[p2p-research] In the future...the cost of education will be zero...Mashable

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/29/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I certainly have, at times, shared this view.  But I doubt it is true at
> present.  My guess is that, in the main, people do not cling to bad
> systems...they rationalize the good they do and wait for proof of
> alternatives to show they are not contributing fair value.  In the end,
> people mostly acquiece to obsolescence.  It's hard, but it happens.
> Universities have historical value.  We gain validity from their past
> students and the accomplishments they achieve.  It is a giant prestige
> network.  Education and learning have little to do with prestige.  The
> challenge is to divorce the two...learning isn't prestige, and prestige
> isn't learning.  So, my idea is to turn old universities into social clubs
> that award membership (fellowship) based on social achievement.  Degrees are
> no longer very real metrics of anything meaningful, but learning is more
> important than ever.  So, split up the prestige component of degrees from
> the earstwhile learning component.

I agree that the present system will be abandoned under pressure of
necessity because it's unsustainable, and I hope at least that the
people running it will allow it to disintegrate as peacefully as did
the Soviet elite 20 years ago instead of making a catastrophic last
stand and launching civil war to defend it.

But as an a fortiori  argument that people (at least the people
running them) cling to bad systems, at the time the present system was
created over a century ago, it was not only not self-evidently the
most efficient way of doing things, it was far worse than the
available alternatives and was imposed on society by a top-down
revolution, mainly because the people who ran the system and benefited
from it saw it as natural.  The present elite are not only clinging to
a bad system as long as they can, they created a system that was bad
from the beginning, and reshaped an entire society to see it as
natural and inevitable.

And things like the DMCA and all the rest of the proprietary culture
regime are examples of their attempt to cling to it as long as they
can.  Of course I hope when they see the untenability of their
position, they'll collapse as quickly as did the Soviet elite.
Creating alternatives and doing everything possible to subvert and
demoralize those people is key.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html