideology, and, if they do, their art does not fall into the category of what I am calling disciplined observation (anymore than does “science” based on authority or ideology, which is not, of course, really science).  Artists also often use tools to discipline observation, tools like paint, musical systems, and cameras. 

 Artists sometimes make claims about what is true.  For example, Tolstoy’s War and Peace has a lot to say about how war and peace work.  To give one example: Tolstoy sees frontline soldiers as the cause of victory or defeat in war based on the flow and ebb of events on the front lines, not the big plans and strategies of generals.  A good general, for him, simply takes the credit or blame for what he knows happens largely outside his control, making people feel there is some larger workable plan.  This serves, at least for me, as a metaphor for politics, as well as for management in many workplaces.  This way of looking at the world can be compared and contrasted—tested against—a great many other observations by novelists, social scientists, military historians, and management consultants, as well as soldiers, citizens, and workers.

 Often artists make claims about what is aesthetic (found beautiful to humans), emotionally meaningful, inspiring, or an insightful perspective on life or the world.  Tolstoy’s insight qualifies in this way as well.  So does Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Life Closed Twice” where she claims that the real endings we suffer in life (“closings”) are the emotional sufferings we undergo from the loss of love, not the death of our physical bodies.  A great many others have been impressed by the way the human body can die only once if you radically traumatize it, but the human heart or soul can be equally traumatized (pained) many times, giving us many “deaths”.  And, yet, Dickenson claims it is this fact that gives us humans our “heavens” and “hells”, the sorrows and joys of our lives, and not religion. 

 Claims about what humans can find beautiful, meaningful, inspiring, or insightful for living life are, just like claims in science, claims to truth via disciplined, shared, and accessible observations.  Many people have discovered new forms of beauty, meaning, inspiration, and insight from art.  But these claims cease to be “disciplined observation” if one defers their assessment to authority (including religion) or ideology.  Dickinson’s poem is insightful (“true to life”) not because it’s God’s view or any authority’s view.  It is insightful because it is a view of life based on her own observations, observations that resonate with how others have experienced life.

 In the United States the word “science” is used only for the physical, social, and natural sciences, and often only for the “hard sciences”.  It is not used for literature, music, or art.  In some other countries the term is used more widely, for something like what I am calling “disciplined observation”.  In any case, I will use the term “disciplined observation” to include science and art and things in between.

 At this point, probably, readers of all political stripes are nervous about how I am using the word “truth”.  Truth is a much abused word.  Almost everyone, regardless of their intellectual or political camp, is skeptical of “truth” when other people claim it, though rarely are they skeptical of their own claims to truth (myself included, of course).  And, in a way, this is as it should be.  It is to this dilemma that the idea of “disciplined observation” actually speaks.   So let’s turn to truth.

Truth

Truth has taken a lot of hits from postmodern academics.  They claim there is no fixed, eternal big “T” truth.  Claims to such are just ideologically “master narratives” meant to empower certain sorts of people and institutions.  But “disciplined observation” is not about any such sense of the word “truth”.  It is about a much more practical and mundane matter: namely what works.

 Humans are overly impressed by their own observations and ideas and liable to believe them when they are, in fact, false.  Disciplined observation is the willingness to put one’s observations and ideas to the test of other people’s observations and ideas.  These people often compose a group that develops tools and methods to test, critique, and debate observations and claims in a certain domain (e.g., biology or gardening).  These tools and methods cannot rest on authority or ideology.  Crucially they must involve ways of confronting claims against the publically shared world of human experience.  If the world behaves in such a way as to consistently contradict a claim, the claim cannot (yet, at least) be claimed to be true.   If the world behaves in such a way so as to consistently support a claim, then that claim can be taken (at least for the time being) as true.  In this sense “truth” is a move in the “game” of “disciplined observation”.

 Astrology and astronomy are classic examples of two related areas where only one plays by the rules of disciplined observation.  Astrological claims are often put forward to a social group that debates astrology.  But such claims do not pass muster when tested against the world, while many astronomical claims do.  Furthermore, people engaged in astrology base their claims on a shared ideology, not genuine critique, testing, and debate.  Astrology is more like a religion than it is like disciplined observation.

 There is a slightly stronger sense of the word “true” that is connected to the disciplined observation “game”.  This game is played on the assumption that many more claims taken to be true in the game than ones taken to be false will still be considered true over the long haul as the game progresses (until the end of time).

 Thousands of people have found Emily Dickenson’s claims about life, love, and the human heart true to their experience of love gained and lost.  In fact this is so much the case that many of us would not say her claims were false if many people came to deny them.  We would say the nature of human beings or human life had radically changed. 

 Claims about evolution in biology are so well supported by the game of disciplined observation in biology that people who deny evolution (and not just mechanisms relevant to how it works) simply do not accept or want to play by the rules of disciplined observation.  And, of course, that is their prerogative.  People can play any game they like, but they cannot expect the world of nature or human experience to be so flexible as not to “bite back” against a great many of their claims that are not, in fact, true by the rules of disciplined observation.

TYPES OF DISCIPLINED OBERVATION

Disciplined observation is not just a “game” played by academics.  Nonetheless, academic disciplines have refined the game a great deal with many technical tools and methods,  And they have devoted the game to quite specific, technical, specialized, and narrow questions in a myriad of specialties and sub-specialties.   This effort has yielded lots of nonsense and fundamentally uninteresting and unimportant work.  But it has also yielded lots of important, marvelous, essential discoveries.  In fact, it seems that keeping the weak work around is the cost for getting the important discoveries, since often we cannot tell at the outset what will turn out to be important.  In any case, these highly specialized academic areas are properly the preserve of graduate students and research professors.  They are not the correct food for undergraduate education, however much undergraduate “majors” often feed undergraduates simplified versions of graduate disciplinary education.

 Disciplined observation has always had a home outside of schools and more so today than ever.  Today, via the Internet, people of all ages can join interest-driven groups to develop expertise in a great variety of areas.  This phenomenon is so pervasive today that our time has been called the Age of Pro-Ams (Professional-Amateurs).  People engage in amateur science, citizen journalism, fan-fiction writing, the design of all sorts of media, as well as engage at expert levels on topics like cats, health, autism, gardening, politics, environmental concerns, and almost any other topic one could think of. 

 Let me just take one specific example of this Pro-Am phenomenon.  Players of the massively multiplayer (and massively popular) video game World of Warcraft can join Internet sites where they engage in “theory crafting”.   On these sites players seek to discover, analyze, and improve the complex  statistical model that underlies game play in World of Warcraft where the results of every player move is determined by a large number of interacting variables.   They engage with mathematics, statistics, probability, and game design to offer expert analyses and to critique the game and the company that makes it in the service of what they think would be better ways to design the game.  They also make software tools (called “mods”) that incorporate their statistical insights and which help other players to better understand and use these statistical insights as they the game.

 On such Pro-Am sites people make claims that must be backed up by disciplined observations, made publically accessible, and open to critique, debate, and falsification.   They cannot claim truth based on authority, ideology, or informal observations.  In fact, often they have no degrees or expert credentials.  They, in fact, must abide by the rules of the game of disciplined observation, though they are not academics and not studying an academic topic directly, but a video game.  Of course, their claims in mathematics and statistics are often grounded in or accurate in terms of academic work.

