Academic Policy

Policy as a set of procedures controlling action meets with the work of disinterested reflection to deal with the basic conditions impinging on educational work. Here educators frame their basic rationales and justifications when challenged by internal doubt or external oppositions. Here are the fundamental directing strategies that educators develop to turn conditions to the best advantage. What basic tasks must intellectual and educational policy accomplish if people are to fulfill the educational potentials inherent in prevailing historical conditions?

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As we have seen, professional policy, policy relating to the codified principles of organized performance, pertains to a wide range of features in the existing system of education, all of which helped to adapt print technologies to educational purposes. As educators advance their agenda of change, they are developing new policies and adapting existing ones to make full use of digital technologies as educational resources. Academic policy, policy in the context of disinterested reflection, has an important, more unitary function, namely to legitimate both the distinctions among people and the shaping effects on people, which a system of education creates as a consequence of its actual operations.

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Until the current historic juncture, the problem for academic policy has been to deploy scarce educative resources in ways that people would find just and proper. This basic problem is shifting in our extended present. Cultural resources are ceasing to be scarce. With the World Wide Web, we see a hint of the fullness of cultural participation that is becoming the birthright of each and every child. As it has existed, educational policy has been a complicated system for allocating differential access to the cultural assets of the world's civilizations and for legitimating the results. How could it be proper that some enjoyed the privilege of advanced education and others did not? In our extended present, reflective policy in education is being redefined to take into account a completely novel starting point – all the resources of the world's cultures are becoming in principle available to any person at any place at any time.

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Cultural scarcities are sure to persist because some people are choosing for religious or cultural reasons to forego access, because some political regimes are imposing censorship and limitations, and because some individuals and organizations are exercising sufficient commercial leverage to price access to some resources beyond the means of many. Such retrogressions notwithstanding, the bulk of cultural resources are becoming available to anyone at any place and any time, and the problem of policy shifts significantly with that new condition. Of course, this new condition is becoming a reality for all people only over an extremely extended present. Hence, questions of equity are persisting, far too tenaciously, and educators must act affirmatively, with greater effect, a more liberal spirit, to achieve equity for all in education. [Note 82] It is taking, however, a very short time for a condition of cultural profusion to become an approximate reality for very large numbers of people living in the more developed sectors of the world. [Note 83] As people in advantaged societies start to enjoy random access to unlimited cultural resources, the policy problem shifts from one of allocating scarce resources to managing relatively abundant ones. Let us explore the character and consequences of this shift.

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Educational practice has been rife with privilege. Great differences in educational opportunity everywhere exist. The function of academic policy has therefore been to justify such privilege, to rationalize the differences, to legitimate the advantages some enjoy and the disadvantages others suffer. Academic policy has performed these functions by showing, in remarkably convincing ways, that the differences are in some significant way deserved and beneficial to the community. In many different ways, traditional educational policy has served to legitimate the allocation of scarce resources. Policy issues have turned on a fundamental trade-off between people and cultural resources. Under a regime of scarcity, educational institutions can avail a narrow selection of the culture to all people and a full representation of it to a few – almost everyone gets through elementary school but only a few receive MBA’s. In every polity and society throughout the world, formal educational systems consist of pyramidal structures in which very large cohorts receive instruction in basic subjects – reading, writing, and arithmetic. As cohorts move upwards from that base, their numbers dwindle as the selection of the culture received becomes fuller and more complex and testing, counseling, and the subtleties of suggestion make many stop the academic ascent. At the apex, a very few gain command of comprehensive research and professional collections.

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On the whole, these legitimations have succeeded because the regime of scarcity has appeared to be a natural necessity. Only a few could rightfully gain access to the most comprehensive collections, for those were both fragile and costly. Universal participation in advanced cultural activities was a practical impossibility. The whole structure of educational opportunity necessarily identified and prepared a limited number who could make optimum use of the exhaustive resources while endowing others, in due measure, with lesser educational opportunities correlated to their aptitude and need. The extensive system of grades and record keeping, of assessing aptitude and measuring achievement, of guidance and counseling, works to match the quantity and quality of opportunity with the estimated potential and demonstrated merit of different individuals. It is a system legitimating differential access in the eyes of all – those who get the better opportunities, those who do not, and those in the whole society who presumably benefit from the rational allocation of limited educational resources.

