The Consumer Experience of Higher Education

The Rise of Capsule Education

Deirdre McArdle-Clinton

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441151032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This work examines the philosophy underpinning current higher education provision. Contemporary culture seems to encourage consumers to purchase products where the product is shaped by the provider and the input of the consumer is very limited. Research suggests that students, their perceptions shaped by the educational experience they have undergone, view education as a commodity and require that information be packaged for easy consumption. The purpose of this study is to examine the current situation in education against the backdrop of an emerging trend that sees education as a product and students as consumers or customers. The literature provides a basis to argue that a qualification now is frequently a simulacrum while previously it represented knowledge and competency.

Part 1

Introduction

All the best stories start with the words: ‘Once upon a time ...’ So it is with this story too. Once upon a time – five years ago, to be exact – the author had a supermarket experience which presented a startling eureka moment. She observed that food items were being presented for sale in capsule form. For example, a small tray contained several tiny, evenly sized potatoes complete with a knob of butter and a scattering of chives, covered with cling film and ready to be inserted into a microwave oven. Rather nonplussed, the author mused whether anyone prepared meals in the traditional fashion any more and whether purchasers of prepared foods would be able to recognise the originals. Immediately, and shockingly, came the realization that this was the same process which was being followed in the academic field. Formed by the kinds of life and educational experience which they have undergone, students bring a new perspective to education. They exhibit an increasing reluctance to purchase or consult texts and because of their ‘shopping’ approach, many lecturers prepare notes for easy academic consumption and tend to examine these notes rather than examine a subject. The input of students is decreasing on a continuing basis and they are becoming increasingly disengaged from their studies. This realization was the beginning of a journey from potatoes to postmodernism.

This book deals with the philosophy underpinning current educational provisions. Anecdotal information would suggest that students, their perception shaped by the educational experience they have undergone, view education as a consumer experience and require that information be packaged for easy consumption. This book provides support for this perception and examines the current situation in education against the backdrop of an emerging trend that sees education as a product and students as consumers or customers.

The subtitle of this book is the Rise of Capsule Education. The word ‘capsule’ is derived from the Latin diminutive, ‘capsula’ from ‘capsa’, a box, and ‘capere’ meaning to hold. Dictionary explanations involve the concepts of small size, abridged form and separateness. A capsule is often understood as a tiny packet which, because of its membrane, an individual may absorb without the distress or effort of chewing or tasting. The contents are sealed; there is, therefore, no sense of touch or involvement. What is significant about a capsule is that someone else shapes and probably prescribes it. The recipient need only swallow the capsule whole. It is clear that consumers are, more and more, purchasing ‘capsule’ products, that is, items such as food, holidays and decor, where the product is shaped by the provider and the input of the consumer – if it exists at all – is very limited. To the dismay of educators, students are adopting a similar approach to education.

Traditionally, higher education was the preserve of the elite and there was a strong link between qualification and education. That is, the signifier represented the signified. The growth in democratisation during the middle of the last century exposed the inequities in the education system and made a claim for the provision of higher education for all. The link between higher education and high status, high paying careers is a seductive one. Bound together with those who want such an outcome are those members of society who feel that they ought to want it. These two groups provide the population willing to undergo the higher education treatment. Such mass provision places a considerable strain on funding. The outcome of this constraint is that educational institutions should operate on a business footing in the belief that such a model can deliver maximum efficiency. Applying the business paradigm ushers in a new framework as the education field becomes a market with its outputs measured against external criteria. The budget becomes the overarching tool of management in a constrained resource environment. Funding is driven by enrolment and issues of quality acquire new interpretations such as organization size and numbers qualified. Education becomes an industry with students as customers/consumers and staff as processing units. As education shifts from elite to mass, there occurs a rupture between the signifier and the signified with a qualification no longer representing either education or competency.

