Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has a brilliant plan for higher education. Video. That, he says, will free us from the "higher education cartel." By which he means college professors.
"We've got the internet—you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying different lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn't play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need destructive technology for our higher education system," he said.
Johnson added, "One of the examples I always used—if you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don't know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done? You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas."
Ron Johnson apparently missed the "critical thinking" components of his coursework toward a business degree. He also apparently isn't aware that online learning already exists, and that "education happens when teachers can listen to students and engage them to think for themselves," as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, comments. "Leave it to someone from a party led by a reality TV star to confuse videotape with the learning experience of a classroom. […] But this is typical for a party with an education agenda as out-of-date as Johnson’s Blockbuster Video card."
Please give $3 to help Russ Feingold stand up for Wisconsin educators again.