 There is, however, another way to engage with disciplined observation that has no secure home.  This involves people playing the game of disciplined observation not about topics in academic specialties (like syntax theory in linguistics) or ones in popular culture (like theory crafting in World of Warcraft) but on what I will call “big questions”.

 Big questions are questions that can only be answered by drawing on different sources of knowledge.  They do not fall into any one discipline, but require pooling knowledge across different disciplines, knowledge domains, history, and people.  Furthermore, they are questions whose answers help shape how we live, act, and value in the world.

 Take one example.  In 2008 the world experienced an economic meltdown and a deep recession brought on by a variety of factors, many of them centered in the United States, but eventually spread throughout the world.  Lots of people have suffered and continue to suffer from this meltdown.  It nearly shut down the global economy.  Why did it happen?  That question is a big question if approached in a certain way.  Answering it requires melding and evaluating knowledge from economics, human psychology, sociology, history, politics, public policy, ethics, as well as thinking about human nature, human interactions, values, environments, ideologies, and behaviors.

 Answering this question is not just a prerequisite for asking how to fix the meltdown and avoid future ones, though this is important, of course.  Answering it also leads to a deep understanding of how the world we live in works and how the claims we make about it and the actions we take in it can go wrong and lead to unfortunate consequences, even with good intentions (and, of course, without them as well).  Answering leads to some degree of protection against being harmed by human and institutional greed, ideology, stupidity, and mistakes.   In this sense, the question is generative: it generates lots of further understandings and applications beyond the specific issue (the 2008 recession) that triggered it.  Let’s call such questions not just “big questions” but “generative big questions”.

 We can play the disciplined observation game with generative big questions, but this requires that we pool people with different types of knowledge, experience, and skills.  It requires that we draw on knowledge from academic and non-academic sources.  It requires we reject authority, ideology, and anecdote as the ground for answers for questions that often impinge on people’s politics and values.  And it requires an appeal to disciplined (repeated, well-managed, and publically accessible) observations and claims based on them that are open to critique, debate, and refutation.

 Generative big questions are ones that academic disciplines break down into smaller questions directed to specific academic specialties and sub-specialties.  Unfortunately, in many cases, no discipline exists to put all the sub-questions and sub-answers together into a “big picture” answer that speaks to the larger question.  Furthermore, generative big questions are important to all of us, not just academics, and we all have to be able to think about them if only to protect ourselves from stupidity and spin in a complex world. 

 And we cannot just passively accept credentialed experts’ answers to these big questions, since this becomes just a form of basing truth on authority.  At the very least we need to know how and why the experts reached their conclusions and how trustworthy their conclusions are actually claimed to be on their home base in an academic discipline or set of them.  At the best, we need to engage in the “game” ourselves, along with credentialed and not-credentialed experts.

The home of disciplined observation played on questions embedded in academic specialties and sub-specialties is graduate education and academic research.  The home of disciplined observation played by Pro-Ams is popular culture.  But where is the home of disciplined observation played on generative big questions, on questions that sound “academic” but which impinge on everyone’s life and pursuit of happiness and meaning?   Proactively approaching generative big questions requires credentialed professionals, Pro-Ams, and “newbies”, each with different  knowledge, experiences, perspectives, and values to collaborate.  Sounds a lot like a vision for college.

Generative big questions should be the focus of people’s interactions in the public sphere.  They should be the focus of media, politics, and larger societal debates.  They should be the focus of our communal attempt, throughout our lives, to discuss with others what the purpose of life is, what makes a life worth living, what we owe each other, and how a just society should be organized.  The discussion of such questions is, in fact, the heart and soul and a pre-condition for a real public sphere.  There was a time when we thought the purpose of a college education was to prepare one for this public sphere, to prepare one to participate it and even to reform it.

And here we hit a major and perhaps insurmountable problem.  Colleges and universities which focus undergraduate education on generative big questions require a true public sphere to sustain them and then, in turn, be nourished by them and their graduates.  What, then, is a public sphere?

 A public sphere is the space in any society in which people from different backgrounds (whether these be defined in terms of classes, races, ethnic groups, genders or sexual orientations, interests, values, or beliefs) seek to create together a “public”.  People who are part of this public feel they should collaborate for the common good.  They feel they have not just rights, but responsibilities to others in the public.  The responsibilities are not based on kinship, friendship, shared backgrounds, wealth, or politics, or shared life styles.  They are impersonal. 

 Further, people in a public sphere agree to settle their differences and to come to agreements about the common good based on publically accessible, free, and open argument, evidence, and universalizable (and not sectarian)  moral values.  They do not base their arguments solely on ideology, self-interest, authority, short-term profits, deception (“spin”), fear mongering, or distain for others.  They respect each other as co-citizens in the public sphere.

 Today in the United States and in some other countries there is no real public sphere or a quite diminished one.  In the United States wealthy and professional people share life styles, interests, and values with other wealthy and professional people across the globe.  In a global world they can interact with people like themselves across the world and come to see these people as their true “peer group”.  They can come to feel little co-citizenship or co-membership in a public sphere with others in their own country less well off or different from themselves.  They feel little responsibility to or for others in their own society and often resent paying taxes to sustain the common good.

 Furthermore, in the United States today, we are deeply ideologically driven, constant victims of spin in the name of ideology or profit, and prone in business and politics to short-term thinking and planning for short-term gain.  We see those who disagree with us as “traitors” or “pin heads”.  We do not approach social problems pragmatically, asking what balance of conservative or liberal approaches is called for to reach a workable and fair solution, rather we see the whole world through one ideological lens more closely connected to our own desires and self-interest than any notion of a common good.  We are well aware that no matter how much evidence of harm was available businesses that caused that harm would fight to the end to stop regulation to mitigate the harm, as the cigarette companies have long done and as any number of other corporations do today. 

 In the U. S. health care debate we heard about the perils of “rationed health care” (where people would not be able to get high risk low benefit expensive operations) if the government sponsored health care so that everyone got coverage.  However, many people showed little concern for the “rationed health care” forced on thousands of people who had no health insurance and could not even get a basic operation that could save their lives. 

 Colleges and universities that have as their goal sustaining and nurturing a true public sphere—via open discussion of generative big questions—cannot function if there is no real public sphere.  It is not surprising that in a society with a diminished public sphere, there is not a widespread desire to fund such a college education for the “public”.

A Problem of Class

There is an inherent “class” problem in democracies.  To see this problem assume everyone can vote and assume there is significant variation in wealth among the voters.  Both assumptions would be the norm today in developed countries.  Now line up the voters according to wealth, from highest to lowest.  The lower half of the voters will have less wealth than the top half.  The disparity between the two will be greater the more economic variation there is in the society.

The top half and the bottom half will have different interests.  The bottom half can benefit if they use their voting power to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom.  The top half will benefit if they can resist this redistribution.  Furthermore, if the top half can use their economic power to manipulate votes, they can benefit by redistributing wealth in the opposite direction from the bottom to the top. 

Wealth is often redistributed from top to bottom by taxes that tax the rich more than the poor or by spending on social programs.  Wealth is often redistributed from bottom to top by successful business enterprises that make profit from sales and services to the less well off or by public subsidies to business.  In some cases this profit comes from services that some people argue should not be a matter (or entirely a matter) of profit making, but, rather, of justice and caring (e.g., health care, schools, shelter). 

