[Oer-community] Is MIT thinking of putting its OCW material behind a pay wall?

[Stephen Downes]

  I think the point being made is that education is not something that 
is simply bought and sold, as a commodity, but rather something a 
society does to advance its own objectives. That it is, therefore, 
something too important to be left to the whims of the marketplace. And 
that the content of an education cannot be determined merely by economic 
pressures, but by the wider set of values of a society as a whole.

A private company traded on the stock exchange is required by law to 
maximize profits for shareholders. This often works to the detriment of 
society as a whole - McDonald's, for example, maximizes profits by 
selling people fat and salt, while Coca Cola maximizes profits by 
selling people flavoured sugar water. We allow this not because it's 
more efficient, but because as a society we respect the choices people 
make. But my the same token, we do not allow people to bottle and sell 
poison as food. If allowed, free enterprise would undoubtedly offer such 
a product (generally to be given as gifts, I would imagine). But the 
social harm that would be caused outweighs the profits to be made.

Most societies have decided that the management of education is too 
important to be left to private enterprise, that there would be too many 
poison pills to swallow, and that society would be irreparably damaged 
as a result. That even if private enterprise were to be able to manage 
education more efficiently, the product offered would be harmful to 
society. The United States is almost unique in its belief that these 
services can be managed by private enterprise. The current crisis in the 
U.S. education system is good evidence of that, as private educators 
attempt to finish off the public education system it has been attacking 
for some decades now.

I get frustrated when I see the same sort of argument posted here or in 
similar forums (there was a recent troll in WikiEducator to the same 
effect recently). Education isn't about making money; the provision of 
an education isn't about charity or philanthropy. The large cash 
donations provided (with strings) by people like Gates or Zuckerberg do 
more harm than good. The fostering of an educational resources regime 
where publishers and academics produce, and everyone else consumes, at 
once promotes their business objectives and undermines our social 
objectives and disempowers learners as a whole.

We need and must recognize that open educational resources are at once 
both the product and the property of those people who are intended to 
learn from them. That our role, as a wider society, ought not to be to 
shower free resources upon people, in the hope of somehow lifting them 
up and maybe enlightening them, and certainty of creating lifelong 
customers, but rather in the fostering of a social, legal and cultural 
climate where people are empowered and encouraged to create and share 
artifacts of their own learning. To do any less is to cheat them not 
only out of their own education but also of their own social values and 
cultural heritage. The goods Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg would deliver 
will not do as a substitute for a free and freely-formed curriculum, no 
matter what the price.

-- Stephen


On 10/11/2010 7:05 PM, Steve Foerster wrote:
> Franco wrote:
>
>>> Education is an important service,
>> Education is a service? It is a huge mistake to consider
>> education as a market commodity: Education is a human right.
> These aren't incompatible positions.  One describes the level of
> importance it has.  The other explains how it can be provided most
> effectively.
>
> -=Steve=-
>
>


-- 
Signature 	Stephen Downes
Research Officer, National Research Council Canada
100 rue des Aboiteaux, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada E1A 7R1
Website: http://www.downes.ca ~ Email: stephen at downes.ca 
<mailto:stephen at downes.ca>

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