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Digitized cultural resources are developing very different economies from those of printed cultural resources. With printed texts, the bulk of production costs are absorbed in the costs of physical reproduction, along with the costs in libraries of storage and preservation. For printed information, the curve plotting cost relative to supply charts a steady increase, perhaps even a course that accelerates as supply builds and large collections require special buildings and staffs for their maintenance. The developing curve of cost relative to supply for digital resources is different. At the start it has a high threshold because initial investment in the digital information infrastructure is costly, although it is becoming lower as the infrastructure becomes fuller and more efficient. But once the threshold is crossed, both the cost of adding more resources to the set of those available and the cost of making the set accessible to more and more people is low. Legitimizing harsh differentials in the degree of access ceases to be a significant policy problem when everyone has nearly unlimited access to the full stock of cultural assets of the world's cultures.

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What then becomes the challenge for academic policy, the commitment to legitimation? A major item in the agenda for educators is to develop a good answer to this question. Let us explore it briefly.

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Note how a movement from the pole of constraint towards its opposite has profound effects on the formation of curricula. For some time, elite colleges and universities have used the elective system to include a very wide range of possibilities in the curriculum, putting their practice close to the pole of complete inclusion. In the mid nineteenth century the curriculum ceased to be prescribed and opened up to cover a wider and wider range of courses with a great deal of control over what to study shifting in the process to the student. As it has expanded, the degree of inclusion has offended cultural conservatives, who attack it as an illegitimate watering-down of the core values of intellect and civilization. To those who believe their accidental privileges are essential to the welfare of the whole, this critique may be convincing, but for most it sounds shrill and self-serving. There are alternative routes to core values, consistent with open inclusion, to which the discussion shortly returns. For now, observe how the issue long festering in higher education is beginning to have a far more radical effect on elementary and secondary curricula.

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Traditionally, curricular resources in schools represent highly constrained choices. Policies determining who teaches what to whom, along with policies governing how the resultant performances by students, teachers, and schools are to be assessed, all serve to manage and legitimate such constraints. The unenviable task of legitimating highly constrained curricular choices results in tenaciously ridiculous judgments of cultural worth as educators have had to rationalize a cramped canon and a sample of historical interpretations that have been simplified to the point of stupidity. In field after field the range of cultural resources that have substantial educative worth has far exceeded what publishers could cram into textbooks or schools could purchase for their libraries. Thus a great paradox arose – except at its most elite pinnacles, schooling has been a consistently anti-intellectual profession.

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As digital resources become the basis of the curriculum, the need for curricular exclusions in principle disappears and the pedagogical strategy becomes one of inclusion. It requires on the one hand ensuring that the system represents all resources optimally and on the other that it avails to teachers and students navigational and analytical tools, which dependably enable them to engage a sequence of seminal questions, which let them identify and activate the resources that advance their power of cultural participation at the moment when they feel their need. With constrained media, policy enabled authorities to make choices on behalf of users, [Note 84] and with digital media, policy shifts the power of choice to users, and authorities work to facilitate and assist users in the exercise of that power. [Note 85]

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Rightly practiced, making choices for others differs from helping them make choices for themselves. The legitimation of choice under a rule of scarcity is the problem of distributive justice. Thus, over the past few centuries, people have situated issues of legitimation with respect to curricula and educational opportunity largely within the framework of distributive justice. Fuller, better opportunities went to those who had the highest aptitude and best preparation because they deserved them and would return to the whole society fuller service than would the lesser prepared. Arguments about whether on not a particular structure of opportunity was just turned on the whether or not one or another group received the educational opportunities and resources that they properly deserved. The good curriculum distributed educative attention to materials in fit measure to their cultural worth, the most attention going to the most important. Curriculum contentions turned on arguments over whether educators had committed injustices in assessing the relative importance of various materials and the relative potentials of diverse students. In contrast to this rule of scarcity, with the rule of profusion, where all opportunities are open to everyone, the issue of distributive justice in education in principle disappears. A problem of legitimation nevertheless remains.