The bottom half may call redistributing wealth from the top to the bottom “justice” and the top half may call it “theft”.  The top half may call redistributing wealth from the bottom to the top “capitalism”, the outcome of the social Darwinian struggle within free markets.  No one will actually use the term “redistribute wealth” for what they do, but only for what the other half does. 

Of course, in real countries like the US, this battle of the halves is often more realistically seen as a battle of a smaller top group (less than half) and a larger bottom group (more than half), though the logic is the same.  So let’s just talk about top and bottom.  Of course, there are people “in the middle”, so to speak, who might (and usually do) see their interests one way when they look down and another way when they look up. 

In any society both the bottom and the top have incentives to support or oppose various sorts of redistributions of wealth.  Thus, there will be a struggle between the “classes”.  This class problem is resolvable if everyone in a society (or nearly everyone) sees redistributing wealth from top to bottom as justice.  It is resolvable, as well, if they agree that redistributing from bottom to top is the inevitable result of free enterprise, that is, that the richer get richer because they have worked to deserve it.  In the end, a society has to agree on how much and what type of redistribution of income is acceptable. 

In society, the top half always has at least one incentive to support some degree of redistribution of wealth from top to bottom.  If the bottom half gets too far below the top half in wealth, people in the bottom half are liable to rebel and engage in some form of assault on the top half’s interests.  At the very least, society will become problematic even for the well off.  Thus, the top half always has some interest in “amelioration”, so that the bottom half does not feel so oppressed as to seek redress in ways that could harm the interests or peace of the top half or society as a whole.  Thus, besides justice, amelioration can be a motive for why someone in the top half would favor the redistribution of wealth from top to bottom.

In a democracy, the top half—especially when they are, in reality, much smaller than actually half the population—can fear voting because a majority could vote to redistribute wealth from top to bottom.  The bottom half can fear voting, on the other hand, because they a minority of wealthy people could use their greater resources to manipulate the voting in their favor.

Let me be clear what I mean here by “justice” and “enterprise”.  By “justice” I mean what some might call “social justice”.  Social justice implies that everyone in a society, as a member of that society, owes some degree of help to less fortunate others in the society.  This form of justice is a social obligation that flows from being a citizen and sharing citizenship with others.  A citizen owes help to others in the society because such help makes the society better as a whole, healthier, safer, or more successful.  Social justice is not a matter of charity, but of rights and obligations for the maintenance of a certain type of society.

There are those who reject such a notion of social justice.  They argue that people ought to aid others only as individuals and as a matter of charity or morality.  They should not be “forced” as a matter of state-sanctioned social obligations to help those less fortunate than themselves.  Such people sometimes believe that government aid can turn into a “crutch” that ultimately deskills people.  Thus, they believe that the aid people are offered in a society ought to be determined on personal, individual, family, moral, or religious grounds, not as a matter of law.

By “enterprise” I mean any form of endeavor that seeks to make a profit on something approaching a free market.  Of course, in a country like the United States, there are many respects in which markets are not truly free, due to the power of monopolies, political interventions, dishonesty, and subsidies.  But I will leave that aside for now.  Ideally, enterprise means generating wealth through fair competition.

Some voters are what I will call “moral voters”.  These are people who realize that society needs a workable solution to the struggle between “justice” and “enterprise”.  Too much redistribution from top to bottom may kill enterprise and too much redistribution from bottom to top may unfairly punish the less well off or even cause them to rebel in the name of justice.

What I call “immoral voters” seek only their own self interest.  They will support a strong emphasis on justice or enterprise not because of their real beliefs or morals, but because this just gives them more wealth or power.  For example, are media commentators who oppose all tax increases sincere in the belief that this is economically sensible or are they just trying to increase their ratings or their influence among people who resent government?  If they are sincere, they are moral voters; if not, they are not.  However, it probably won’t do to ask them if they are sincere.

So people in a democracy must come up with a theory about how to resolve the struggle between justice and enterprise.  The theories proposed by immoral voters will be versions of self pleading and are not of interest to us right now.  The theories proposed by moral voters will be of interest. 

Conservatives and Liberals

There are two large classes of theories about how to resolve the struggle between justice and enterprise and other significant problems in society.  One class we can call conservative and one class we can call liberal.  Within each class there are many different and sometimes conflicting specific proposals.  But at the level of “world views” we have two approaches here.  The liberal wants to solve society’s problems and dilemmas through “engineering” and the conservatives through “tinkering”.

Engineering is an approach that says that society is made up of a number of large systems (e.g., schools, health care, the military, etc.) each of which is itself made up of many interacting forces.  These systems compose a larger system (society).  To improve society we need to change some of these systems as a whole or, at least, in substantive ways.  Small changes will just be co-opted by the system to make little difference.  When systems are not as good, we can and need to make them better.

Tinkering is an approach that agrees that society is a system of systems.  This system (society) and each of its sub-systems evolved slowly and unevenly over history.  Social systems are so complicated that any large changes are quite likely to lead to unintended consequences.  We need to be careful and change things in small and incremental ways, otherwise our interventions could make the system worse not better.  The systems we currently have are not necessarily good, and certainly not perfect, but they may be the best we can do for now or, at least, we may be able to make them worse far easier than we can make them better.

Take schools as an example of one complex system within society, a system that interacts with many other systems in society.  Today, liberals and conservatives in the United States (and in many other counties) often agree that the school system is “broken”.  The liberal argues that we need to create a new paradigm of schooling.  Any incremental innovations will just be co-opted by the “system” and eventually just help re-produce the status quo. 

The conservative argues that we need to be careful.  We need to make and test small incremental changes.  Otherwise our sweeping innovations may have unintended consequences that will make the system even worse.  After all, the system evolved slowly over time to solve certain problems and we must be careful not lose the historical “wisdom” (or at least practicalities) of the system in our urge to change it.

Conservatives will call liberals “arrogant”.  They will claim liberals are too trusting in their knowledge and wisdom in the face of great complexity and the inherent limitations on human knowledge.  Liberals will call the conservatives “selfish”, seeking to maintain the status quo because it favors their own interests.

Of course, these theories, engineering versus tinkering, are so abstract that they are world views and not really “provable”.  Each side will read history to support themselves.  The liberals will point to big system-wide changes that worked (e.g., The New Deal, The Great Society).  Roosevelt’s New Deal arguably helped save America during the Great Depression and later motivated a battered working class to fight World War II.  Johnson’s Great Society eradicated working and elderly poverty and lessened segregation.

 The conservatives will point to those big system-wide changes that did not work or they will claim that the ones liberals think worked did not (e.g., the New Deal, the Great Society).  The top-down planning and control in the old Soviet Union is an example of a system-wide change that had disastrous results, though it is arguable whether it was worse than the days of the Czars for many.  In the United States, the swift and nearly wholesale movement (in the midst of two wars) by the Bush administration to turn over many military services to outside for-profit contractors (“privatization”) had many unforeseen consequences.  It is an example, too, that many real world conservatives (e.g., Bush) do not always eschew engineering.  The well-intentioned desire to spread mortgages to the less well off, interacting with “moral hazards” created by deregulating finance (both system-wide changes), helped lead to the 2008 recession.

