Stephen Downes

Hollis Robbins gives us a great article comparing Friedrich Hayek's 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society with his 1949 The Intellectuals and Socialism as analyses of the centralization and standardization of university curricula. "Read together, the 1945 Hayek explains uniformity as the product of a bureaucratic system that destroys local knowledge by demanding interchangeable units. The 1949 Hayek explains uniformity as the product of an intellectual class converging on fashionable ideas." The problem with the 1949 Hayek is that it "cannot explain why universities are doing the same thing everywhere, when there's no ideology involved." And that's what we're seeing today. It's not ideological conformity. It's "a system that has destroyed its own capacity to adapt. This is the world we're living in, until critics start noticing the problem is not ideology but centralized planning." It reflects the convergence of a university system around standardized curricula at the expense of local knowledge. Obviously I don't think this is the whole analysis, but this is a big part of it.