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: Mar 28, 2024 4:33 p.m.

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