On a phone call the other day with a new friend, Zay, we ended up on the topic of religion. “Did you attend madrasah?” I asked her, referring to the Arabic schools that offer primary and secondary education where subjects like the linguistic characteristics of Arabic and Islamic theology and jurisprudence are taught.

She responded yes, but that she no longer remembers most of the things she was taught there. “I can still write my name in Arabic, I can still write Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem, and oh, yeah, I can still write some of the 99 names of Allah,” Zay said.

Zay’s experience is reflective of people of my generation in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where I’m from. Most only attended madrasah when they were young, before dumping it when they emerged more fully into life. Some, like Zay, told me they ran away from madrasah because their teachers, or ustadhs, flogged them too fiercely. But others told me that they dropped out to focus on their Western education, which they knew was the more economically sound path.

For me, balancing these two schools of knowledge has always seemed normal and natural. Growing up, I attended Western school Monday through Friday and attended madrasah on Saturdays and Sundays. The reason my experience was different was thanks to my father, who spent his life promoting Arabic and Islamic learning in Nigeria. The more I’ve learned about his efforts, the more I’ve realized why it meant so much for him to encourage Nigerians to be proud to speak Arabic, and study at madrasah, rather than let this education fall by the wayside in a country where there is little profitable motivation to pursue it.

In the 1960s, the author’s father established the Arabic studies school at the family house in Iwo. Courtesy of author.

Growing up, I knew, even as much as my mother tried to conceal it from me, that my father had died when I was still in her stomach. As I got older, I started to ask for more information. When I was 10, she pointed at an old landscape photo that hung above the window of our living room. In the picture, my father, a Black, plump man, is standing amid Arab men, smiling. Later, when I was 15, I came across an undated, self-published book my father wrote, titled “The Presence of Arabic Language and the Religion of Islam in Southwest Nigeria.” In the introduction, he observed that Christian missionaries were “snatching the children of Muslims into their English schools in order to get them to abandon their religion and take up their religion or believe in any other religion.”

To understand what he meant by this, it’s important to understand the history of Islam and Christianity in Nigeria. Both are understood to be colonialist ideologies because Nigeria, before it became Nigeria, had its own traditions. But both belief systems have permeated Nigeria thoroughly (today approximately 51% of the country identifies as Muslim and 47% identifies as Christians).

My father was likely writing in the 1950s, at a time when more students began to leave Arabic schools for English schools. The Christian missionaries, my father posited, were able to sell them on a Western education because it promised them more opportunities for advancement. Arabic studies, at the time, only promised to teach a better understanding of how to worship God—seemingly at odds with a growing and modernizing economy. He recognized that if something didn’t change, it would put the study of Arabic and Islam on a path of gradual erasure in the Nigerian educational system. So, he thought: Let me establish something similar in Arabic so as to attract back the Muslim children.

In the 1960s, he began this work, establishing his own Arabic school, which originally started at the family house in Iwo, before it took on a modern classroom-based learning setting in 1962. He called the school, which I later attended, Markaz Shabaab–l–Islam, or the Islamic Youth Center. Other scholars in the region, like Sheikh Adam Al-Ilory, created similar educational programs to build standards and structure around Arabic studies at the time.

The author’s father (middle) with the students of his school. Courtesy of author.

Despite their work, the present structure of the Nigerian education system offers fewer and fewer opportunities for advancement for those who attend madrasah. That’s why, though the number of Arabic students produced every year in its junior schools equals, if not exceeds, the number of students produced in Western schools, the drop-off point that follows for secondary school is steep. Unlike madrasah, Western schooling offers students an opportunity to dream of, for instance, attaining government or white-collar jobs. When students finish madrasah, there should be something equivalent in the system which guarantees them an application to higher institutions, for instance, without sitting for external examinations, to incentivize further Arabic study.

I think about what it would look like if Nigeria valued Arabic education more and rewarded the efforts of those who are still passionate about learning the language. It is not about Islam, the religion, but Arabic itself, because faith is different from knowledge, just as a Western education is different from Christianity. The way I see it, for the Arabic language to have permeated our culture so thoroughly since its introduction in the 11th century through the northern part of the country, disseminating through trade and migration with North African countries like Egypt and Sudan, makes it even more deserving of study. This is especially the case in a complicated region like the southwest, where our Indigenous language—Yoruba—does not share similar phonemes with Arabic.

Though my father’s struggle was a long time ago, his determination inspires me today; he started his Arabic studies at a young age, learning the rudiments of the Qur’an from his paternal grandfather, Sheikh Bukhari. To learn modern Arabic, he traveled to different Arabic-speaking countries. His first trip, to Saudi Arabia in 1942, came at a time when such a trip necessitated taking camels and horses. When such transportation was not possible, he trekked on foot. What made it worth the struggle? I think the answer is that faith and a thirst for knowledge can be chronic.

