From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jan 14 2002 - 02:31:40 MST
Robert, what are you objecting to?
I'd said, as you show (I paraphrase slightly):
>> Those sorry offspring at X-class-universities
>> who have Y
>> heaped upon them
>> without suffering
[that is, a delimited sub-set of those at X-class; Some not All; Iba nor Aba]
>>will come to no good
You retorted:
>Hey! I went to an X [on the basis of]
>precious little "inherited Y"
So, you're a member of the sub-class I excluded--and you managed to come to
no good even so. :)
>I actually think much of the accumulated wealth
>in the endowments goes into salary competition for the accumulation of Nobel
>prize winning professors.
I don't see the relevance to my point, which was that those who bleat about
`evil' communistic/socialistic `free' education for all never seem to worry
about `virtuous' rich-parent-pays-&-kid-gets-in-`free' education.
(You'll see of course that this leaves out of the discussion entirely other
groups such as the virtuous poor who hock their futures to a loan, or work
while studying, etc.)
In fact, one could agree with me and go further, asserting that the
inherited wealth currently used by the rich to pay for the education of
their offspring might instead be sequestered (as a wise donation,
naturally, not an enforced tax, from the rich--who wish to see their kids
spared the spoiling horrors of getting unearned benefits) for the precise
purpose of hiring terrific teachers... but not just for the rich people's
kids.
Obviously that is not a strict consequence of my comment, and is vulnerable
to the usual objection that spreading such a bonanza among the masses would
water it down to the point where *all* excellent teaching would be lost.
More saliently, it could be used to create, as you say,
>in the age of the internet, [...] an opportunity that
>sould become more distributed. With more people taking classes from
>the real sages in a discipline educations would have a higher quality
>and a lower cost.
Yes indeed. In fact I'd like to see a whole range of educational methods
trialed, from the classic anarchistic Summerhill method (which doesn't work
all that well, alas--I have several friends who either went to such places
or taught there) through agoric hire-your-own-teacher to ferocious boot
camps of the mind.
Cheers, Damien
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