Tinkering has the down side that the people suffering social ills often must go on suffering them.  Engineering has the down side that speaking to the social ills of a large group of people in a big policy change can make things worse or just change who suffers.

People who highly value enterprise need not, of course, be against social justice (though they might).  They may well believe that enterprise is a route to justice.  People who highly value social justice need not, of course, be against enterprise (though they might).  They may well believe that social justice is necessary for successful and fair competition or even for truly free markets. 

We are used to people who highly value enterprise being conservative and advocating incremental changes, what I have called tinkering.  We are used to people who highly value justice being liberal and advocating systemic change, what I called engineering.  But it is certainly possible to be both an activist for justice and an advocate for tinkering.  Such people are in danger, though, of being called “sell outs”.  And, of course, it is possible to be both an advocate of enterprise and for engineering.  Such people are in danger, though, of being seen as a threat to the market status quo.

In any case, we have four features: a focus on justice, a focus on enterprise, a focus on engineering, and a focus on tinkering.  They give us four possible political orientations: justice/engineering (a classic liberal); justice/tinkering (a conservative liberal); enterprise/engineering (a liberal conservative); enterprise/tinkering (a classic conservative).  In reality, a person might be one of these for one issue (e.g., health care) and another one for another issue (e.g., school reform), though many people are fairly consistent across issues.

What I am calling conservative and liberal are tendencies rooted in a person’s genetics, upbringing, and life experiences.  Below I summarize a number of contrasts between these two ways of seeing and being in the world socially and politically:

      CONSERVATIVE/LIBERAL

1. At risk of the sin of greed/ At risk of the sin of pride
2. Tinkering/Engineering
3. Oriented toward past/ Oriented toward future
4. Focus on human fallibility/Focus on human perfectibility
5. Favor a republican form ofgovernment/Favor a democratic form of government
6. Favor an authoritarian form of parenting/Favor a more permissive form of parenting
7. Favor status quo/Favor change
8. Distrust human knowledge/Trust human knowledge
9. Trust tradition/Distrust tradition
10. Favor free markets/Favor regulated markets
11. Focus on family/ Focus on society
12. Focus on charity/ Focus on social welfare/justice
13. Focus on liberty/Focus on justice
14. Focus on merit/Focus on equity
15. For small government/For larger government
16. Focus on society’s winners/ Focus in society’s losers

These are tendencies.   As I said above, a conservative need not (though some do) disavow social justice.  However, the conservative will see enterprise as a route to, or crucial element in, social justice.  A liberal need not disavow enterprise.  However, the liberal will see social justice as a force to mitigate and, when necessary, “trump” enterprise.

A person could be on one side of the above chart for some items and not others.  There are people who “pick and choose”.  But many people tend to be much more heavily on one side than the other.  And, of course, these choices can change with education, experience, and age.

I have been talking about conservatives and liberals in ideal and abstract terms.  However, in the real world—more today than before, perhaps—there are not many ideal (one could say “real”) conservatives and liberals.  Conservative politicians sing the praises of the free market and yet legislate favors and subsidies for the rich and powerful who help fund their campaigns (creating a form of welfare for the rich and warping the workings of the free market).  Liberals claim to stand for social justice and then desert the cause of working people to curry favor with corporations and financiers.

Enterprise

Today there are people who call themselves “social entrepreneurs” or “double-bottom line capitalists”.  These are people who want both to make profit and do social good.  There are also “triple-bottom-line capitalists” who want to make profit while doing social good and helping the environment.  These are people who see enterprise as a potential force for social good and justice, but not all by itself left to its own devices.  For them, melding enterprise and justice takes a special approach to enterprise and justice. 

In fact, traditionally many business people and many conservatives have argued that enterprise should be a source of justice.  They have argued that businesses do not have just stockholders (those who own the business), but also stakeholders.  The stakeholders are everyone on whom the business impacts.  Business has an obligation to help and not harm these people.  It is their “social” or “community” duty.  This view, though traditional in many respects, is often disputed today based on the logic that a business’s moral obligations are primarily (some would say only) to their stockholders, the people who have put their wealth at risk for the company.

Aside from the focus today on raising stock prices as the core moral obligation of business, there is a significant change in what constitutes enterprise.  Enterprise used to mean producing physical goods and services some of which people actually needed and not just desired.  These are things like food, clothes, shelter, and safe bank accounts.  In this case, enterprise and possible social good or ill are clearly closely interlinked.  There have been and still are arguments over how fairly enterprise, left to its own devices, distributes these needed products and services.  Some argue that free markets lead to the best possible such distribution and others that it does not.

However, today enterprise often means producing and selling non-physical instruments of speculation, not physical goods and services.  People can buy stock in a company because they believe the company makes high quality goods and, thus, that it will be a successful company over the long haul.  Indeed, this is how a person like Warren Buffet invests.  But they can also buy stock in a company because they simply believe that the stock price will rise regardless of the quality of the goods produced or the long-term prospects of the company.  A company’s executives can manipulate the short-term price of a company’s stock by short-term policies that have little to do with quality or long-term survival.  People who invest in such companies or on such grounds are speculating.  They are playing a certain sort of game.  They are betting on the short run and hoping that they can get out before the long run turns things sour, as eventually it will when a company is not making intelligent long-term decisions.

Instruments of speculation are things like stocks, bonds, and derivatives when people are using them as ways to “bet” and not ways to support the production of high quality goods and services for all people in society.  When financers risk large amounts of money on financial instruments—like betting whether a stock or commodity will rise or fall within a given time—we well know, from the 2008 recession, that they can enrich themselves but, if their “bet” fails, they can cause great harm to people who were never really in the “game” (e.g., taxpayers). 

Such speculative enterprise practices can be toxic to society if someone or something does not ensure that “innocent” people (e.g., taxpayers) do not pay for the sins (unacceptable risks) of the financiers.  My main point here is that such game-like speculation (really a form of gambling) is a form of enterprise in which the gains and risks to society are quite unpredictable.  Such speculative practices sever any close tie between enterprise and social good, because they do not supply needed products and services.  Rather, they are forms of legalized gambling for wealthy people.  Nonetheless, they are part of a larger trend today to stress short-term gain over long-term gain and to focus on stockholders (and owners of financial instruments) over any stakeholders who might be harmed by such enterprises.

The 2008 global recession was, in my view, primarily caused by “moral hazards” built into these gambling sorts of financial speculation.  A mortgage broker sold a mortgage to someone who could not really afford it and might well default on the mortgage.  The broker collected a fee, but sold the mortgage to a bank, thereby passing on the risk of the buyer defaulting on the mortgage to the bank.  The mortgage broker’s “risk” (on the buyer defaulting on a mortgage he could afford) was no risk at all for the broker.  He could not loss.  He collected a fee and passed the risk along to someone else (a bank).

The bank that bought the mortgage then bundled lots of mortgages (many of them mortgages that were in danger of default) into bonds that they sold to rich investors and investment institutions.  The bank made money from the sale of these bonds (as well as fees for rolling the mortgages into bonds) and again passed on to others the risk of default.  In the end, the bank, too, could only win and not lose.