Before I read my father’s book, I was unconsciously starting to throw myself wholly into Western education, because that’s understood to be the path to thrive in the country. But his writing has helped me recognize how important it is to not throw away his work, and this legacy of being a student of two schools of knowledge.

The final pages of my father’s book include three photographs. The first is a group picture of my father and his first set of students at the Islamic Youth Center. Tiny in the picture, he looks way younger than the photo my mother first showed me of him. The second picture is of him, flanked by older men, robed in Agbada, embroidered, traditional Yoruba attire. All of them wear caps and firmly-knotted turbans. The caption under this picture reads, “a picture taken by friends and well-wishers as send-off for Al-Hadj Ahmad Muhaly Al-Bukhary on his trip to Mecca and some Arab countries.” The third picture is an isolated picture of the first building in the school my father established. A wooden signpost rests against the wall of the building, the door and the windows shut. The caption below the picture reads, “Here is the picture of Islamic Youth Center in Iwo.”

Staring at these pictures, I wonder if my father knew that all his hard work would make a difference. But the more I look, the more I am certain he knew that the school he built would. It was his way of ensuring that he could share his wisdom and teachings with generations to come—offering inspiration to me and others who continue to matriculate through that door captured in the photograph.

The post My Father, the Madrasah, and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California kids, do you follow the news about the culture wars over the boards that oversee your schools?

If you do, you’ll see these wars portrayed as political contests between groups that want to take education in different directions. You’ll see reports about loud conflicts between progressives and right-wingers, and fights between parents’ groups and teachers’ unions.

But you won’t hear much about the role of students in these debates. Because there isn’t one. School boards are meetings of adult politicians; kids are rarely even present (much less heard) in those loud and angry rooms.

You might think not having to listen to grownups yelling is a good thing. It’s not. There’s an old adage in politics: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

That’s cynical, but so are your parents and teachers. For all their performative battles over your schools, the adults in your lives share a unity of purpose in the education wars.

They all want to trample on your already very limited rights as children. And they want to prevent you from having control over your own education.

They just attack from different flanks.

On the right, conservative parents and their political allies seek to take away your right to read what you want. Groups with Orwellian names—like Moms for Liberty—are pursuing bans on books and curricula. (Note to you kids: “Orwellian” refers to George Orwell, the sort of satirical author that grown-ups, right and left, are trying to keep out of your hands.)

Now, you may not care about books, but their censorship influences more than just what you read. Banning books limits what your teachers can teach, and which of your questions they can answer. The right is particularly interested in limiting what teachers can tell you about the most hot-button topics, like race and sex. Maybe you think parents are just trying to protect you, but this sort of paternalism always leads to the erosion of more rights.

The right is also demanding that teachers violate your privacy and make official reports, including to your parents, if you dare deviate from old-fashioned gender norms. I know, it’s crazy. Figuring out your identity is hard enough, in this world of gossipy classmates and social media, without your teachers being required to inform on you. Why can’t these uptight adults live their own lives, and stop inserting themselves into yours?

Now, the political left, to its credit, is fighting back against these intrusions on your privacy. But they have their own ways of trying to limit your freedoms and your educational horizons.

It was groups on the left—especially teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians—who violated your right to an education by closing the schools for more than a year during the pandemic. Those same state and local leaders haven’t done enough to help you recover the learning you lost in the pandemic. Some even maintain that learning loss is a myth, even though most of you are testing below grade level and many of you are chronically absent from school.

And inside your schools, the left is determined to keep you on their prescribed path by limiting your ability to study what you want. Progressive politicians defend outdated traditional school curricula, while adding new requirements that match their political preferences—like labor rights or ethnic studies. Meanwhile, schools rarely provide the technology courses that many of you want. Unbelievably, just 40 percent of high schools in California, home of Silicon Valley, even offer computer science.

Maybe you think this is a budget problem. It isn’t. Spending on schools is way up, even as the number of students declines. It’s just that the new money ends up going to adults—teachers and administrators—and their salaries.

If you still think your teachers, school administrators, and elected officials respect you, let me tell you a story that will disabuse you of that notion.

During the pandemic, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified Schools faced litigation charging that he was violating students’ right to a good education. He responded by saying that students only had the right to a free education. It didn’t have to be good or even useful.

Perhaps even more shockingly, California’s leaders and schools have embraced the superintendent’s position as their own. In fact, the state’s political and educational establishment is opposing a ballot initiative that would give you the right to a “high-quality” education.

Don’t believe it? Here is language from this measure they oppose: “The state and its school districts shall provide all public school students with high-quality public schools that equip them with the tools necessary to participate fully in our economy, our society, and our democracy.”

