Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Surviving the Third Wave of COVID and Beyond

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This should be really obvious, yet there's no small number of people who continue to pretend it's not true: "We cannot commit ourselves to the ideal of equal access to quality education for a global population of 7.8 billion people and simultaneously remain committed to the ideal of small in-person seminars as the paragon of quality education. The two are simply incompatible." Michael Feldstein also writes, tellingly: " I am suggesting—and I believe Paquette is suggesting—that we take a good hard look at how much our standards may be influenced by hidden assumptions of privilege. Why should a 'quality education' for the 21st-Century masses look identical to the 'quality education' of the 19th-Century elites?" I have often argued that demands for "quality" are simply code for "unequal access". This is a good post by Feldstein where he makes that connection explicitly and demands we make a choice. "If you want to understand what that means, then just turn on the TV news for five minutes."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 23, 2024 7:20 p.m.

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