In this education field the aims of students and administrators coalesce but are opposite to the views of lecturers. The goals of many students, to obtain a qualification with the least possible effort, commitment and input, are in line with the goals of administrators who need to have as many qualified ‘outputs’ as possible in order to garner maximum funding. Lecturers, the traditional gatekeepers of quality, see the concept in terms of learning on the part of students and are dismayed to see that their understanding of quality no longer provides foundations for practice in education. They recognise that many students are reluctant to purchase or read texts and they acknowledge that their own response is to supply students with sets of notes. There is an understanding and expectation on the part of students that there will be no surprises in examinations. This chasm between the lecturers’ ideal and the students’ approach may cause the kind of disenchantment first noted by Marx, as lecturers now need to produce an alien, petrified product – education as a consumer experience. Additionally, semesterisation seems to have the effect of increasing the pressure to deliver an examinable module in a time span of 12 or 13 weeks. There appears to be a relentless drive towards the ‘encapsulation’ of education and towards the perception of education as a market commodity.

The difficulty for lecturers is that there is a gap between what they want to give, in terms of education, and what students wish to receive. It is possible that this may be because students may be attuned to the postmodern whereas lecturers may be firmly rooted in modernism. The postmodern approach is one based on consumption where there is attachment to the fleeting and the ephemeral, where image is more important than reality. Postmodernism and its perspectives and terms have infiltrated society over the past number of decades. The most striking aspect of this perspective is its overturning of modernism which has traditionally provided the underpinnings for our institutions and our thinking. Modernism offers clear meaning and defined terms. Postmodernism, on the other hand, plays with indeterminacy of language and refuses to fix meaning. One of the most significant revelations of postmodernism is the concept of the simulacrum. This occurs when the boundary between a simulation and reality implodes so that the basis for determining the real is gone; the signifier bears no relationship whatsoever to the signified. The Zeitgeist of the postmodern is the consumption, not just of goods and services, but of their symbols as well. Advertising and public relations engage in what is called the ‘theft and re-appropriation of meaning’. In the education field the symbol of qualification has subsumed the reality of education. A postmodern perspective sees the shift in society from production to consumption. The concepts of education as product and students as consumers impact on education, on students and on educational practitioners. Education, conceived as a product, makes for a pedagogy of confinement which limits the creativity of students and inhibits any achievement by them beyond the limits which have been set for them. Such an education has, at its roots, society’s desire to control and to ensure that everyone fits into allotted places in its plan. This ideological intent shapes education as an industry – the largest single industry in the world – where students are processed as inputs and awarded a qualification, the educational value of which is in serious doubt.

Chapter 1

Modernism, Postmodernism and Higher Education

The terms traditional, modern and postmodern indicate specific conceptual structures, not to be confused with the common usage that merely designates temporal reference. In common use modern is defined as contemporary, current or new, whereas traditional is synonymous with old or past. Within the current postmodern paradigm the word modern, according to Moncayo (2003), refers to modernism as ‘the secular scientific paradigm with all its accompanying aesthetic and ethic values, whereas tradition refers to cultural traditions existing before and outside the western scientific paradigm . . . ’ (p. 6). He continues: ‘postmodernism points in the direction of a new cross-cultural paradigm that permutes and combines without necessarily integrating or synthesising traditional and modern western and eastern European and American conceptual structures’ (p. 6).

Viewed through its own prism, modernism represents a model of reason, rationality, cause and effect and a faith that there are universals, which act as conduits for arriving at truth and reality. Modernism, for western society, has for so long represented an ontological and epistemological compass that little attention has been paid to the philosophical reasoning. It, further, does not query the concept that language can be used as a known and reliable means of accessing and communicating that truth. So steeped did western society become in the morass of these ‘truths’ that it is shocking to have postmodernism query their provenance and ask from which natural law might they have sprung. Modernism, according to Bloland (1995),

has long been considered the basis for the emancipation of men and women from the bonds of ignorance associated with stagnant tradition, narrow religions and meagre educations. Championing democracy, modernism promises freedom, equality, justice, the good life and prosperity.

(p. 522)

The reader may find cause in his/her own life or in biography to support this view of modernism as an escape hatch to a ‘better’ life, without querying that it is modernism itself, which both manufactures the straitjacket and provides the means for escape. The individual acquiesces, locked as s/he is into modernism’s understanding of better, prosperity, justice and equality. Modernism’s fascination with binary oppositions dexterously provides a lexicon from which an individual can draw understanding in order to live a successful life under the banner of modernism. Citizen is better than slave, middle class better than working class, white better than black, man better than woman, teacher better than student, boss better than worker, master’s better than primary degree, university better than institute of technology. It falls to postmodernism to demolish these binarisms with the challenge that there are no natural hierarchies, only those which are socially constructed.