The establishment says that you, the students, have to accept whatever dismal education, and whatever meager rights, they choose to give you. In arguing against the initiative, they have claimed that a requirement of “high-quality” education will produce a barrage of lawsuits and demands from you.

For your sake, I sure hope they are right.

Now is the time for students to go on the offensive. If adults chastise or punish you for being combative, you can laugh in their faces—and remind them how loud and combative they are being in their own educational wars.

You could try a one-day-a-week student strike, like the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and spend that day trying to find lawyers to sue your school districts. (Lawsuits, and their costs, are what really move school administrators.)

An even better move would be to demand democracy from the Democrats who rule California. Students know more about how education works than most adults. Why shouldn’t you have the right, regardless of age, to vote and run in school board elections?

Indeed, school boards have been so captured—by teachers’ unions and parent groups, and all their conflicts—that there’s a strong case for turning school boards entirely over to students, who could check adult interests.

This may sound radical, but it isn’t. In other countries, teens have parliaments and councils, some with real powers. And even our state has a number of “democratic” schools—like Diablo Valley in Concord, and California Free School in Altadena—where students set schedules and curricula, and vote on how the campus is run.

Also, please remember that grown-ups like to say that you kids need to learn civics, even though no one provides much in the way of civics classes. Turning school boards and school governance over to kids would be the greatest civics lesson possible.

And it’d be far more educational than the current culture wars in our school boards.

The post Let the Kids Rule School Boards appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist group won control of his local Parent Teacher Association when he was in kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary.

This was early 1960s Pasadena, California, during the rise of the Birchers. What happened then and there was a story unfolding in many communities around the country.

In one way, the story was similar to the pressures that schools are seeing now. In recent years, parents and activists—who, in many cases, are the ideological inheritors of the Birchers—have succeeded in getting large swathes of the country to vet what is taught and read in classrooms, to decide which students can use which bathrooms, and to determine what gender pronouns teachers can use with their students.

But there is at least one profound difference between today and the 1960s: the ferocity of response to such pressure campaigns. While today’s culture warriors often get their way in the schools, the Birchers ultimately failed to capitalize on opportunities like the one in Pasadena.

Why? The counterattacks were too strong. The so-called guardrails protecting democracy were also resilient. When the Birchers made inroads in the media, libraries, and schools more than a half-century ago, they were often stopped, and pushed to the margins. In this Pasadena case, the letter-writer told me, a grassroots effort, which included his mom (who had no apparent history of political activism before this), came together to win back control of their PTA.

His email reminded me how much of the work countering the Birchers occurred out of sight, by parents opposing what they considered an intrusion on their liberties and on their children’s access to a robust progressive education.

It’s this kind of mass mobilization and resistance that’s needed now to defend such ideals as freedom of expression, pluralism, tolerance, and multiracial democracy in America.

The Birch Society was founded in 1958 by 12 white men, mostly Christian and wealthy, including oil and gas magnate Fred Koch, and ex-candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the group’s leader.

But it only exploded into the American consciousness in 1961, when reporters and political leaders revealed to the public that Welch had formed a secret anticommunist society that saw conspiracies proliferating inside the United States. The Birch Society, which numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 members at its height in the mid-1960s, sought to impose its version of Christian morality on American public life. This included giving parents veto power over sex education, giving students easier access to approved pro-“Americanist” texts, and minimizing teachings that they considered antithetical to traditional morality and culture.

In this local work, the Birch Society, while overwhelmingly male in its national leadership, was powered by grassroots efforts by women who used their status as moms to claim a moral order and impose it on schools and communities. Their methods are reminiscent of those used by today’s Moms for Liberty.

Sometimes, the Birchers could win even by losing, inserting their issues into the public square and pushing the conversation in a direction they wished. But more often, the Birchers and their allies lost their fights to take over PTAs and school boards, and to force libraries to stock shelves with conservative tracts. These defeats were fueled by the concerted mobilization of institutions, individuals, and elected officials devoted to repelling the Birch-backed assault on progressive education.

For instance, when Birch leader Laurence Bunker won a seat as a trustee of his local library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Bunker’s own Unitarian pastor, apparently chafing at a radical’s ascent atop the library’s administration, decided to challenge him in the next election. He ultimately assembled a coalition that unseated Bunker.

In other cases, institutions and their leaders organized the resistance. When Birchers and members of the American Legion in Paradise, California, charged that a popular government teacher Virginia Franklin had immersed her pupils in communist ideas (she exposed them to the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee), the community largely rallied behind Franklin. Her principal backed her, the school board cleared her of wrongdoing, the media painted her in a sympathetic light, and the courts later awarded her monetary damages in her lawsuit claiming defamation.

