When I lived in New York in the 1990s, I briefly worked for the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, a company that combined a theater and an Internet start-up. The reason for this unusual hybrid was that the theater’s brilliant artistic director was devoted not only to the modernist playwright but also to technology, which she used to pay for her experiments and nourish her creativity.
If you study the history of the arts, you can find plenty of examples of artists using technology to enrich and complicate their work.
I mention this to affirm that I am not antitechnology. But I am unsettled by the embracing of MOOCs, or massive open online courses, both inside and outside the academy, in part because the conversation about them mostly excludes the arts and humanities.
Not everyone has bought into MOOCs, of course. Still, I have not read much on a point that to me is obvious: MOOCs might ultimately be suited for tackling quantitative subjects like engineering, math, and computer science, but they are irrelevant for humanities and the arts, which are themselves already marginalized in the academy. There is less discussion of the fact that to support MOOCs as the conduit through which information is disseminated is to ignore one of the university’s primary responsibilities: to create an oasis for inquiry into disciplines that in this country don’t receive enough support. American literacy is declining, some experts say—and that problem cannot be solved by MOOCs.
And yet it is surprising to learn that the chief executives of MOOC-supporting companies express contempt for universities in general and for disciplines other than computer science in particular. Here is Daphne Koller, one of the founders of Coursera, in The Wall Street Journal:
“What we hope and believe will happen is that the role of teachers will change. A teacher will have more time to spend teaching, as opposed to spending time in content development and preparation and in grading endless repetitions of the same assignment. Students will come to class to actually have meaningful, engaged dialogue with other students and the instructors.”
There is so much wrong with that sound bite, which borrows its talking points from the charter-school reform movement, that it is hard to know where to begin, so I’ll focus on just two things: To refer to professors’ class preparation as “content development” reveals Stanford University, where Koller got her Ph.D. and teaches computer science, as less a university than a farm team for Silicon Valley. Even worse, Koller seems unaware that some students already “have meaningful, engaged dialogue.”
Although many of those pushing MOOCs are the usual suspects—university administrators, professors in the hard and soft sciences, tech columnists—now some professors in the humanities, too, have drunk the Kool-Aid. One of the most dismaying moments in Nathan Heller’s recent New Yorker article, “Laptop U,” is when the eminent Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy, whose course “Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization” is now a MOOC, is paraphrased as saying that multiple-choice quizzes are “almost as good as” essay questions.
My situation is unusual. I have the good fortune to teach small seminars in a theater-training conservatory housed in a large university. Many of my classes contain fewer than 10 students. Not only that, my students have decided at age 18 to become artists in a climate where nearly every force is conspiring to argue them out of that decision. They are, in other words, individuals of extreme courage.
These students, some of whom are the first in their families to go to college, are hungry to learn about all the things they don’t know. I teach them, among other things, literature, theory, collaboration, nonfiction writing, and critical thinking. Much of that teaching occurs via the Socratic method, which is mostly how I was taught.
In class, I play devil’s advocate to coax students into seeing the other side of an argument. I teach both practical skills, like how to write a sentence, and theoretical questions, like “What did Aristotle mean by tragedy?” or “Why is Susan Sontag’s essay about Leni Riefenstahl called ‘Fascinating Fascism’?”
My own education now seems most of all like an endangered species. When my professors were not using the Socratic method, they were casting a skeptical eye on my work—particularly in graduate writing workshops, where a particular professor did not spare his disdain for our terrible sentences. “Ahem,” he would begin, and proceed to eviscerate some paragraph. By today’s standard, that might be seen as abuse. It was certainly undemocratic. But it helped shaped me. It helped give me an ideal to try to achieve, as did my professors’ sometimes awkward attempts to make me love the books and art that had shaped them.
I try to teach students how to experience pleasure reading great works of literature and seeing great works of art, which they often hate naturally and reflexively because they need something to hurl themselves against and because we live in an anti-intellectual culture. I try to teach them about the timeless, the universal, and what the dramaturg Mark Bly calls “the questioning spirit.”
In the conservatory, we spend a lot of time helping the students figure out their aesthetic—who are they as artists? Where do they stand in relation to works of great art?
I think of what I do as a kind of artisanal education of the imagination, a slow education, if you will. It is time-consuming and labor-inefficient. It is sometimes maddening. It also ultimately works. I can see it in how my students grow, how they speak and write.
I don’t see how any of it could be reproduced in a MOOC.
I am particularly dismayed when I read one defense of MOOCs in particular—that they enable professors to reach thousands or even tens of thousands of students. But in the arts and humanities, especially, is bigger necessarily better? Yes, everyone should be able to have access to education, but I’m skeptical that MOOCs are the answer for a general arts education. Haven’t we learned anything from other institutions that were too big to fail? Along with Big Pharma, agribusiness, and megabanks, must we also now endure BigEd?
Here is a plea for small education and slow learning. Whatever their actual size, colleges are—or should be—about what endures: learning transmitted person by person, professor to student. By all means, let’s use profits from MOOCs to pay for arts education. But let’s not confuse the two.
Rachel Shteir is an associate professor at the Theatre School at DePaul University. She is the author, most recently, of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting (Penguin Press, 2011).
