After Meltdown, Back to School?
We need a new post-secondary for a post-recession world.
Back to drawing board for universities.
The collapse of the world economy has evidently come as a surprise to the very well-educated people who run Canada's colleges and universities. An online search turns up very few documents about the long-term future of post-secondary.
It may be significant that two recent long-term studies are by consultants: a PowerPoint presentation given in January to the University of Victoria by Ken Steele of the Academica Group, and On the Brink, a grim forecast just published by the Education Policy Institute.
In the short term, post-secondary educators have tried to maintain business as usual: enough government funding to maintain big programs with as many students as possible. They see the recession as a temporary problem, and post-secondary itself as part of the "infrastructure" that will return us to yesterday's affluent society.
Actually, the colleges and universities could make things much worse by trying to restore a vanished status quo. But they could also help create a stable and sustainable society by creating a new kind of post-secondary.
This year, as Ken Steele's presentation shows, B.C. is going through a tectonic shift in demographics: We now have more people aged 55 to 64 than aged 15 to 24. The trend will continue far into the future.
Fatally false premises
A few education watchers have worried for decades about this. Post-secondary officials have carefully projected their future sources of students. But their plans have been based on fatally false premises.
The first premise was the assumption of indefinite economic expansion. That in turn supported the premise of indefinitely expanding schools. The third premise was that jobs in an expanding economy would require ever-higher levels of education. So even with lower government funding, students could be counted on to make up the shortfall. If the traditional 18-to-24 group dwindled, "non-traditional" students would take their place.
After all, their education would bring them so much added income that they could pay back their debts and still have money for lots of consumer goods and services. The whole point of higher education was higher income for higher consumption.
These premises led to the convenient conclusion that we would always find both students and the money to fund their education -- at least in the short term.
Like workers living paycheque to paycheque, post-secondary schools live budget to budget. Funded largely by government, they follow an agenda driven by politicians, who themselves live election to election. No one has time to consider long-term needs. Everyone falls back, in the current downturn, on recent experience: the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s.
The comparison seems apt. As in those recessions, the schools have seen a surge in enrolments. This would seem to be good news: Students are upgrading their qualifications, faculty members are busy, and we'll emerge from the current recession with a new generation of highly skilled workers eager to make money and spend it.
But the system is already underfunded. Since 2002, B.C. post-secondary has had to cram every class as full as possible, even at the cost of cutting courses and programs that don't put enough students in seats.
An ethical quandary for educators
The students are in those seats not to learn, but to compete: to acquire a piece of paper that puts them ahead of other job seekers. Faculty, meanwhile, are under pressure to admit as many warm bodies as possible, especially in career-training programs. They have an interest in ignoring poor qualifications, and in being upbeat about their graduates' job prospects.
Ethically, then, educators are in an awkward spot. Their own jobs depend on full classes and employed graduates. Programs that can't deliver have been shut down like unprofitable auto plants. But a student who can't deliver may still squeak through.
In previous downturns, governments cut funding and schools made up the difference by charging students more. Students have gone increasingly in debt (now well over $13 billion, according to the Canadian Federation of Students), assuming like first-time homebuyers that the return on their investment would repay that debt. Now they face the prospect of going underwater like other subprime borrowers.
Current post-secondary programs arose in times of prosperity to meet the demands of expanding fields like law, business and education itself. When earlier graduates are going broke, or waiting for the next round of layoffs, should educators recruit more students to go into debt and to train for a collapsed economic model?
So far the answer is a resounding yes. Politicians, educators and students all seem to be scrambling to return to 2006. The B.C. government says it's "preparing students to take their places in the province's knowledge economy." Faculty associations complain that their funding isn't enough to get us back there. Students complain about tuition costs and loans, but sign up for the same old programs and more debt.
Living by Mr. Micawber's philosophy
Like Mr. Micawber, post-secondary lives on hopes that something will turn up: more international students, more immigrants, more "non-traditional" students like the middle-aged and First Nations.
You would think that such highly educated people, facing the ruin of the old order, would be imaginative enough to find paths to a new order. It's unlikely that we'll ever see a 2006 economy again, and suppose we did -- it would be the same old emission-heavy, over-consuming economy that got us into our present environmental mess.
Colleges and universities should not try to rebuild Humpty Dumpty. Their future success doesn't involve finding new sources of students and cheaper ways to teach them, but finding ways to make at least a few students highly unpredictable.
