Free education

There are two types of education: learnin' stuff, and certification. And they don't necessarily go together.

I was talking to a co-worker today about her possibly sitting in on my Survey Methods course I'll be teaching this upcoming semester: Not enrolling, just sitting in.

This caused me to ponder the underlying elements of ''education.''

Knowledge is just lying around at universitsies. You could conceivably sit in on large lectures, take notes -- maybe even ask a few questions. As long as you're not submitting assignments or taking the exams -- and thus increasing the load on grading assignments -- you're not causing any extra work for the instructor or the teaching assistants.

Even in smaller classes (say, 10-15 students), on the first day of class you could introduce yourself to the instructor and say ''I'm not on your list yet''. Which is enetirely correct. You could do the homework, or not -- your choice. (Just not turn it in; do it for the practice.) And you could do as much of the reading as actually interests you, or seems relevant to what you want to get out of the course.

Granted, because you hadn't formally enrolled in the course, you wouldn't receive any documentation that you had taken the class -- and thus, no certification. But, you would've learned stuff.

When you go to college, you're really not paying for the knowledge: you're paying for the certification. And it doesn't create any additional load on the instructor to lecture to one extra person -- it's only the grading (or as the Aussies call it, ''marking'').

Think about classes that are offered at community centers and such: "fun" classes, like yoga, beadwork, martial arts classes, conversational French -- you don't get grades, you just do it out of interst in the subject matter.

Want to learn webpage design? Buy a book for thirty bucks, and dink around with your computer. **Or**, take a course for a few hundred bucks, do all the homework assignments and term papers or class projects, and get a grade at the end that signifies ''Yes, this person understood at least X-percent of the course content.''

If people were truly intersted in a topic, and didn't care about the certification, they wouldn't need to pay thousands of bucks in tuition: all they'd need is a library card, and access to someone that knows about the topic that they can ask questions of.


--GG