When the bonds went bad because so many people defaulted on their mortgages, many of the investors and big players in the whole scheme claimed to be “too big to fail” and demanded to be bailed out by the taxpayer.  Thus, for them, too, the risks they took were no risks at all for them.  Someone else paid for them when their risks failed, namely taxpayers or society at large.

There were many other examples of moral hazards in the financial system that ended in disaster in 2008.  Moral hazard is any case where someone takes a risk (makes a bet), but can really only win and not lose, since someone else is set up to pay the price of failure.  Mortgage brokers had a massive incentive to give anyone a mortgage, since they got paid no matter what and the risk that the mortgage would default was passed on to someone else, who also passed it on.  In the end, someone else paid the price of failure.

It is a rare—and moral—human being who will not take a risk when facing a risk where he is guaranteed to win at least something (a fee, for example), but will not have to lose anything if the bet turns bad.  Aside from morality, one reason not to take such risks is that they could endanger society and so harm the risk taker eventually as a member of that society.   In the lead up to the 2008 recession too few people considered morality or even the possible damage they could do even to themselves.  They acted in their short term and morally-suspect self interest.

Now, moral hazard of this sort is something that one would expect both liberals and conservatives would disavow.  They may disagree on how to control it, but they would, one would think, see moral hazard as both a moral and an economic ill for society.  I would suspect that failing to condemn moral hazard is a sure sign of an immoral voter.

I want to broaden the notion of moral hazard a bit.  I want to define moral hazard as making decisions that in the long run damage others in the name of one’s own short-term interests.  Moral hazard in this broadened sense is today more and more built into our economic and political systems. 

A CEO who knows that a decision that will harm his company in the future but will raise its stock price in the present (ensuring a big bonus for himself and a rise in his own stock options) is liable to make the decision and eventually leave the company (often with a “golden parachute”) to let someone else clean up the mess in the future.  The moral hazard here is caused by an obsession on short-term stock prices over long-term results or quality in goods and services.

A President who knows a policy will greatly benefit the economy or society in five years, but cause short-term suffering, cannot push the policy.  The benefit will come too late for his or her re-election in four years.  The moral hazard here is caused by an electorate and politicians who cannot delay gratification or sacrifice short-term gain.

A for-profit college that can only survive through ever increasing numbers of students paying for courses has every incentive to assure students they will learn, but never to give them a bad grade, since then they will not come back as consumers.  In the long run this is bad education; in the short run it is profitable.  The moral hazard here is caused by the conflict of interest between short-term need to keep students as consumers happy and the long-term goal of offering students as learners a high quality education.

For business and politics, the struggle between short-term gain and long-term success (which some short-term gains can imperil) has always been intense.  Obviously no business person or politician likes losing in the short term in order to achieve long-term success, since they may lose their jobs before the long-term success is apparent.  Of course, moral business people and politicians, nonetheless, make decisions based on both short-term and long-terms interests and considerations.  Sadly, there are less of these today, I believe, though, perhaps, there were never a great many.

Society had two institutions that were meant ideally to be separate from business and politics, however much historically they have not been.  They were meant to consider long term gain over short term gain and even to mitigate the possible short-term thinking and excesses of business and politics.  These two institutions were churches and universities.   Churches are meant to take the long view because they were supposed to about more than this life.  Universities were meant to take the long view because they were supposed to be about knowledge developed over long periods of historical time, knowledge that may have implications stretching for into the future.

Today, of course, in the United States and many other developed countries, churches and universities operate more and more like businesses.  Furthermore, they are heavily embedded in local and national politics as they seek government funding and subsidies of all different sorts.   TV and radio are full of preachers seeking contributions and living the life the rich and famous.  Mega-churches compete for “consumers” with sermons and Starbucks in their mega-churches.  University deans and presidents spent most of their time raising money for universities that themselves often compete for “consumers” with each other in terms of how good their amenities are (things like food courts, fancy dorms, and a plethora of available young bodies and beer).  The fact is that today the laity and students are both more and more treated as species of consumers.

Ideological Conservatives and Liberals

In their daily lives, sane people know there are situations where a conservative mind set is called for and situations where a liberal mind set is called for.  Imagine someone who has a garden in a desert.  The garden is lush with green grass and water-hungry plants.  If there is plenty of water available, the gardener, once having gotten the garden into good shape, will take a conservative mind set to the garden.  The gardener will tinker, making small changes so as not to undo the efforts made in establishing the garden in the first place.

But if there is a severe shortage of water, the gardener will know the lush garden is no longer sustainable and that it will eventually die.  The gardener will now take a liberal mind set to the garden.  He or she will make a big system-wide change.  The gardener will engineer a new garden, a garden made up of dessert-based, drought-resistant plants.

If we are playing on a competitive sports team, we expect every team member to gain rewards (status, praise, or money) from his or her own efforts (enterprise).  We do not, in competitive sports, let people win or score points as a way to motivate them to play or to make up for their previous problems in life.  We take a conservative mind set and stress enterprise.  But when hard working players get hurt or are facing a personal crisis, we do all we can to help them, including cutting them slack and covering for them when they are in the game.  We see this as a matter of justice, what we own them as fellow team mates.  We take a liberal mind set.

Sane people also realize that in some situations, where conservative and liberals have to work together, there has to be compromise.  There are times where we have to be pragmatic.  The liberal wants the lush desert garden to go away in order to preserve water for others.  The conservative wants the lush garden to stay in the name of individual freedom.  But they have to live next to each other.  So they compromise: the conservative pays a special “tax” for extra water use; or the conservative designs a better way to capture and use rain water; or the liberal accepts a mixed garden with desert plants shading water-needy plants; or the liberal buys the conservative’s garden, changes it, and the conservative moves to Wisconsin.

But here is the problem: The garden problem is solvable if the conservative and liberal see it as a matter of both of them getting some of what they want.  It is not as readily solvable if the garden and water are viewed as less important than the moral principles for which the conservative and the liberal stand.  If the conservative sees individual liberty as uncompromisable in any circumstances, even if he doesn’t really care about the garden, no pragmatic solution is possible.  If the liberal sees social justice as uncompromisable (for example, believes that individual freedom or the market should never trump other people’s needs), no pragmatic solution is possible.

Of course, liberty and justice are, indeed, moral matters.  There are situations where, for any sane person, one should not compromise the one for the other.  But there are people who so strongly believe that one trumps the other that no compromise is really possible.  These are ideologically-driven conservatives and liberals.  They may, indeed, be morally sincere, but, in the end, they cannot really live with each other in society, save for one circumstance, namely that they agree to live by the outcome of democratic elections.  If they are not so willing, then there cannot be a society, just conflict and, for “true believers”, a battle to the death.

Today in the United State there is an important asymmetry between “real world” conservatives and liberals.  Many right-wing conservatives in the United States believe that all liberals are “traitors” and that the outcome of any election liberals win must be contested at all costs, even up to and including active resistance and maybe revolution.  At the same time, most liberals believe that many or most conservatives are at worse misguided patriots, not traitors.  They seek to defeat them in elections whose outcomes they currently contest in much less militaristic and revolutionary language.  Far right conservatives do not see any liberals as a legitimate opposition, while liberals do see many conservatives in such a light. 