The schools of the 1960s and '70s barely noticed computers; at best they trained people for instant obsolescence as keypunch operators. It took dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to create an industry that changed the world. Educators then had to scramble to train themselves and their students for an unforeseen status quo.
Given our economic and environmental problems, we can't go back to the good old days of logging, fishing and real-estate bubbles. But we don't know what would create a comparable and sustainable prosperity.
Should post-secondary downsize itself?
One approach would be to downsize post-secondary and return it to its original function of training scholars. Instead of subsidizing business with pre-trained employees, post-secondary would leave the training to the businesses themselves. The universities would focus on surprising and shocking their few remaining students into new forms of thought and analysis.
Such an education might inspire new gadgets to fuel a new economy. Or inspire graduates to live without gadgets or the need for ever-increasing wealth. It hardly matters, because post-secondary wouldn't try to sustain yesterday's society.
In an unprecedented crisis, post-secondary could ditch precedent also. Instead of imposing our own discredited ambitions on the next generation, we could give our students a survival kit: true critical thinking skills, and the freedom to choose their own solutions to the problems we've bequeathed them. After all, do we really expect off-the-shelf solutions to climate wars, species extinctions, mass migrations and an aging population?
So rather than pump money into preparing students for a vanished world, governments should fund post-secondary schools to study and teach whatever they feel like, regardless of employability. Let them flunk students without fear of losing funding. And let them enroll students to study what they like, as long as they work hard and engage with society as well as with their subject.
If post-secondary were as radically conservative as that, it might actually serve the needs of this century instead of the last. Its graduates would surprise us, but also, I suspect, delight us. They might be "poorer" than we, but they would be far freer to invent a truly prosperous and humane society.
Related Tyee stories:
- Schools that Make Us Look Stupid
Another BC private 'university' bites the dust. Why it hurts you and me. - How BC Libs Aim to Reinvent Higher Ed
'Campus 2020' report promises upheaval without progress. - How Dumb Can You Get?
Reviewed: The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30] by Mark Bauerlein.
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
anarcho
26-02-2009
The Education Racket
A major problem has been the promotion of a university education as a necessity in the contemporary world. This ideological concept has been behind the growth in post-secondary education over the past 4 decades. But the reality is most jobs only require a basic education. As a result we have university educated people serving coffee, driving cabs and doing white collar work that any grade 10 drop out could handle. And we have a shortage of trades people, since it is more socially acceptable to have a BA than be a plumber.
Don't get me wrong. I am all for as highly an educated populace as you can get. But university shouldn't be seen as a kind of trade school, or "jump through the hoop to get a job" routine. Other than training scientists and professionals, university should be once again the place of a true education, disconnected from the meal ticket. The populace as a whole should be encouraged to get that true education by initiating a policy of educational sabbaticals in all jobs, shorter work weeks and a general policy of encouraging education and culture at all levels.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
26-02-2009
Would-be autocrats
One comes close to sensing in this article a delight in the possibility that tutition hikes, the levelling of the middle class into the depressed poor, might bring with it an end to mass striving and the re-emergence of the aristocratic ideal. Imagine, some Republic, where the elites are few and apparent; trusted to roam where they will; spared the indignity of sharing space with noisome lessers; and you will share in every conservative scholar's unegalitarian, unempathic, grotesque dream.
How about let's stick to the progressive plan, people. That is, one which values life enough to not ever give up on the idea of bringing to the fore, EVERY human being's beauty and genius--not just the few stellar Obamas needed to delight, comfort, and lead the support of an aging, sagging, populace.
(About institutional leadership and sprited teachers "surprising" and "shocking" their hard working, appreciate students: Five words: "Don't taze me, bro!" And maybe seven others: "Thank you, sir!--May I have another!?")
The sixties generation was a great generation, because they learned to look to themselves rather than to the establishment--true Romantics unshakle themselves, in part, by shakling their teachers. Whatever the post-secondary rucus, really explore what you can do with your own journals, discussion groups, and ready access to itunes U. Let's make it so that if there must be a really best, they're the ones freely sharing, loving, and living, outside the scholar's tower.
morechatter
26-02-2009
Times are changing
And its no more teachers as distance education is becoming more and more popular as Universities attract distant learners. Your right about schools accomodating business with a ready, set go work force. More and more people will find themselves self employed, contracting,big business will downsize, and we will also she more women and non white men in posessions of leadership or so they say. And our educational systems are changing from grade school on up as class rooms get smaller and teachers find themselves stretched out. Will that have an affect on education? More and more students are dropping out so a steady supply of the uneducated and unqualified coming up but the only problem is they don't eat, right and they don't sleep right, and they don't think, right so maybe you can get them for six bucks and hour and they will be riddled with disease by the time they are 20 but heck education is not for everyone. But in this province without it its hard to imagine as many find themselves unable to survive.
