Bone-Lazy College Professors: The Great Opportunity
The laziness of college professors has been legendary ever since the 11th century. It never changes. It is actually a lot worse than outsiders believe.
No other profession requires less work for more pay.
No other profession offers less accountability to anybody in authority, especially people who pay.
Even in the most mediocre of third-rate colleges, nobody is forced to teach more than 12 hours a week, meaning 12 50-minute sessions. Some of them teach only nine hours.
No professor is required to assign a term paper to students. No one is required to assign essay examinations. It can be all graded by true/false questions and multiple-choice questions. These are sometimes graded by machines. The grading machines are called Scantrons.
No one is required to update a lecture that he first delivered 35 years ago.
No one requires college professors to record these lectures on video and then post them on YouTube, free of charge, so that any student anywhere can see what the professor has said. This means that parents, board members, and even the heads of departments have no idea what is actually being taught in the completely autonomous classrooms of the college.
In the early 19th century, the founder of the University of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, invented the doctrine of academic freedom. He did not want Prussian politicians interfering with the classroom lectures that the politicians were paying for. So, he invented a completely hypothetical concept, which on its face was preposterous, namely, that nobody who is paying for a service with tax money has any right to investigate what the money is being used for. This blatantly self-interested dogma has become universally acceptable as a principle of academic autonomy, and it is almost universally believed and enforced today.
Once a professor has been granted tenure, he cannot be fired for any reason short of moral turpitude. It is rare for any tenured professor ever to be fired for any reason. If he shows up to class sober or close to it most of the time, he is not going to be fired.
There is no other profession with this kind of immunity from performance.
The same intellectual lethargy has been transferred to high schools and grade schools, but the hours are much longer. The intellectual lethargy is just as great, but the teachers have to show up on time and take roll.
You would think that this system could be overturned without much trouble. Eventually, it will be. The Khan Academy is the wave of the future. Salman Khan produced the first 800 mathematics lessons before anybody sent any money, and before he was able to go out and hire other teachers to produce video-based lessons.
Today, he trains literally millions of students. He does this free of charge. The quality of the education is better than they can get in most public schools. The best public schools are beginning to adopt his videos for classroom use.
DELAYING THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION
At this point, it would be possible for any ideological group to produce a comprehensive case through graduate school curriculum with fewer than three dozen teachers holding a Ph.D., or a master's degree.
Next week, the Ron Paul Curriculum is essentially completed. Every course will be available, K-12. It took me four years to put this curriculum together. If I had not run into a roadblock in the first year with mathematics, I would've been able to do it in three years. The curriculum project had $5,000 to start with. It was based on the willingness of teachers to take royalties.
Any ideological group, or any religious denomination, could do this. This is not hypothetical. I have done it. I did it without the backing of anybody or any institution.
Think of the American Catholic Church. It has 77 million members. Historically, the American Catholic Church was committed to private education. Catholics who got off the boats from starvation conditions in Ireland in the second half of the 1840's started private schools. These schools had the support of the church until the bishops changed their minds in the second half of the 1970's.
Two or three dozen men and women teaching at Notre Dame University or any other Catholic college could put together an entire K-12 curriculum online for the Catholic Church in two years.
The same applies to the Southern Baptists, the Methodists, all varieties of Lutherans, squabbling Presbyterians, and all the other splinter groups that say they are taking a stand for Jesus, but whose intellectual leaders are taking a break from life. These people have Ph.D. degrees, but they are bone lazy. They have no vision. They have no self-discipline. They have no organizational ability. They are not motivated by royalty income. They are not motivated by service. They are motivated by one thing, and one thing only: the desire to avoid teaching as many students as possible for 40 years, and then retire comfortably -- to the extent that ceasing from virtually no work for 40 years can be described accurately as retirement.
The next time you hear any Christian complain about secular humanism in the public schools, remind him of this.
Christian parents have this in common: they are too cheap to pay for anything good.
Christian college professors have this in common: they are too lazy to do anything slightly different from the somnambulism of their present careers. They sleepwalk through life. They are paid well by incomparably stupid donors and incomparably stupid parents who put up the money. This has been going on since the 11th century.
Digital technologies are going to upend this system. It is possible today to put an entire university online and sell the product at a profit for $5,000 a year. It is being done. This is not hypothetical.
It is possible to offer a comprehensive K-12 education free of charge online. This is not hypothetical. The Khan Academy is doing it.
The Ron Paul Curriculum charges about $500 per year. That's not much money.
All that is stopping this from spreading is for terminally naïve parents to stop putting up $10,000 a year to pay for classroom-based private education, K-12. It can be done online free of charge 12 months from now if just 40 college professors would devote a summer vacation to producing one course of 180 20-minute lectures. They could do it free for the sake of the cause. (Joke!) Or some denominational group could pay them $50,000. Or they could be paid 50% of the course's tuition payments. This is not hypothetical. This is what the Ron Paul Curriculum is doing right now.
CONCLUSION
All is not lost. Educationally speaking, a dozen college professors in denominational colleges could restructure the denomination's K-12 curriculum within five years. All it would take then would be parents who are willing to pay for about a tenth of what they are paying now to get their children educated and certified. In other words, parents would have to come to their senses. This has not happened since the 11th century, but there is always hope. Not much, but a little.