The relatively strong popular conviction that progressive education was a cornerstone of shoring up democracy also helped fend off the Birchers. This kind of education was venerated as a bulwark of democracy and individual rights against the ideas of fascism and communism. Progressive education had seemingly helped the United States survive the Great Depression and win World War II by building a corps of citizens who believed in the power of government to do good, felt devoted to their community, and contributed through military, federal, and volunteer service.

Such a broad-minded education was evinced by American philosopher John Dewey, who promoted his ideas in the early 20th century by establishing the Laboratory School in Chicago and publishing Democracy and Education. To imbue students with the values of democratic citizenship, they would be exposed to a range of ideas and perspectives, learn the importance of social equality and an informed citizenship, and explore both America’s greatest triumphs and its abject failures to live up to its ideals.

Though the Birchers never achieved the revolution in public education they hoped for, they did notch a handful of education-related wins. Notably, in 1962, they arguably secured their greatest victory when they helped elect Max Rafferty as California state superintendent of public instruction. Rafferty had drawn Birchers to his candidacy when he delivered a barnburner of a speech to the school board in the Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada, which borders Pasadena.

Titled “The Passing of the Patriot,” Rafferty’s address charged that the public schools were indoctrinating young minds in the poison of communism. The education system, he complained, was churning out a generation of “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs, whose favorite sport is ravaging little girls and stomping polio victims to death.” Rafferty’s broadsides succeeded in getting voters to turn against the ideals of progressive education in favor of a curriculum that favored pro-American tutorials where students would learn to be “militant for freedom” and “happy in their love of country.”

Such a win showed how, using the banner of parental rights, state power could be deployed to enforce a set of norms and values across public institutions.  And that same playbook—or at least something that reads like the old Birch playbook—has allowed for the rise of an Orwellian regime of bureaucratic censorship today.

But, as emails like the one sent to me this spring demonstrate, organizing, voting, and activism can counter far-right efforts to control public education at the community level.

Championing the idea of progressive education, in the Dewey tradition, is part of the ongoing work of defending democracy. Disinformation, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and economic and racial inequalities are rampant in the United States, making progressive education more relevant than ever.

It is needed, as well, to counter the declining trust in the nation’s democratic institutions and reject the growing intolerance toward people of color, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants.

This type of education can also help foster citizens who can tackle the country’s biggest problems. As one scholar put it, Dewey’s vision of a progressive education was to “produce an inquiring student who could change America.”

Though it is harder nowadays to use “sunlight” to expose the excesses of education extremists, it’s still possible to expose the radical nature of the project. If the extremism can be surfaced as an attack on the free exchange of ideas and facts, then some parents might be convinced to enter the fray to thwart the successors to the Birch movement.

The post A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On a dark, chilly evening in November 1839, a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, convened a party at her friend’s house. That might seem an unremarkable event, but this was not a high-society tea party or wine-tippling book club. It was a bold social experiment. The hostess was the 29-year-old journalist Margaret Fuller, and the guest list was composed of the most finely tuned minds she could collect—minds that nevertheless, by virtue of being women, were barred from attending university. Safely concealed from the prying outside world by the guise of innocent domesticity, they were taking their education into their own hands. They were about to have a “Conversation,” with Fuller leading the way in the informal role of instructor.

Maybe more of us should be having such conversations. With fall approaching, thousands of high-school seniors are in the throes of the fraught “college search,” an anxiety-ridden affair that, for many, culminates in years of astronomical debt. Between the rising cost of higher education, the “devaluation” of degrees, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s shakeup of education—not to mention the culture wars over critical race theory and free speech—there is rising interest in finding other ways to prepare oneself for a rewarding professional and intellectual life. The resourcefulness of Margaret Fuller and her acquaintances—and the accomplishments that followed their budget-friendly, self-engineered education—show us that the foundations of a fulfilling life and career can be built on curiosity and willpower rather than loans.

The premise of a Fuller “Conversation” was simple: anything that wasn’t stale tea party table talk was permitted. There would be no petty gossip, no complaints about children or servants, no exchanging of recipes or sewing tips. And unlike the salons of the time, there would be no men to impress. Instead, the curriculum was an in-depth discussion on fine art, literature, science, politics, or mythology—with corresponding homework in between these two-hour weekly meetings. At the sixth conversation, the women discussed wisdom and the mechanics of art; for the seventh, they wrote, shared, and critiqued their own essays on beauty.