VivianLea Doubt
26-02-2009
A would-be scholar
Here I sit, posting to the Tyee instead of finishing a paper due tomorrow. 79 days to the degree and I don't know if I can stomach any more. There's no room for thinking in my university courses, and disagreeing with the bland,innocuous (almost all American-authored) texts will quickly get you branded as difficult - but worse, it will probably mean a lower grade. No one cares to instigate critical thinking, because that would require teaching skills and real student/professor engagement - the universities can't afford it. Teaching based on inculcating the meaningless regurgitation of assigned material is just so much easier (and cheaper) than demanding thinking - not to mention writing - skills.
I'm embarrassed to admit I returned to university for love of scholarship, because it reallly isn't valued for the most part. But why, as Crawford points out, are we subsidizing training for employment? No one ever points out that this is a business subsidy to the tune of millions, if not billions, of taxpayer dollars. Further, it seems to me that a strong and independent university system is a precondition for a strong and healthy society. Far from being elitist, the tradition of scholarship is all about thinking for oneself, being able to agree/disagree with a given line of thought and being able to defend that agreement/ disagreement.It means that critical thought is valued, and as a consequence, everyone is not in lockstep to the beat of a doomed drum. It means that bettering yourself is not about a credential, but thinking about what that means. Oh, s***...obviously I am not educated enough.
Urbanismo
27-02-2009
tHu MeLt dOwN
Mr. Killian,
Long, long in the tooth, and after decades of practice, I was a PG student in the early eighties . . . and oh how your wisdom resonates . . .
freebear
27-02-2009
D'uh!
Students are only seen as consumers of education.
Business needs more robots.... so
moodyguy
27-02-2009
business educate???
As a post-secondary faculty member, I agree with notion that the "value" of education is the development of a broad spectrum of knowledge and true critical thinking and analytical skills. This article, however, assumes that Canadian business has an interest, any interest in training, never mind educating, employees. This is a huge assumption which, in my experience, is an invalid assumption.
Rod Smelser
28-02-2009
Business changes it's mind all the time.
moodyguy
This article, however, assumes that Canadian business has an interest, any interest in training, never mind educating, employees.
In my experience, employers change their minds all the time about what they expect from the education system. One day, it's generic skills, education of the type you've described, literacy, critical thinking, and the like. The next day, they want very specific skills suited to their industry and the types of occupations they employ.
Bailey
28-02-2009
First, Dear VivianLea
Hi, I sympathize with the frustration of finding the terribly expensive thing you signed up for didn't teach you the thing you might most have valued.
But please take heart. I think you should finish the degree regardless. Because you clearly are learning something important, and the most hopeful part is that it absolutely isn't what they wanted you to learn.
Finish your degree, please. Join the club, knowing what you know. The degree is like a ticket of admission. And the people it will give you access to in your career will be much more interesting and give you far more scope to accomplish whatever changes you have it in you to create, than the empty gesture of rejecting all your hard work at this late stage, just because you're aware of the failure of the system you offered to join.
When you consider it, the lessons you learned are not at all worthless, unless you refuse to engage the world with the things you know.
Bailey
28-02-2009
Next, the nature of the change
It's not just post secondary that needs transforming. It's education.
The world perches on the edge of a huge transformation, one that will require a whole new type of human to operate whatever new kind of world will come of it.
Seems to me that there are two main directions things can go. We are brought to this pass, I think, by our willingness to embrace organized crime as a viable philosophy of business and government, just because it provides so very much money. Money for campaigns, money for executives, money got by betraying or looting the mission.
For government, that mission is guardianship, for business, it's to supply the world with whatever the business is meant to produce. To contribute that to the benefit of all the world. Not at all, as they love to claim, to the pockets of the owners alone.
That selfish attitude is the true legacy of all this money-laundry prosperity that has given those who have dirty money to spend entre' to the halls of power. And has permitted them to redirect the true purposes of society's structure to simple piracy without regard for the deep needs that are going unmet because of it.
We will either rid ourselves of the criminal consciousness and rise above this disregard of the realities we face in favour of pointless acquisition, or we will face the traditional consequences.
Let's see, what were they again?
Oh, yes. War. Famine. Pestilence. Death.