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Distributive justice is not the only type of justice. Aristotle formalized the problem of distributive justice, and in societies where economic power and differences are the main determinants of well-being, people perceive distributive justice to be the primary problem of justice for under the daily constraints it is surely the most pressing. [Note 86] But as societies become affluent, other problems of justice increase in importance. Prior to Aristotle, Plato’s Republic was another great work devoted to the problem of justice, but not to that of distributive justice. Most students forget chronology and assume that the proper context for interpreting Plato’s views is the context of post-Aristotelian reflection on distributive justice. Consequently, they find the Republic essentially incomprehensible or perverse. In actuality, the Republic is not about distributive justice at all, but about what we might call developmental or regulative justice. Distributive justice concerns who deserves what share of available rewards and goods and why. Regulative justice concerns the problem of maintaining relationships between differentiated parts within a self-sustaining whole in ways that allow the parts and the whole to fulfill their potentialities over time.

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Think of a professional football team. The front office deals with distributive justice, at least within the tiny universe of the team and the league, in negotiating salaries and other terms of player contracts. The issue of distributive justice here (we’ll forget about your pay and mine) is to justify differentials in compensation, making it clear relative to the market, or to some standard of intrinsic worth, why one player should get $7,000,000 and another a few hundred thousand. If the justification is poor, jealousies and resentment can wrack the team, leading fans to rail at the front office. The coaching staff, on the other hand, deals with developmental, or regulative justice in trying to bring each player up to his full potential and integrating them all into a resourceful, winning team. The issue here is to get each player into optimum condition for the role he has to play, to build the determination and elan of the group so that each plays with full intensity, and to develop and communicate to each player an astute gameplan that takes into account the unique capacities of key personnel and the vulnerabilities of opponents. Finally, regulative justice here consists in putting all these activities together, each in its proper measure, so that on the day of the crucial game, the whole team is strong, intense, and shrewd together, winning in a commanding performance.

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Ah! Were the rest of life so simple, especially education. Even where the situations are far more complex, however, regulative justice entails perfecting the many-dimensional excellences of components and integrating them into an optimal performance. Theories of regulative justice in different areas of human activity enable people to think about how to bring potential excellence to fulfillment and people consider something legitimate according to regulative justice when they believe that efforts to bring potentials to fulfillment have been highly successful. In education, regulative justice is always important, but where scarcities abound, regulative justice recedes from the forefront of attention. Where curricular and educational resources are unconstrained, regulative justice becomes the prime issue of legitimation, however. Then, those responsible for the use of educative resources face increasing demands to show that their stewardship of the parts conduces to the optimum benefit of the whole, for the whole person acquiring education and for the whole community whose defining purpose is the fullest possible enlightenment of its members. [Note 87]

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It took Plato a supremely complicated and beautiful treatise to introduce his regulative theory of justice. It is neither our purpose here to explicate the Republic, nor to provide a new treatise following out the topic of regulative justice within a digital system where educational choices are essentially unconstrained. Educators have so far generated relatively little deep justification for existing practices. [Note 88] For the most part, external constraints have imposed the elitism of the system on it. Those at the higher reaches have found their goods fortuitously in high demand. In the nature of things, their goods were scarce. Hence, they felt little pressure to explain well why their goods were better than others. As goods cease to be scarce, pressure increases to understand how various options affect persons and the polity so that people can make reasoned choices among those options on behalf of themselves and the polity. With a change in constraining conditions, the question the young Socrates put so well in the Protagoras – What effect does an educational experience have upon the student who undergoes it? – increasingly confronts educators at all levels. [Note 89] Regulative justice, pedagogy in its fullest sense, an understanding of how educational options affect self-actualizing persons in self-actualizing communities, becomes an integral part of educational work in the digital context.