By 1839, Fuller had already made a name for herself as a writer, with publications in distinguished journals such as the North American Review and the Western Messenger. She was trained in the classics, talented as a critic, translated German Romantic literature into English, and was so outstandingly bright that regardless of her gender, she was hailed as something of an authority on anything highbrow. Yet she understood that it wasn’t mere writing talent that had afforded her the rare privilege of a professional life. Fuller had benefited from an extensive education and access to the reading materials and intellectual social circles she needed to cultivate her mind for a productive life, and she wanted to share the additional elements of good connections and directed study with others. She’d worked as a teacher already, having served at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston in 1836 and at Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1837, and the role came as naturally to her as the instinct to combine it with that of an author.

Still, the Conversations had their adversaries: privileged, bookish men who felt threatened by this clever female innovation—which made their prestigious and expensive university educations suddenly not so special anymore. Historian Charles Capper writes that they tried to conceal their obvious sexism behind religious objection—they were “scandalized” by the women’s discussion of Transcendental critiques of Christianity.

The Conversations continued until April 1844. Though only a five-year enterprise, they left a lasting mark, including forming the base material for Fuller’s 1845 feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century. There, she laid out her stern commentaries on the inequalities between the sexes and what needed to be done to remedy them for society’s benefit. The intrepid  educational reformist Peabody, whose home was the site of the discussions, went on to find the first English-language kindergarten in the U.S., in 1860. Sophia Ripley, a fellow feminist and philosopher, went on to become a primary school teacher at a progressive academy, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan, an ambitious Transcendentalist artist, published poetry and children’s books.

The Conversations have also served as a source of inspiration for factions of frustrated women who came after Fuller. Lara D. Burnett of the University of California claims that Fuller’s Conversations serve as the early model for the current phenomenon of podcasts, a technological platform through which creatives in pairs or groups can explore and discuss their niche interests vocally (an especially useful means of expression for modern-day women who are still being barred and/or systematically discouraged from mounting traditional podiums). It’s an equal, open space, where all women are free to participate as either speakers or listeners and can hope to be taken seriously. “Conversations allowed Fuller to be a kind of professor, and allowed her subscribers to participate in a kind of university course, without vetting by those who were determined to marginalize female intellectual work,” Burnett astutely observes. “Similarly, podcasts can, without any gatekeeping, make available to their producers and their listeners the conversational practices of the seminar room.”

Today, women can and do attend university, but the bittersweet reality is that not everyone can afford to partake. In this modern context, underground education is once again prevailing.  One example is the Dark Academia movement, a clothing and lifestyle culture born on TikTok that embraces the aesthetic of a 19th-century academic with some worldly flair. But it doesn’t end at looks. Dark academia appeals most to teenagers who are dissatisfied with their current education, defeated by higher education’s price tag, and have discovered the joys and benefits of self-directed study.

Though a degree is still necessary for certain jobs, it’s not essential for developing an original, critical, and respectful mind. There are always opportunities for full, rewarding, and meaningful conversations. Getting together to debate Sartre or new developments in gender politics can be done in any time period, in any available setting—tuition-free. And whether you do it on Zoom or at a friend’s place, stop and listen for Fuller’s voice, broadcasting through from a long-gone era.

The post Who Needs Student Debt When You Can Get Together for a ‘Conversation’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

All artists exist within a larger ecosystem of creativity. Artist Ward Shelley’s timeline-inspired paintings and prints of interrelated people, places, facts, and events visualize this ever-evolving cultural milieu on mylar. His subjects range from politics and the evolution of science fiction to downtown New York’s counter- and sub-cultures. These works are both complex and beautiful, but they are also unique in part because his gallery prices them based on the arduous, sometimes years-long research required to develop them. This pricing calculation is antithetical to most galleries and artists; typically, until an artist’s own market is truly established, the amount their work sells for is determined by its size.

Like the works themselves, Shelley is more interested in the ecosystem of the arts than in profit. He often makes multiple versions of a painting—and produces and sells editioned prints—as he continues to discover new connections and histories about his subjects. “Sharing information is the most important aspect of making art to me—at times I send hi-res image files of works to those who ask,” Shelley has explained. “I rely on the trust and honesty of friends and peers who ask for files, hoping they won’t turn around and sell the file to a company that will mass produce and sell prints without my knowledge … but I’m willing to take that risk, since I’m more concerned with sharing than selling the information and images I create.”

As an artist, art consultant, and director of the Patty Disney Center for Life and Work at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), my life and work revolve around not just art and its creation but also the economic sustainability of being a contemporary artist. For my colleagues and me, who essentially function as a career services office, that means acknowledging that artists of all disciplines—from music and film to fine and performing arts—enter the art world as entrepreneurs, working as their own managers. Each individual artist must design their own strategy to chart a path to their own definition of success. Some endlessly search for the nonexistent guidebook, while others use the journeys of artists before them as a guide. Most approach lifelong creative careers with endless curiosity and innovation, making it up as they go.