Either choice will remake humanity. Just in different ways.
RickW
28-02-2009
But if we can't make money......
....with our university degree, then how will we ever know we are educated? Or perhaps, how will OTHERS we are educated....?
morechatter
28-02-2009
Its A Case Of Being Sold Short
Like the type of business that a Government attracts to a province for instance can bring forth opportunities or be looking for financial opportunities and windfalls from government along with Cheap labor.
And one thing for sure Cheap is in but its gonna hurt big time as Canada just can't compete with Cheap labor and an unqualified work force especially in BC highest unemployed and also the highest cost of living. I wouldn't give to much credence to those little power points but if you want to get to the good stuff I would be pushing for a highly educated, highly skilled workforce because anything else will leave many going without especially when are American neighbors are ready set to go to college. And the problem is Governments haven't been putting enough money into education that the cost has out lived the benefit. Its when you can't afford to survive and work and repay your loans its a real deterrient. And our truly gifted have already left dead end Canada because of lack of funding and innovation as America well pick up their Tabs and have them heading up their Universities and areas of study for the world now thats a given.
morechatter
01-03-2009
And if you can't make money
Who walks out of university into their dream job as most have little work or life experience? Its few and far between as many take on positions in company's and work their way up from sales clerk to Director now thats also a given. And often people find themselves going back to school as their careers demand thats a given as education is an on going as one has to stay up on the latest or fade away into mediocrity or unemployment.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
01-03-2009
@vivianlea
Please ignore Bailey's advice. Ignore anyone who tells you that "the degree is your ticket of admission." Those who say so these days, are, after-all, the ones who laughed at, and rebelled against, the pro-offered future in "plastics," a al _Graduate_. They clearly are ones who don't really want the status quo to change all that much.
For the last while, the cool kids respected those who got into Berkeley/Harvard. That day is ending. The emerging breed are going to respect those who valued themselves and true education enough, not to be degree or grade chasers. They'll stop the degree when it seems right to them, not when it looks right to unimaginative, uninteresting others. They're the ones who are going to do the stuff worth watching, in this new "America."
alive
01-03-2009
kidding nobody
Any time we have unemployement, the wise heads decide that keeping people on the education bandwagon for a longer time makes sense; unless they can be shuttled into the armed services!
This is not the way to stop unemployement; the myth that more education equals a better job fools nobody anymore; it is much more important to "know somebody"!
Have the right buddies, attend the right clubs and show "community spirit" is the ticket; who cares if you have a brain in your head, right?
Bailey
01-03-2009
If I only had a brain
alive, you make a point. The majority of people taking degrees do seem to be caught in the trap VivianLea articulated so well.
They fear the future, and try to catch the brass ring as a safe path through it. They form up into little insulated groups, the better to defend their misperceptions of the world and to avoid having to face reality. These are the ones who reinforce the anti-thought movement. It drives those who can see more clearly what needs to happen right out of school, leaving nobody to balance out that narrow vision.
When somebody gets to within 76 days of the degree, but still can see and lament the enormous flaw in the system, I truly hope they will continue. They are most valuable in the place that's opening to them.
It's true, as Mr. McAvoy says, that big changes will always be driven from without, but unless they also resonate within the structure, such changes will be much harder to bring to be.
People like VivianLea can help to overcome that fear with reason, and will be very hard to dismiss, bearing the credential.
A very strong position to occupy. Defender of the truth from within the fortress of the lie.
Melodramatic as it sounds, power is based on a faith position, and faith based power is quite dangerous. Only truth has any hope of bringing change without conflict. And truth from inside at that. From without, it can be dismissed and ignored for longer than we have.
An example is the global warming debate, which was very effectively dismissed by power until Mr. Gore, an insider, made the argument from within.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
01-03-2009
Two paths
So Vivean, do you want to be one of those who "drive big changes," or one of those who "resonate within the structure"? Wanna go big, or small fry? Be the Titan, or the web-caught fly?--How well Bailey does articulate the choices available to you now.
Bailey's response would have resonated better with me if he had brought up liberals like Pelusi or Feinstein or (Barbara) Boxer. They're not Naders, but they're not frauds, either--just tactically minded, adaptable, good people. Gore's an opportunist and a fraud. He's managed to persuade himself otherwise, but his environmentalism is about tactics as much as anything else. People who readily ride with him, likely do so because they sense that he is one who help them justify/validate a new zeitgeist--one ultimately less earth-friendly, even--if the need should ever arise (and it will).