This situation exists in the United States because in reality there is no politically viable “far left”, only a politically viable “far right”.  The far right, of course, often labels every liberal as a “far left”, an insane position for anyone who knows any history or anything about other countries.  The reality is that liberals in the U.S. have a stronger belief in enterprise and markets (mitigated by social justice) than far right conservatives have in social justice.  As such, liberals in the United States already, in this respect, lean further to the right than many conservatives do to the left.  All this is an impossible ground on which to sustain a democracy.

When a society faces major existence-threatening conditions, as we do in the world today with global environmental, population, economic, and religious problems, it is not, in the end, helpful that ideological and non-democratic versions of conservative and liberal world views become themselves existence-threatening conditions for the society.  But that is where we are.  In the United State, the impasse is made deeper by the close connections between fundamentalist religion and some conservative thought and policy, which further moralizes all issues, removing them from pragmatic solutions.

Paradoxes at the Heart of the Conservative and Liberal World Views

There is a paradox at the heart of the conservative world view.  On the one hand, conservatives value individual liberty, free enterprise, and small unobtrusive government.  On the other hand, they see humans, human institutions, and knowledge as fallible; value tradition and the historical wisdom built into current long-evolved practices; and support a republican form of government that constrains the forces of total democracy.  Thus, they often support a top-down authoritarian view that demands a strong tradition-backed leader, institution, or state to enforce behavior, stop social disruption, and mitigate the moral failings of weak individuals.   They end up valuing liberty, small government, and a moralized top-down authority all at the same time.

This paradox does not mean that conservatives are “wrong”.  It just means they have a dilemma with which they must deal.  They must always balance strong individual liberty (and democracy) with strong (even moralized) authority and this can be a hard balancing act at times.

Liberals tend to believe in more direct democracy than do conservatives.  Thus, for them, in ideal terms the government represents an authority freely chosen by the voters.  That authority exists to ensure that social obligations and social justice are enforced, not to restrain the fallible moral natures of humans.  Liberals tend to focus on balancing individual liberty and social obligation, a balance that tends to be supported by direct democracy, since at least half the voters will have less than the other half, and, thus, will have some incentive to socially redistribute wealth as a form social justice.

Liberals do have a paradox of their own, however.  What I have called engineering (large scale, system-wide change) today requires a good deal of social and/or technical expertise.  Such expertise can often and easily run well ahead of the viewpoints and knowledge of the majority of voters in a society.   Thus, liberals can find themselves demanding that voters accept transformations that they do not, in fact, really understand or necessarily support based on their own non-expert experiences and knowledge.  The voter is asked to defer to the “greater knowledge” of the liberal engineer (a paradox of sorts in a direct democracy, where the experts are in the minority) and this is potentially risky.  Further, it is easy to lose the voters’ trust when some such transformations don’t work as planned.

I have treated conservative and liberal worldviews evenhandedly because I have been describing “ideals”, not real world positions.  In the real world these idealized pictures of conservatives and liberals take on specific configurations that are much more complex, inconsistent, variable, and even contradictory than are my idealized descriptions.  In the real world, too, self interest and greed, as well as ignorance, play a strong role that I left aside in my discussion thus far.

My point has been that my idealized descriptions of conservatives and liberals are meant to capture two different ways of being in and seeing the world.  These two ways exist, at some level, in most societies and even other human groupings.   For some people and some societies, they are   ways that are both used though for different purposes and contexts.  For other people and societies, they are seen as uncompromisable viewpoints that must remain consistent, pure, and applicable across the board.  In this case, we do not need self-interest or greed to get implacable conflict, because, then, even in the case of relatively mundane problems—let alone much more significant ones—pragmatic compromise will be out of the question.

A commodity is a relatively inexpensive, widely available product or service.  Modern technologies drive more and more goods and services to become commodities after an initial period in which they are expensive and owned by only a few.  Computers, HD televisions, and cell phones are current examples. 

 Companies in developed countries often attempt to market their products and services as “special” in some way and not as commodities.  Only thus can they can charge more and earn more profit, since commodities are the source of stiff price competition and low profit margins.

 Today most college degrees are commodities.  College courses and credits have long been standardized.  Colleges can and do distinguish themselves by status.  Since courses, credits, and the basic format of a college education are standardized, these high status colleges can only charge premium prices by claiming their faculty are better and their students are smarter (or richer) or that they have august histories. 

 Until recently, there were basically two types of colleges: inexpensive but no or low status colleges and expensive but higher status ones.  The former were commodities and the latter were special products.  There is one wrinkle, though.  Thanks to state subsidies, in the past some colleges were inexpensive but high status (e.g., the University of California at Berkeley).  Offering special products at commodity prices violates today’s current free market principles (“neo-liberalism”) and, in any case, state after state has raised the cost of all public colleges.

 Today, many commodity colleges are over-priced thanks to a loss of state subsidies and the cost of research-based faculty.  Let’s call these “old commodity colleges”.  Intense competition is occurring and will increase.  This competition comes from for-profit colleges, distance degrees, and cut-rate extension programs operated by many colleges far from their home campuses.  Let’s call these growing competitors “new commodity colleges”. 

 To the extent that an old commodity college carries no great distinction and is more expensive or less convenient than a new one, it will eventually lose in competition with new commodity colleges.  These latter can be cheaper and can be run more efficiently by evading many of the constraints old commodity colleges face because of lower course loads, higher salaries, and tenure.

 Old commodity colleges will be caught in a bind.  They already lose top (and top paying) students to specialty colleges that can offer prestige at a high price (and have little need for innovation, since prestige will do).  One new threat from such elite colleges is that they will, more and more, offer relatively cut-rate distance or extension versions of their degrees and name.  This will allow more students to evade old commodity colleges and gain some (though reduced) prestige. 

 Old commodity colleges will lose other students to new commodity colleges which offer low cost, flexibility, and customization, though no prestige.  Why pay premium for X-State College when you can get the same standardized content and credits—often in a more flexible and customized format—from a cut-rate competitor?

 What is an old commodity college to do?  Does it have any advantages over the competition?  Yes.  It has beer nearby in the local college town and it has warm social bodies in the dorms.  These are two things e-learning cannot supply.  Undergraduates—the people who pay the bills—want socialization with other students.  But this is not much of a leg up when it is only coupled with today’s standardized courses, credits, lectures, and majors.  There are other ways to get beer and bodies.

 So beer and bodies are not near enough.  One thing an old commodity college could offer is socialization that goes much deeper than beer and bodies.  Such a college could offer learning-centered, collaborative, problem-focused, passion-driven social groups with a shared mission.  More on this later.

 In my view, many old commodity colleges will survive only if they become specialty products.  But they have to become specialty products of a special sort.  Since, for the most part, they cannot offer the high prestige of elite colleges, they must either stay close to commodity pricing (while offering more than a commodity) or offer some other type of distinction than the prestige of elite colleges.

 As old commodity colleges become new specialty colleges, they must remain place based.  Indeed they must greatly enhance their place-baseness by creating a distinctive and alluring physical and social space devoted to learning.  Yet they must also bring the virtual, the imaginary, and the distant world into full interaction with this real place-space.  This mixed model, mixing the real with the virtual is a big advantage over new commodity colleges that offer only e-learning or unattractive physical spaces and shallow face-to-face social spaces.