It can be tricky for emerging artists to ascribe monetary value to their work—and to balance the importance of its financial worth with a multitude of other personal, cultural, and creative values. There have been plenty of articles published on the production cost of Urs Fischer’s “You,” a 38-by-30-by-8-foot excavation of the foundation of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise gallery in New York in 2007—$250,000. What is its value, and how does one price (and sell) a hole in the ground? I can’t find the retail price, which isn’t surprising—partly because of the piece’s nature and partly because that’s how the art world works. Until a piece enters the secondary market, and especially if it’s being sold by one of the top 10 galleries, regular people probably won’t be able to find out what it costs. This is one of the reasons the largely unregulated art world appears to be elitist and opaque. That is changing slowly, and in part due to new technology: The online brokerage and search engine Artsy and other platforms make works and prices public and accessible to everyone, even though galleries can still choose not to list artwork prices on the platform.

“Work, Spend, Forget (Dissected Frog Polemic)” by Ward Shelley (2013). Courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Gallery, New York.

Art tends to make headlines beyond art publications only when the market determines astronomical and seemingly absurd monetary values. But in our line of work, we always keep in mind that the artists we’re training create work that has different kinds of value: in activism, decolonization, politics, privilege, gender disparities, identity, and so many other aspects of economics, sociology, and consciousness. And sometimes they bring value to the art world itself. David Hammons joined New York City street vendors to create his 1983 Bliz-aard Ball Sale, selling snowballs of various sizes to passersby. The work comments on the absurdity of the art market, questioning class, race, and capitalism. Today, art schools around the country teach Hammons and his work, which continues to push boundaries and make waves, as examples of both conceptual brilliance and biting societal critique.

Even as arts educators spend a great deal of time exploring how art reflects and refracts the issues of our time, many institutions still consider it unnecessary to educate students about how to actually make a living as an artist. They neglect practical skills such as marketing, budgeting, and communications. Yet artists all over—who have immediate, nearly free access to a global audience—need these skills, which allow them to take control of their sales and networking strategies. That, in turn, increases their visibility and the chance of securing a show, grant, fellowship, or residency anywhere in the world.

This is the arts ecosystem into which I am trying to prepare students to enter—one of opportunity, access, innovation, and excitement. My job is in part to help them feel prepared and confident to use the tools available to challenge the status quo and move the cultural needle forward.

Many of the students are teaching me in the process. In fall 2022, recent CalArts MFA graduate Eliot Burk, a composer, presented his final recital, Seven Strategies for Ending Music. The performance had several parts in several locations, and included volunteers destroying nearly 300 instruments, already in various states of disrepair. I was among the audience members watching as they dropped or hurled saxophones, guitars, clarinets, cellos, and other instruments over the campus balcony outside of CalArts’ Herb Alpert School of Music, to crash against the concrete slab below.

The piece critiqued the field of music as a whole and the human-object relationship that creates sound. I was strongly moved by the entire performance and happening; to me it was a beautiful sensory, meditative experience. But the loudest initial audience response emerged from assumptions surrounding the value of the instruments—the objects—rather than the intention of the project as a whole. But what if, rather than thinking of art and the people and objects that make it in terms of monetary value, we looked at this performance as just one part of a Ward Shelley ecosystem? An art world where we don’t deny that things—supplies, time, and higher education—cost money, but where we also recognize the value of creativity is fluid, subjective, and does not always translate to currency? That is an art world I want to help cultivate, and participate in.

The post The Art World I Want My Students to Inherit appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ten years ago, in May 2012, Harvard and MIT announced the launch of edX, their nonprofit platform for Massive Open Online Courses (better known by the acronym MOOCs). Together with Coursera and Udacity (both launched in the first months of 2012), these three platforms promised to make “the best education in the world freely accessible to any person,” as Coursera put it in their mission statement. The New York Times called 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” and the Chronicle of Higher Education covered “MOOC mania.” The promise of MOOCs and the principle of open access with global reach created hype that stretched across the U.S. as well as into Europe.

But in the halls of the United States’ hierarchical and stratified university system, it looked more like MOOC panic—then-Stanford president John Hennessy warned of a “tsunami,” Udacity co-founder (and former Stanford professor) Sebastian Thrun predicted that only 10 higher education institutions would survive the MOOC revolution, and the University of Virginia even seemingly ousted its president (however briefly) for failing to jump on the bandwagon.

In 2022, MOOCs are no longer a buzzword, and most of these promises and fears have gone unrealized. A decade on, what can the MOOC story—and the way it diverged between the U.S. and Europe—tell us about the future of online education?