Modernism promises a better life to all who understand and obey its rules; it promises – through science – better health, the eradication of crime, hunger, disease and poverty. It claims ongoing development towards the knowledge of the universe and equates change with progress – progress which is defined as increasing control over nature and society. Control is the crucial leitmotif of modernism, a leitmotif, which Freire (1972) chillingly describes as necrophilic. This descriptor challenges us to raise an eyebrow at the claims of modernism and to listen to its sceptics.

Modernism carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. According to Max Weber (1958 translation) an over-organized economic order has imprisoned people in

an iron cage of work incentives. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism . . . with irresistible force.

(in Bloland, p. 523)

Moncayo reminds us that the Frankfurt School presented a critique linking modernism with masked forms of oppression and domination. This school, itself a modernist construct, sought to articulate a critical reason which would free modern rationality from the bonds of instrumental scientific rationality. By contrast, the postmodern paradigm questions the superiority of reason itself. According to Bloland, ‘instrumental rationality, in its current postmodern reading, is seen as having forged the consumer society in which commodification, the definition of persons and activities solely in terms of their market value, has become dominant’ (p. 524) – an ironic observation, given that the brickbat most frequently hurled at postmodernism is the latter’s fetish with the product. Even science, traditionally one of modernism’s foundation stones, has given modernism a bad press, becoming the purveyor of death through annihilation and illness and environmental problems through pollution and uncontrollable technology.

The beginnings of the postmodern debate can be traced to the United States in the 1960s. The debate gained currency in the arts and social theory in the 1970s and by the early 1980s, became, according to Huyssen (1990), one of the most challenged areas of intellectual discourse in the west. Following its sweep through the humanities and social sciences, the debate has receded, the current period being referred to largely as post-theory. Postmodernism, as a worldview, represents a fearful shifting sands scenario to a viewer steeped in modernism. It dismantles the underpinnings of modernism on which western civilisation and western social thinking is, not simply posited, but riveted. Modernism is characterised by its offer of the comfort of certainty, with social rules set out in language which is determinate and absolute. Postmodernism questions the determinacy of the very language we use to express our views, or to enter debate. Anderson (1996a) describes four contemporary worldviews. People who share one of these worldviews understand each other fairly well but do not well understand those of a different worldview. The four worldviews encompass the postmodern-ironist view, which sees truth as a social construct, the scientific-rational which discovers truth through systematic logical enquiry, the social-traditional in which truth is found in heritage, and the neo-romantic which finds truth through harmony with nature and/or harmony with the spiritual inner self.

Neo-romantics are strongly linked to the past. Rejecting the postmodern and the modern, they long for a romanticised, imagined golden age before the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. The postmodern represents a worldview in which truth is not found but made. In Anderson’s opinion it has three subgroups. (The irony of Anderson’s categorisation and labelling of postmodern groups will not be lost on the reader.) The first group comprises those who actively think and live a constructivist worldview. While they may be outwardly conventional, their inner attitude questions acceptance of the value of one set of ideas or rules over another, but not enough to engage in revolutionary change. The second group, described as ironist, plays mix and match with cultural heritage, fashion and religious rituals, is comfortable with virtual reality and at home in theme parks. People in the third group, labelled nihilists, are so bewildered with so many conflicting beliefs that they conclude that they are all bogus. These are not nihilist in the same sense as Nietzsche. He was nihilist, not in terms of throwing out all moral standards, but in asserting that moral standards have no inherent morality. He maintains that, at the dawn of time, the strong simply selected those standards that would best serve them and imposed them on the weak, a notion which is supported by Becker’s Birth and Death of Meaning (1980). Anderson’s nihilists represent the face of postmodernism that induces fear in conservatives – fear that it will lead to alienation, hedonism and contempt for mainstream society. Moncayo, aware of this perspective, suggests that, in order to combat the possible anarchy of ego-autonomy, it is important to regenerate a non-authoritarian or non-moralistic heteronomy.

Anderson claims that scientific-rationalistic culture is most strongly entrenched in academia and the sciences. ‘For a good scientific-rationalist’, he says, ‘the main sources of evil in the world are sloppy thinking and lack of respect for hard facts’ (p. 109).