Last thought: People like me are hoping that the establishment becomes mostly populated by those who had the stuff to call an end to the degree when it seemed fit to do so, rather than those who continued on, because 1) they were not capable of dealing with others looking at them as if they had just made the worst decision of their lives, as if they were now and forever, irrelevant, 2) because they continued to hope the hope that the university degree would lead the way down the straight, narrow path toward smart income, smart life, smart kids, smart partnering, smart locates: the professional's paradise, 3) because they were ones who never sensed that education of the mind/heart/soul was always the higher purpose, university just a means of getting "there."
patrick mcevoy-halston
VivianLea Doubt
01-03-2009
77 days to the degree
Gee, there was all this insightful commentary going on whilst I was finishing my g.d.paper and beginning my next lengthy tome. I will finish the degree, because 20 years ago I didn't get to. It won't get me into any clubs; I am far too outspoken, perhaps even original - definately not modest. And I shudder at Patrick's evocation of portly professors with dandruff writing incomprehensible crapand all that nasty stuff - that's not a tradition, it is simply an attempt to justify privilege (and indulge in the nasty stuff.) What I wish above all is that the grinding hard work and bitter poverty and the giving up of many of life's small pleasures was worthy of the universities' notice. That instead of existing to maintain privilege, they existed for love of scholarship, because students like me deserve better. I must save any residual eloquence I have for the next round of regurgitation - but genuine thanks to everyone who contributed their eloquence here. I enjoyed your remarks.
James Burns
01-03-2009
blah blah blah. Change
blah blah blah.
Change comes from unpredictable places. Change comes from insiders far more often than it comes from outsiders.
The establishment will always be populated by the establishment. The only question is, how broadly populated is it? Is it a select ultra rich few, or is it a broad swath of the public who have true opportunity where their achievement really is driven by dedicated deliberate learning and practice?
What brings down empires? Their own mistakes as much as the efforts of any self-glorifying few. The mistake of higher education, like so much in our society, has been it's commodification like so drastically much of our lives. Well, whether the powers that be like it or not we're in the beginnings of a change is that malfunctioning structure.
But dismissing its importance is about as intelligent as burning down the village in order to save it. Formal education is the foundation on which all informal understanding and innovation rest. If it wasn't for a smattering of wheezy old monastics there wouldn't have been an intellectual tradition in the west.
I get rapidly tired of pat trite marketing riffs that fail to see the complexities and interdependence of our systems. Life and culture are complex, and change doesn't come from mere rejection of tradition.
So what if you have a bug up your ass about loan debt and professors who don't see it your way, because your so god damn smart. I want to see solutions, demonstrable best practices that work in the real world; not the latest home cooked theories elucidated by a smattering of buzzwords gleaned from the glowing phosphors of iTunes and the Onion.
VivianLea Doubt
02-03-2009
g.d. smart
My modest proposal for change would simply be that universities attempt to facilitate, not impede, the process of education.That the people who teach not only enjoy doing that job, but are good at it. That the resources of the university go towards students, not towards making the university look good in the media...
and that what constitutes core curriculum is not driven by 1. availability of cheap American textbooks 2.any special interest group.
It is so very true that life and culture are complex...excellence, however, is rather simple.
michael maser
02-03-2009
"Back to School" ?? - that's part of the problem
IMO, a sad and important irony emerging from this article is how "Back to school" has become a now long-habituated, industrial (and clearly post-industrial) cliche that is synonymous with unconscious, robotic processing for nearly all of those engage in it (students, faculty, staff and overseeing boards) and how indifferent anyone in a leadership position is to changing this.
And this certainly isn't limited to post-secondary, as you well know, Crawford, but thrives in K-12 education systems globally as well. I know, my daughter attends a local, run-of-mill BC public high school and in this, her grade 10 year, her school has failed in any meaningful way to nurture student learning about, including participating in, either the federal, municipal or US elections, the financial meltdown (and lessons thereof), Obama's swearing-in, the continuing alarms raised by Climate Disaster, etc.
What's to say about this? "Mediocre" doesn't begin to address the frightening consequences of stamping out another generation that has had little or no exposure to the "deep meaning of our times", in 12 - 20 years of training.
This won't change, I predict, until the consumers and clients of knowledge ( i.e. 'students') get active and discontent and demand that their education provide them with relevant, meaningful knowledge and experiences that better equip them to ... do whatever it is they wish to do.