At the beginning of the MOOC hype, American MOOC founders shared a missionary spirit, a set of charitable goals—and a belief that computational media technologies could fix everything, including long-standing social problems such as unequal access to education. Images portraying students of color in rural villages and young Afghani girls in their homes populated the homepages of major providers and their launching videos. Ironically, prestigious private universities characterized by high selectivity and high tuition fees became the first promoters of an educational model that promised to remove the same barriers to access that had shaped them.

The mainstream, U.S.-based MOOCs originated from bottom-up initiatives led by charismatic computer science professors whose faith in the salvational potential of technology paired well with the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. Some of these organizations followed for-profit business models from the outset (Udacity, Coursera) while others (notably edX) slowly drifted toward market-oriented solutions over time. A few years in, all of these providers had introduced paywalls and limited access to course materials to paying subscribers.

While most of the leading American platforms progressively lost the first “O” of their acronym—the one that stands for “open”—European initiatives have tended to favor learning experimentation, enlarging the audience of potential users, and preserving cultural and linguistic diversity as well as accessibility and openness. (An exception is Future Learn, the UK-based platform that ranks among the top three MOOC providers globally and follows typical market principles.) In Europe, governments played an active and participatory role in MOOCs from the beginning, and higher education institutions opted not to outsource their online courses, instead relying on a mix of pan-European aggregators, country-level initiatives, and single university initiatives.

In 2013, for example, the French government—led by the Ministry of Higher Education and three other public organizations—launched a national initiative called France Université Numérique (FUN), a clearinghouse for hundreds of MOOCS from French universities and educational institutions. FUN continues to use open-source learning systems and to serve both French students and those outside the country, including via a recently created Moroccan platform. In Italy, MOOC platforms release course content under the shareable Creative Commons license; some also post course videos on YouTube. And many European platforms offer courses in English alongside national languages and Arabic. By contrast, American MOOCs do not apply open licenses to their resources, thereby preventing their adaptation, redistribution, or reuse.

The downside to all this diversity in Europe is that it creates a certain degree of confusion about where and how to find courses among novice MOOC learners—a number that grows every year, even if the media hype peaked by the second half of 2013. The number of MOOC students grew for eight years—Class Central, a MOOC aggregator, estimated 16-18 million total enrolled in 2014 and 120 million in 2019. And then, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 and the consequent lockdown policies surged interest in distance online learning to unprecedented levels and helped recast the fate of MOOCs. In April 2020, the three biggest MOOC providers registered as many new learners as they had done in all of 2019, reaching a total of 126 million new users. That number exploded to 220 million in 2021.

But these are not necessarily the students the original MOOC founders claimed they planned to serve. Research has shown that the largest share of users come from affluent countries or neighborhoods, already have high levels of education, and are employed in highly skilled professions. They rely on MOOCs largely for continuing professional training rather than for traditional university courses.

The past decade and the recent resurgence of MOOCs shows that despite their hype waning, MOOCs can be considered anything but a “moment,” an entirely new phenomenon disconnected from the dynamics happening in the society. Rather, MOOCs are the most visible part of a broader trend that concerns the digitalization of many aspects of people’s lives, education included. Now, as mainstream commercial platforms grow alongside less popular but still lively public and less market-oriented platforms, the time is ripe for moving the conversation on MOOCs to a more pragmatic level about whom they best serve, and which platforms—beyond the mainstream—are doing the most interesting and experimental work. As more parts of our lives move online, many questions remain: Will people move away from more traditional models of education? Will online education continue to serve the same type of students, or can its reach expand beyond to new terrain? Will online coursework provide an arena for people around the world to remain plugged-in? And will MOOCs be part of it all?

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But the discussion focused on a more specific query: How can rural education thrive?

In answering that, three veteran educators from different rural parts of California—Connie Stewart of Cal Poly Humboldt, Julie Boesch of the nonprofit California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, and Tim Taylor of the Small School Districts’ Association—offered several suggestions as they shared the stage at the Bakersfield Music Theatre.

The pandemic was a major topic of conversation, and the event’s moderator, Saul Gonzalez, KQED correspondent and co-host of “The California Report,” started by asking how it changed rural education.

Boesch, former superintendent of Maple Elementary School District in Kern County, called the past few years “a phenomenal learning experience.”

Yes, she said, it was difficult when, say, half of her small staff were out or exposed to COVID. But the “beauty of being small and rural” is that they also had “big opportunities to shift gears” to meet their students’ needs. With fewer than 300 students, she knew every child, and could figure out how to support them personally if they were struggling.

“In a small district like mine, I know everything going on,” said Boesch, who recently became the assistant director of services at California Collaborative.

Boesch said Maple was fortunate to get Chromebooks within a week of COVID, speeding the transition to distance learning. But this change wasn’t easy for many rural school districts, whose students ended up offline for quite some time.