The scientific-rational and social-traditional cultures occupy an occasionally uneasy coalition as the power structure within countries. ‘The official realities of our time are to be found there’ (p. 109). If you want to be the President of the United States, warns Anderson, you must eschew all signs of postmodernism. He further suggests that the spectacular growth of neo-romantic culture represents, not alone, a disaffinity with modernism, but a distrust of the uncertainties of postmodernism.

A synthesis of the main responses to postmodernism ranges from social conservatism (underpinned by nostalgia and religious fundamentalism), to chaos theory which, like postmodernism, presents us with the core concepts of disorder and indeterminacy but which emphasises the possibility of creating order from disorder.

At the heart of the confrontation between modernism and postmodernism is the question of whether or not there are basic standards underlying human behaviour – standards like reason and justice. Postmodernists question if reason is simply the name the powerful offer in support of their rationale for holding power and if justice is no more than an excuse for the majority to impose its ideas on the minority.

Rorty (1989) is emphatic that there is no objective truth, no skyhook, no God’s Eye perspective. He replaces objective truth with solidarity and describes the ideal situation for society as one which achieves maximum voluntary agreement in addition to some tolerated disagreement. Less dismissive of modernism, Shweder (in Anderson 1996a), recognises that in a postmodern world it is more and more difficult to take a stand on issues of fact and value without appearing to be dogmatic, hegemonic or prejudiced. He suggests that prejudice is not always a bad thing; it fixes a starting point from which we may examine other viewpoints. Becker (1980) summarises the postmodern condition and lifts the veil on the symbolic environment which, from prehistoric times, has facilitated human action and interaction in a psychological world of human aspiration which is largely fictitious. Man is free to inhabit this world, from which lower animals are excluded – a world which is free from the enslavement of the present moment, from the immediate stimuli which bind all lower organisms. Man’s freedom, says Becker, is a manufactured one and it carries a price tag – the imperative that he must at all times protect this fragile construct and at all times deny it’s fiction. Man must understand, he says, that this is how this animal must function if he is to function as this animal. Man’s fictitious fabrications are not superfluous creations which he can set aside in order to get on with the real business of life.

They are at least as important a part of the business of life. Becker describes these fictions as a ‘flimsy canopy’ (p. 142) flung over the social world from the dawn of time. He expresses awe, not that these fictions exist, but that man should be sufficiently willing to subject himself to self-scrutiny that he is able to see through them. History, he says, will marvel at this discovery and see it as one of the most liberating of all times, a discovery that was made in Becker’s time – during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Hayakawa et al. (1990) also draw attention to the symbolic in the lives of humans. The difference between man and animal is, they say, is that while animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, man, in addition to those struggles, will also battle with his fellow man for things that stand for food and leadership – such as paper symbols of wealth, badges of rank or January registration plates. For animals, the relationship in which one thing stands for another, in so far as it exists, does so only in the most rudimentary form. The human, with his highly developed nervous system, understands that there is no necessary connection between the symbol and that for which the symbol stands. Our current human environment is shaped by hitherto unparalleled semantic influences; we need, therefore, to be aware of the powers and limitations of symbols. A naïve attitude towards symbols can result in attributing a ‘mystical power’ to what are mere words (p. 98).

Habermas (in Bloland), a member of the second wave Frankfurt School, often finds himself pitted against Foucault, Gadamer and Lyotard in theoretical debates surrounding postmodernism – essentially a recasting of the debate between Kant and Hegel. Habermas is clearly a follower of Kant in his dedication to reason, ethics and moral philosophy. The defender of modernism, he sees much of value in postmodernism’s critique and, taking some of it on board, seeks to develop a renewed modernism, improving democracy, freedom, equality and progress through open communication. He is a staunch advocate of the principles of reason and justice and believes in a humanism or universalism, that is, ‘in our everyday knowledge of how language is properly used we find a common ground among all creatures with a human face’ (in Stephens, 1994), a theme reflected in Hayakawa (1965) and Hayakawa et al. (1990). While postmodernists reject such beliefs out of hand, Habermas (1987) clings resolutely to the view that through communicative action humans can, over time, overcome their biases and prejudices in order to achieve social emancipation.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index