 Collaboration and collaborative problem—forms of cognitive socializing, the mixing of minds and not just bodies—have to be at the center of the college.  Collaboration can no longer be seen as a form of cheating.  Today’s young people want to learn and play socially.  Today’s workplaces want people who can collaborate on teams that are smarter than the smartest person on them.

 Finally, and most importantly, standardization must go.  Standard courses, credits, disciplines, and majors need to disappear.  So do grades.  Grades are, in any case, meaningless in an age of grade inflation.  One thing that most certainly must change is time.  The goal has to be mastery not the time it takes to achieve it.   It matters not whether a student with a good head start or lots of time masters something in six weeks and another student, without such a head start or time, takes six months.  What matters is commitment to mastery.

 Now claiming that the goal is mastery is controversial.  We are all aware that many students today view college more as a social and networking experience than a cognitive one.  So it will be tempting for old commodity colleges to offer “camps” for young people, with college work a not too serious side attraction.  Indeed, many colleges for many students today are just this.  But this is neither a moral thing to do, nor one that will lead to much profit for most colleges, since setting up good camps is actually another business altogether.  Creating good camp colleges can be—and will be—done better by entertainment organizations.

 Here is a well kept secret: deep learning is a drug for humans.  It is as attractive and addicting as real drugs and sex.  It fills a primal need in humans.  Schools have obscured this by making learning noxious, as they would with sex if they taught that.  However, out of school, popular culture has learned that learning is sexy and sells.  Popular culture activities like the card game Yu-Gi-Oh and the video game Civilization are as complicated and hard as anything most kids see in school these days.  They require effort, commitment, persistence past failure, lots of practice, and eventual mastery.  They also make tons of money.

 Now this is the new product old commodity colleges could offer: Allow students to recover from what schools have done to them.  Allow them to engage in learning and mastery as addictive as good video games.  Allow students to rediscover their learning muscles and rediscover (something they knew as babies) that learning is, along with sex and food, a primary need.  Allow them to find new identities as producers, knowers, and movers and shakers in the world.  This is a different sort of camp.

 Old commodity colleges cannot offer the prestige of elite colleges.  But they can offer a “specialty” customized education that elite colleges need not.  And then they can beat the e-learning colleges through building a face-to-face community worth being in that still draws fully on the virtual, the digital, and the distant.  Let’s call such colleges of the future “new specialty colleges” to separate them from the old specialty colleges like Harvard, Smith, and Vassar. 

 This niche is virtually unfilled.  So the first colleges into it will thrive.  However, given the inertia of colleges and the lure of standardization, the niche may never be filled.  In that case, the day may come where Kaplan (new commodity colleges) and Williams (old specialty colleges), and their respective ilk, will be the last colleges standing.

 There are lots of ways colleges could innovate and we should encourage lots of experimentation.  I do not want to propose one standard way to engage in innovation.  I will, however, make some suggestions about one shape innovation could take.  But first let me say that like most innovation, there is an initial high cost to development and implementation.  After that, costs go down and will, indeed, be significantly less than today’s old commodity colleges, especially those with lots of research-based faculty.

 Let’s call the college I propose “New College”.  It could be any old commodity college with vision and guts.  First New College tells its students that there are billions of things worth knowing and studying in the modern world.  Furthermore, information and knowledge transform rapidly in the modern world.  The old model of education is based around everyone knowing the same things: “What every educated person should know”.  This model is profoundly out of date and never worked that well anyway (All Americans do know the same thing about science, for example, namely nothing). 

 At New College, every student must find his or her passion or passions.  In the domain of their passion, students will work with others to achieve mastery.  This will require “grit”: passion plus persistence.  Students must also demonstrate that can teach others in their domain of passion and that they can create new learning tools for people in that domain. 

 They must demonstrate, as well, that they are prepared to learn new things from others who have mastered other domains of passion when they need to.  That is, they must show they are expert learners and well prepared not just for future learning but a lifetime of new learning and mastery.  Finally, they must demonstrate that they can pool their expertise and mastery with other people’s to engage in collaborative problem solving that requires a team with different specialties but the ability to integrate skills and domains of passion (areas of expertise).

 The old model was about everyone knowing the same things so that people could share some common ground as citizens.  The new model is about people sharing abilities to learn, teach, listen, and collaborate.  Arguably these are the foundations for national and global citizenship in the 21^st Century.

 New College will ban classes or courses.  It was never the case that everything worth learning could or should be taught in the same time-frame and format.  Courses are based on professors giving students information they can now look up in minutes on the Internet (and often find out, in the process, that there is more controversy than the professor told them).  Courses are based on the idea that because a group of students is sitting together in the classroom they all need the same thing and can proceed to learn in the same way.  This is next to never true.

New College will ban majors.  Majors are usually named by discipline labels like anthropology and biology.  These labels now name only budgetary departments, not coherent fields of study.  Real disciplines are lower-level units (e.g., medical anthropology or genetics) than academic departments.

Furthermore, as we all know, there are today a great many new disciplines and sub-disciplines arising all the time (in part caused by changes in technology).  And a great many of the most productive faculty do not work “in their discipline” alone but as part of teams that do not just pool different disciplines but integrate them into new forms of shared language and methods of inquiry.

New College will ban grades or make transcripts with grades on them only for the convenience of students seeking to go on to traditional graduate programs.  People do not develop “grit” (passion + persistence) because of grades and grades can kill passion.  Mendel was in the monastery garden growing peas and discovering the foundations for modern genetics because he had failed the qualifying examination for teacher certification.  

New College will know that failure is necessary to learning; it is often something to seek; and never failing is a sign of a domain not worth learning.  A low cost of failure encourages risk taking, exploration, and hypotheses testing.  All are necessary for innovation, as well as for deep learning and mastery.  New College will never punish failure.  It will only punish a lack of persistence past failure, a lack of effort, a lack of being proactive about more learning (including at times seeking more failure), and a lack of collaboration.   In turn, facile successes will not be rewarded at New College.

Courses will be replaced by Missions.  A Mission is a large challenge that requires learning new specialist knowledge and skills.  It is centered on problem solving.  Each Mission is made up of a series of Quests.  A Quest is a specific demand to collect information and knowledge and to develop skills in order to solve a sub-problem that is part of the challenge of the Mission.

There are Missions in many different areas.  Missions are meant to expose students to areas where they may develop a passion for learning.   Missions do not have to be “academic”, though, of course, they can.  All of the following could be Missions: Design a 3D video game that could teach someone something important.  Develop a new professional urban plan for a part of one’s city and defend it to real urban planners.  Develop a functional approach to grammar that is theoretically correct but could be used by teachers in school.  Use mathematics and programming to ensure that a virtual car is programmed to race on any track of any shape.  Develop a simulation that both reflects scientific knowledge and also teaches the public how to think about a complex issue.  Develop art that speaks aesthetically to people but represents mathematical principles that one can explicate using the art.  Use different methods, qualitative and quantitative, to analyze a large corpus of talk and text about current politics in the United States.  Using multi-media, clearly explicate for a popular audience the changing understanding of genetics from Mendel to contemporary biology, with due regard for controversies, new discoveries, and changes in technologies.

Any Mission would be made up of a number of Quests (some of which would be optional or elective).  Quests focus on a specific skill or on knowledge that one needs in order to solve a sub-problem of the big problem that constitutes the Mission.  Or a Quest teaches one how to think about or approach parts of the solution of the big problem. 