And I see little sign that politicos or School Boards or Boards of Governors "get it". Perpetually, they default to a notion of education that increases in its irrelevance each day, something I tell the telemarketers from my alma maters (UBC and SFU among them) that regularly pester me.
Fish-counter
02-03-2009
Innovation by any means possible
All of the above is true, but...
In the 35 years I have lived in Canada, there has been talk about 'diversifying our economy', and 'developing markets other than the USA'. The piece de resistance is the 'Value added' component to the BC forest industry.
Essentially, nothing has happened. Canadians have demonstrated a slavish adherance to antiquated business models. The forestry industry has taken massive steps backward, by exporting raw logs. BC needs an "Ikea 2.0" industry that actually makes product from the lumber, exporting it as a consumer item. We also need to swim free of the blue-collar union mindset that bedevils the workplace.
Somewhere in the sea of educational brainwashing-by-heavy-workload, there are young entrepreneurs who may just be able to change this. If we don't turn out a highly-educated workforce, the Chinese will.
We need higher education but we also need real job training. Technicians and engineers who can not just fix things, but design them as well.
It would be good, for example, to have young biologists who can identify the common native plants in out forests. You would think that 13 years of schooling would provide that skill, but you would be wrong. Nature has been expelled from the school curriculum along with common sense.
Now I have to go talk to a class of high school students, to tell them why they should help ppnat trees over their Spring Break. (Thinks, Why Bother?)
James Burns
02-03-2009
Zoom. Zoom. A life in commercials.
"excellence, however, is rather simple."
Ummm... no it's not. Excellence is elegant. Elegance can make excellence appear simple. But excellence is never ever simple. Excellence is always preceded by years of toil: deliberate, intense, comprehensive study and carefully reflected upon experience.
More and more we seem to believe in notions of instant gratification. Knowledge and skill is just a download away...not. Sorry to break it to ya kids, but for the foreseeable future there are certain things that our meatrix can and can't do.
And no it's not just hard work. Everyone works hard (except for maybe the richest, as there's no way they could ever work hard enough to justify their wealth).
Patty you go on to prove my point. To take your example:
Tired: Mac vs. PC commercials and lacking the creativity to communicate in your own tropes.
Wired: You figure it out. Oh, and realizing that just bitching is part of the problem. Bitching is easy. Bitching is simple. Bitching is not excellence.
Cotton candy spinnery is all fluffy sweet, but it's a nutritional desert. It's all just clever trash. What a life waste that is.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
02-03-2009
After the meldown, Cotton-candy, pixie play
James, You're way of narrating the development of excellence is one many readers may be familiar with, but they ought to know that many people believe genius, great creativity, emerges only when people look at life with an attitude of spirited play. Progressive eduators like Alfie Kohn and Stanley Greenspan have the same end as you do--they want kids to grow up truly creative, but they see this end as coming through getting kids to relax, take chances, being more than willing to look stupid, take delight in what they do: the care-free approach. They avoid the kind of talk you're offering--that is, of taking care, being deliberate, of comprehensive study--because it makes learning seem "tight" and arduous, with pleasure not as something that arises naturally enough from--because it is inherently within--the doing, but as something you get after many years, and only after much pain and frustration. Personally, I find your attitude toward rewards a bit calvinist: where creativity MUST be seen as emerging from toil because any other kind of life MUST be judged as about instant gratification, lazyness-- as about bad stuff, for bad people, heading nowhere good.
I think to show me up as unimaginative (and not just as someone que n'est pas au current), rather than argue that my turning to the P.C. vs. Mac trope by itself showed I couldn't have much of a mind, you would have done better (or at least have reached me more effectively) if you had shown how I used the Mac vs. P.C. trope with little imagination. Poets/rhetoriticans can show great creativity when they fashion new tropes or other poetic forms/devices, but they can show their stuff just as well when they make effective, imaginative use of the materials already at hand. The tropes in pastoral poetry are familiar to all who use them, for example: the fun is in seeing how they tease and twist their shepherds, lovers, flowers, and nymphs, in novel ways that delight, surprise, and convince.
For me, turning kids on to the possibilities of itunesU isn't about instant gratification. It's about getting kids to know that THEY can be the ones in charge of their own education, about not being so ready to bow their heads to the powers that be. It's about empowerment, the nurtance of self-belief and self-esteem: for me, the kinds of things that engender creative exploration. I think that if they nurture this attitude toward their world, their development will become worth our demarcation and study--that is, I think my cotton-candy talk can lead to the meatful enterprises you would like to see more of in society, and when table-talk turns to the post-secondary.