Shantytown or Temple: Education & the Gold Rush Then and Now
by Rebecca Armstrong
“Well, I suppose you would like to know what I am doing in this gold region. I will try to tell you what my work is here in this muddy Place. All the kitchen that I have is four posts stuck down into the ground and covered over the top with factory cloth - no floor but the ground. This morning I awoke and it rained in torrents. Well, I got up and I thought of my House. I went and looked into my kitchen, the mud and water was over my shoes so I could not go into the kitchen to do any work today. …I felt badly to think that I was destined to be in such a place. I wept for a while and then I commenced singing and made up a song as I went along. My song was this: to California I did come and thought I under the bed I shall have to run to shelter me from the piercing storm.”
[letter from Mary Ballou, boardinghouse keeper, California Gold Rush, 1852]
150 years ago or so we witnessed a rush to profit, the likes of which have not recurred until this decade. Then it was a rush to mine the caves and rivers of the west for gold. Now it is the rush to mine the rivers of federal student loan money that continue to gush forth, inviting prospectors to set up camp in the same hasty, slipshod fashion that characterized the miserable habitations of the California 49ers. Those who did not prospect directly for gold grew fat by servicing those who did. Some things never change. When it was all over what was left fell promptly into ruin since nothing had been built to last.
There is a dark irony when one looks now at what is left, for instance, of Corinthian College; when “Corinthian” used to stand for the noblest of structures, iconic columns from the late classical antiquity that held up such majestic structures as the Temple of Asclepius, the Temple of Zeus, and the Hadrian Library of Athens. This contemporary gold rush will leave nothing behind but empty office cubicles, debt, disappointment, and reams of legal paper.
Interestingly, almost no one is looking very closely at what it is that is actually being offered for sale in the current gold rush and how likely it is to last. When you get right down to it, what prospectors like Corinthian College, Ashford University, Arizona State University, Phoenix University and the like are selling are online courses. But these, the actual substance of what’s for sale, are being as clumsily constructed as were the hovels of the gold rush miners. Once the floods have subsided and the dust has blown away, it will be disheartening to examine the rubble of what was actually being passed off as “higher education.”
Let me say that I have, in fact, encountered a few online courses that were actually well built. I’ve even struggled to build a few of my own and have, for a handful of years, endeavored to bring my design skills to the service of institutions who were supposed to be building them. It surprised me to discover that I was treated with all the enthusiasm that a Parisian decorator might have encountered in the mud-soaked valleys of the Sierra Nevada among the rough-and-ready miners. “Just slap ‘em up and move to the next one,” was the general direction I received.
Most attempts on my part to bring well-researched design improvements to the construction of these courses were met with contempt, annoyance, evasive maneuvers, or outright resistance. In vain I tried to describe the vast differences between face-to-face and online course design and the necessity of taking the time to think through what it was that students were actually supposed to achieve in the process of assimilation, application and assessment. To no avail; it was all about getting the courses up and moving on to the next one before somebody else laid claim to that particular parcel of subject matter. Which is a great pity, since there may be an aftermath in which the courses will be the only thing left standing. How gratifying if they actually would remain standing and retain some value when the rest of the enterprise has imploded. But that will not be the case with the vast majority of these online courses. They will simply be scrapped, deleted from the servers, or languish like the rude structures of yesteryear, until digital decay claims their bytes and they sink into incomprehensible data bits.
This is not the first time I’ve experienced this feeling of futility in the face of forces much larger than the cry for excellence. Back in my early 30’s I was part of a select group of artists plucked out of obscurity to participate in the National Arts Education Research Center (NAERC), a well-funded experiment to make the arts more accessible in the classroom by training artists to essentially translate the research about arts-in-education and then bring that research to classroom teachers.
The training I received was transformative. I was amazed at the amount of research that was out there and also amazed at how difficult it was to penetrate the jargon and discover what it was that was being tested and how those results might be applicable to the ordinary classroom experience. It was no wonder that most classroom teachers despaired of doing anything more than handing out crayons and paper, or leading the class in a half-hearted rendition of America the Beautiful. Comprehending the deeper principles behind the art experience and having a feel for how to weave them into the basic curriculum required extensive personal activity and reflection within at least one of the artistic fields, and the freedom to experiment and fail and revise and finally succeed. Classroom teachers were never given the luxury of that kind of time or latitude.
After my training by the NAERC I was assigned to a variety of classrooms over a four-year period where I worked with teachers to design learning activities in support of reading, math, history, or science in which the arts became the vehicle for discovery. Purists may recoil at the thought of using the arts as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves, but I was delighted that no poem would be stabbed through the heart like a butterfly on a pin and subjected to the agonizing query: “Now, class, what does this poem mean?” No song would be analyzed for its use of metre or rhyme, but would become the vessel that carried students into fertile conversations about revolution and the human spirit in South Africa. No play would be pulverized by tedious dissection of character motivation, but students would grasp the power of irony on the fly as they recreated guerilla theater of the Prague Spring. The arts became alive as the students moved into them in search of new knowledge.
However, in follow up visits to these classrooms two years later we witnessed the grim reality that as soon as the artists were no longer working directly with the classroom teachers the arts stopped finding their way into the curriculum. While it was easy for a teacher to collaborate while an expert was present it was an entirely different matter to attempt to plot a course on one’s own, and the burdens and rigors of large class loads, ever more tests, and dwindling resources forced them back to their old methods. Designing arts-based curriculum, it turns out, requires artists trained to design them.
This is the same phenomenon that is now occurring in online education. Good online courses require instructional designers trained in the special knowledge of that field. Most courses are being built by teachers not trained in the special requirements of distance learning. It is to their credit that they are willing to attempt it at all, as it is grossly unfair to ask someone to put together an online course who has never done it and has no background in visual design, no knowledge of the technical limits and possibilities of the online environment, and no inkling of the recent research in cognition science.
So long as this continues what you will get is very much what the 49ers got – makeshift shanties cobbled together with this-and-that and no possibility of standing up for long. Since the inhabitants of these current shanties - the students – are just as eager to get at the gold and get out as fast as the for-profit educational outfits are eager to get them in and out, no one is complaining about the less-than-ideal accommodations. But I say it’s a pity. I say we should still aim to build edifices of learning that have the grace and staying power of the Parthenon. That they will live in cyberspace is no excuse for flimsy construction. If you build it well, it will make a difference . . . and there’s a study to back that up. I researched it.
R.D. Armstrong
Mary Ballou letter retrieved 5/15/2015 fromhttp://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6512/