Since Quests involve skills, knowledge, information, and the use of inquiry methods they can and should be shared by a number of Missions.  If there are understandings and skills needed across a number of Missions, then these Missions would have some Quests in common.  For example, students will need certain technological, technical, artistic, literary, and writing skills across a number of different Missions.  Missions on urban planning, the causes of economic recessions, and sustainable agriculture might all require certain common Quests dealing with economics.

Quests would often be carried out collaboratively by a team of students working together.  Since many Quests would be shared by different Missions, students in one and the same group may be working on different Missions and have different passions.  They may well have done different Quests and Missions from each other and therefore can and should teach each other, as well as learn from each other.

In every Mission there is one common final Quest.  This Quest demands that students upon completing a Mission must design (often collaboratively) a new Quest for that Mission or re-design a current one.  As part of this Quest they have to test their designs and use their new or redesigned Quest to effectively teach others by mentoring them in the Quest.

Quests could take many forms and students would be offered different resources to do them.  There would be lectures, mentoring, and recommended texts given “just in time” (when students can put them to use) and “on demand” (when students know they need them and why to make progress).  Many quests or parts of them would be done digitally through the Internet, artificial tutors, artificial agents, and e-learning.  Augmented-reality tools and the full array of social media would be used to get students working face-to-face, at a distance, in the real world and in a virtual reality as part and parcel of one Quest. 

 Any Quest or Mission could be finished at any time and take as long or short a time as needed.  When and how Quests and Missions are completed, time-wise, would be determined by students’ needs, backgrounds, and the demands on their time, as well as social negotiation within collaborative groups students have chosen to join. 

 When a student finishes a Mission, the student can be given “course credit” if need be.  But, more importantly, the student would get a “badge” for each completed Mission and each completed Quest.  The badge (much like a boy scout or girl scout badge) would be labeled to clearly indicate the skill or insight the student has achieved.  Each student would have a “passport”.  When the passport filled up with badges, the student would be granted a degree.

 There would be no majors.  Rather, advisors/mentors would work with each student to help them craft a coherent and integrated passport that reflected their passions and how they wanted to display their skills and achievements to the world.  Each student would, in that sense, design their own major, not around a disciplinary or department label, but around a coherent and integrated family of Missions and Quests, whose coherence the student can articulate.  The passport would also clearly show employers what students had learned to do at a level of real mastery.

 Missions are thematic.  They are challenges.  They are meant to allow students to discover a passion.  Missions draw on a large set of often mutually used Quests.  Quests could and should take many different pedagogical shapes to speak to the different styles, talents, and needs of students and faculty. 

 However, a large number of the Quests should be implemented in Learning Labs and via digital and computational media.  For example, students should be able to come to learning Labs where faculty, graduate students, and various technological tools are present to allow students to engage with their Quests.  In this setting, copious data can be collected on the learning trajectories of the students.  Some tasks within a Quest can be done on, automated by, and evaluated by a computer or via students networked in a system.

 Students today often play video games in LAN parties. They are together in the same space, networked together to play a multiplayer game in competition or collaboration with each other.  The game (and mentors) can readily collect information about what each player is doing, how they are performing, and even how they are responding to feedback and failure.  When the session is over everyone knows who has done well and who needs to learn more.  Surely we can design LAN parties for other forms of learning.

 There is no reason why some Quests—for example aspects of algebra—could not be done via artificial tutors.  These today can customize instruction and even sense and respond to several emotions that learners are feeling.  Such tutors could be in every dorm and library and students could complete Quests or tasks for Quests on their own time and at their own speed.  Artificial mentors, not just tutors, are on the way—for example for using digital storytelling to learn programming.  These mentors offer the sorts of suggestions and guidance that good real mentors do.

 Besides Learning Labs and artificial tutors and mentors, New College would design and implement, for many Missions or for coherent combinations of Missions, what I have elsewhere called “passionate affinity spaces”.  A passionate affinity space is an interest-driven group organized on the Internet (though members sometimes meet each other face-to-face in the “real world”) where people of different ages and different degrees of expertise organize to produce, participate, and design, not just consume and spectate. 

 Today passionate affinity spaces are organized around nearly any interest one can name.  People with a passion for an endeavor, challenge, or cause come together to teach and learn from each other.  Newcomers and people who have not yet or may never develop the passion can also use the site as a resource.  Some people use the site only intermittently and for special purposes, others live in it for a long time and see it as an important community to which they belong and contribute.

 New College will help design and implement such passionate affinity spaces for students to use as sites for help with Quests and Missions.  Such sites would contain a group of people devoted to the knowledge and skills connected to a Mission or a coherent related set of them.  Further, students can stay in the site and serve as an advanced teacher or mentor for others.  Graduates of New College would be allowed to stay in and contribute to such a site for as long as they wanted. In this way they would become a long term participant in New College.

 It is important that an assessment model—a model of evidence for learning—be incorporated into each Quest and Mission.  There should be no final tests.  Quests and Missions should be built in such a way that finishing them guarantees learning and mastery.  Good video games are already built this way. 

 Good video games are designed in terms of levels.  Each level requires players to practice a good deal, deal with failure, and persist until certain skills are mastered.  Mastery is displayed by finishing the level.  Often a level ends with a “boss fight” that tests whether the player has mastered the skills of the level in a high degree and whether the player is prepared for new learning on the next level.  Each level ratchets up skills and integrates them in such a way that by the end of the game one is sure that finishing is a good signing of having mastered the game.  This is the model of assessment by “Evidence Centered Design” (ECD) and it has been applied far beyond video games to learning in schools and workplaces.

 The role of faculty changes at New College.  Faculty design and help run Missions and Quests.  They work with each other and students to design more Missions and Quests.  They allow students to modify and transform Missions and Quests.  And they allow them to teach and mentor each other. 

 Faculty offer mentoring and help (including over instruction) on a “just in time” and “on demand” basis.  So a given faculty member might be responsible each year for helping to sustain one or two Missions, a set of Quests, and one passionate affinity space.  Graduate students would play the same role.

 How is all this cost effective?  Though expensive to initially implement, in the end the New College system will be cost effective.  Faculty will be able to integrate their research interests closely with their role as mentors, since learning will be based on problem solving.  Students will teach and mentor each other.  They will also help to design and re-design the curriculum (Missions, Quests, and passionate affinity spaces).  Missions and Quests will be used over and over across time with earlier students helping later ones.  At the same time, both faculty and students will continually improve the design of the Missions, Quests, and passionate affinity spaces.

 Many of the Missions and Quests would be available to off campus students via e-learning, often done with on-campus students.  Successful Missions and Quests—as well as passionate affinity spaces connected to them—could be marketed to other colleges.  Students from other colleges—even in other countries—could participate with New College students in given Missions, Quests, and passionate affinity spaces.

 New College would soon become a specialty brand and no longer a commodity.  It would not carry the prestige of old elite colleges.  But it would carry a new prestige.  This prestige would be connected to students being able to develop and demonstrate passions, problem solving, mastery, innovation, and 2st Century skills all customized to the unique identity the student wants to present to the world as he or she starts on a career and life trajectory.