[discussion of learning vs. credentialization]
>What sort of a product is an educational credential? It is piece of scrip
>enabling the possessor to trade in the futures market of employment.
>Therein lies the awful dilemma confronting educators. If they regard the
>students in front of them as 'customers' (as all the pressures push them
>into doing) then how can they maintain educational standards when to
>'fail' a student (i.e. fail to deliver the product) is regarded in a
>'customer' based model as a failure of the educator as service provider
>rather than student as service purchaser?
OK, let's try this on for size: Society is the client. Per my previous
definition, this is the person or entity that the service or product is
intended to benefit (maybe not the only one, but let's keep it simple for
now - students can be seen as clients, too). This client specifies the
outcomes needed from a variety of subsystems to enable its cultural and
economic systems to operate. In this context we might see students as
potential suppliers, and educational institutions as the places where
these resources are developed. Credentialization is the system of labels
we put on educational outputs that enable us to accept that a certain
level of development has been attained. This involves establishing
production standards (course requirements, exams, papers, readings, etc.),
with grades and diplomas the certification that standards have been met.
There are special ways of indicating particularly high quality outputs,
such as the dean's list and the reputation of the institution.
This is a really big-picture view. Let's take it down to earth and look
at the educational process from the point of view of the student. This
person doesn't know what the system needs or wants from her. New to the
system, she probably has only a vague idea of what she wants to do with
her life, much less what the system needs or how she fits into it. She
does know that she is in school to get out of the educational system the
knowledge that will enable her to get credentialed, and thus create an
opportunity to improve her level of participation in the overall
cultural/economic system. Does this person want to be treated with
respect, as though her needs matter? Probably. So let's go ahead and
call her a customer of the educational process, while at the same time
recognizing that her influence on the process has more appropriately to do
with method than with content. After all, she has purchased an
*opportunity* to learn, not the knowledge itself, so it's up to her to
make good use of that opportunity.
We might say that the cultural/economic system specifies what it needs in
terms of educational outcomes, and the student specifies what she needs in
terms of how she participates in developing those outcomes. In this
perspective, to answer Phillip's question, to fail a student is to
communicate the fact (or judgment) that the she did not meet the
"production standards" for a particular component of the credential being
sought.
>The inevitable consequence is a debasing of the value of the product through
>grade inflation...
Personally, I think this is a real problem. It happens when institutions
perceive students as purchasing knowledge instead of the opportunity to
learn. A student's failure is seen as failure of the institution to meet
her needs, rather than evidence that she did not take adequate advantage
of the learning opportunity.
-- David E. Birren Phone: (608)267-2442 Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources Fax: (608)267-3579 Bureau of Management & Budget Internet: birred@dnr.state.wi.us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "To know, and not to act, is to not know." --Wang Yang Ming, 9th-century Chinese general