My famous cousin

Muggeridge is back in the news, this time on NPR.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/08/1097097620/new-york-times-pulitzer-ukraine-walter-duranty

My paternal grandfather, George Womersley of Sheffield, England, locally famous in his own right for helping organize the Kinder Trespass of 1932, had a first cousin, Malcolm Muggeridge, who was, among other things, a journalist and BBC TV personality. My great grandmother, Ida Booler Womersley, was sister to Muggeridge's mother, Annie Booler Muggeridge. Both were raised in Crooks, Sheffield, the Victorian row-house district where I lived as a small child.

He's my first cousin, twice removed. A tiny quantity of shared DNA. Probably that high forehead, which my grandfather and father also shared. 

Luckily, my hairline is not receding quite as fast as theirs did.

In a very full life, Muggeridge was also at different times a spy, for M16 during WWII, an army intelligence officer, a college teacher, an early advocate for racial and caste justice in India, and an author of various novels and plays, none outstanding successful but most published or staged. He spent many years in India as a young man and in early middle age, meeting and corresponding with Gandhi; later in life he was responsible for introducing Mother Theresa to the west with a book and several TV shows. He was great friends with George Orwell, sharing some elements of his philosophical outlook, and met and interviewed many of the great men and women of his times.

He was also a womanizer, a groper, a serial cheater on his wife Kitty, and alienated or insulted most of his friends at one time or another. 

The general verdict on him is that he was brilliantly erratic, yet mostly oblivious to whatever good or harm he did to those around him. Until old age, when he mellowed considerably.

The Ukrainians don't hold any of this against him. Together with Garath Jones, he is one of two holders of the Ukrainian Order of Freedom (awarded posthumously) for infiltrating Ukraine during the Holodomor and penning articles that revealed the chaos of Stalins terror-famine and its death toll to the west.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/02/exposing-stalin-famine-in-ukraine-muggeridge-1933

He shared the family trait for dementias of one form or another and died of it in 1990. 

Hopefully I don't inherit that trait. 

Speaking truth to power, though...

Remote learners not learning

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/opinion/college-university-remote-pandemic.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Guest%20Essays

An excerpt:

"Ms. Capizzi’s comments echo those of the sociologists Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, who in their 2014 book, “How College Works,” found that students learn when they’re motivated, and “the strongest motivation to work on basic skills comes from an emotionally based face-to-face relationship with specific other people — for instance, the one-on-one writing tutorial with a respected professor who cares about this student’s work.""

Hahnian advice to a former student

 

Some of our former students were complaining on FacePlant about the picture above. 

Said one, and I quote exactly, right down to the missing semi-colon, "I always knew my degree would be worthless one day, this picture is proof."

Well OK, then. Not a happy camper, obviously. 

This hurt a little and so deserved a careful response, and I made one. This is what I wrote:

"Can you read, write, think, and figure at an advanced level? Could you do so, or do so quite as well, before attending college? That's the correct measure. As matters stand in the world of higher education, most degrees are becoming worthless thanks to the kind of race-to-the-bottom competition we are experiencing, particularly in the online institutions. The knowledge, skills, and disposition to conduct reasoned inquiry at an advanced level will never be so, especially as the added students are generally not learning. It's less to do with the extrinsic value of college, especially now that more than half the population will attend, and more to do with the internal process of becoming a fully reasoned human being."

Look, there's no denying that the effective closure of the original campus and the death of its experiential college program is a blow. And not just to our fond memories of the place. There are every few colleges that worked as hard as the old Unity did to provide experiential education. There was good reason for this. Like many if not most of our former faculty, I'm committed to Kurt Hahn's vision. Experiential education works where other education fails, by engaging with the whole person. It works where other systems fail. 

And that is why the old Unity College is so much better than the new online-only one.

Over the decades there were literally thousands of Unity College graduates that met the standard outlined above that would not have met it or would have had to work much, much harder to meet it had it not been for the experiential approach.

I expect there are very few graduates that even begin to meet this standard now. Online degrees may be more immediately accessible for folks that have jobs and careers and families. But are we sure that these folks are actually adding value to their higher thinking skills? Online degrees are accessible, I'll concede, but is education?

There's a difference. A philosopher's "difference that makes a difference."

I tend to think that if you can get any educational value at all out of an online degree, then you'd have probably done about as well to just read and consider and read and consider some more, all on your own. If you're that kind of self-starter, if you can actually learn and improve with only the minimum of low intensity attention that you get from an online degree, then you probably could have done about as well or just a little worse on your own.

And if you're not that kind of a self-starter? Well, you just bought a credential, didn't you?

Not an education.

Selling credentials in place of education is just a high-end con job, one that will almost certainly get found out sooner or later, generally by the student who suddenly discovers later in life, when it probably most matters to them, that they do not actually have the higher learning skills they paid for.

Students, staff, administrators, and most especially board members who cannot comprehend this difference ought not to be involved in higher education.