Taylor, executive director of the Small School Districts’ Association, which represents and assists districts of fewer than 5,000 students, said when “March 13, 2020”—the day when schools were shutdown statewide by COVID—hit, it “exposed the whole digital divide issue.” “Our institution worked with the Department of Education to figure out how many kids didn’t have a device—let alone internet, let alone a hot spot,” he said. The answer was “hundreds of thousands.”

Stewart, executive director of initiatives at Humboldt, the newest Cal Poly campus, called the pandemic a necessary wakeup call. One of the changes it spurred was California’s recent $6 billion investment to expand broadband infrastructure. “The nice thing about COVID was it was all hands on deck—and it brought to light some of the issues around technology.”

“I’m very hopeful in the near future,” she continued, in a decade or so, “we’ll solve the digital divide.”

But equity issues run far beyond broadband for rural schools. Panelists agreed that, though one in four students in the United States today attends a rural school, state and federal lawmakers are not spending one-fourth of their time thinking about these kids, much less visiting their schools.

“Rural doesn’t go to Sacramento enough, and Sacramento doesn’t go out to rural,” Stewart said.

Boesch recalled how, when she first arrived at the Maple district eight years ago, the rains were so bad that there was water coming through the walls. It took years of lobbying officials outside the district, and the building of bipartisan support in the legislature, to fix the issue.

“I put 40,000 miles on my car advocating for my communities. That’s what it takes,” Boesch said.

More attention is required because the challenges in rural districts are different, panelists said. And getting more attention requires behaving more like urban school districts that go to the media, and to court, to make sure their needs are addressed.

“We need to follow the blueprint of urban schools to tell their story for what their children are up against,” said Taylor. “We don’t do that. And we don’t litigate.”

Panelists say rural schools have to get creative to provide services. Boesch shared how she was able to afford a school psychologist by splitting their salary with a consortium of other rural schools. That required negotiating a memorandum of understanding between each school, and finding an employee who was willing to serve everyone.

Rural schools don’t just lack supportive services; they also lack access to courses that help students prepare for colleges, such as AP classes.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

But schools can compensate. “I came here to talk about solutions,” said Stewart, who encouraged high schoolers to dual enroll in community college in their areas. “Wouldn’t it be fabulous if every high school student graduated with some units at a community college? Wouldn’t it be fabulous if they all graduated with a head start?”

Students should also be encouraged to try a trade in high school, so they get to do “something they love” and learn about future job prospects.

What if there aren’t enough kids to run a school, asked Gonzalez, the moderator. When does it make sense to consider a closure or consolidation?

Students’ needs, not financial ease or consolidation plans, must come first, Boesch argued. “We have to serve all children,” no matter where they are, she said. If schools are closed permanently and the only choice left for students is to bus three hours to the nearest school district or solely virtual learning that’s putting barriers in place for their education when “it’s incumbent on us to remove barriers,” she said.

Stewart agreed, arguing for great care in such decisions. “We have to be smart about how we consolidate schools,” she said. If schools must be closed, then the next question becomes what we do with them so they’re still a benefit to the community. There are other educational needs that can be served, she said, citing successful second lives as community centers and bilingual centers.

Gonzales asked the panelists if they think there’s “a cultural bias against rural education.”

Yes, they said, but the nature of the bias may be changing. That’s because it’s no longer inevitable that people will move to urban environments. The pandemic saw people leave urban environments.

Climate change, Stewart added, is also shifting the conversation. She cited her employer—and its transition from being California State University Humboldt to Cal Poly Humboldt, with the resulting emphasis on science, technology, and the green economy— as proof of that. As a Cal Poly, Humboldt can encourage students to come not just to study but also to make lives and careers for themselves in rural Northern California.

But making space for people in rural parts of the state will only be a successful strategy if new arrivals can afford to live there.

Once upon a time, educators who moved to rural school districts were able to afford to buy their house on their salary. Now, housing prices having risen so rapidly that that’s no longer the reality for many, panelists said.

“The American dream is slipping from people in education, and we have to address that as Californians,” said Stewart. That’s why, she said, her organization is working to invest in workforce housing “so we can try to keep teachers” in the communities they serve.

Near the event’s end, Gonzalez asked the panelists to talk about the joys of small-town education. We’ve talked about the hardships, he said, but “what rocks about it?”

All the panelists spoke up at once.

It’s great to be well-known in your community, said Boesch: “We’ve seen generations of families go through school.”

It’s the ability and freedom to innovate, said Stewart: “All of us have wonderful stories of how we can quickly make change and that’s the beauty of being able to work at a rural school.”

And it’s the intimacy, said Taylor: “The school is the town. You’re part of this incredible loving, warm safe environment.”

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