Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

“The Anti-College is on the Rise“, Molly Worthen’s op ed in today’s NYTimes, describes an emerging disenchantment with higher education among many of today’s students… a disenchantment that COULD restore our democracy and change our perspective about the purpose of schooling.

In a comment I posted, I wrote:

Ivan Illich would be glad to see that his ideas about deschooling society are finally getting some traction. It is too bad that it took decades of “rankings” based on “hard data” assembled by US News and World Report and the US government’s obsession with equating the quality of colleges with post-graduate earnings to get students to see the pointlessness of getting into a rat race that ultimately leads to high debt and little purpose.

If the “quality” of a college or university is defined by easy to gather metrics devised by a magazine who used its rating system to boost its circulation… or defined by the earnings of its graduates… we are allowing greed to prevail. The colleges described in Ms. Worthen’s essay, which include my older daughter’s alma mater Evergreen State College, place a premium on independent thinking, self-directed learning, and humanity. We need those qualities more than we need anything else nowadays.