The American Freedom Network

College is a Racket – What can We Do?

I think that we’re at the point where higher education may
be ready to drop in price radically, breaking the college/student
loan complexes’ power.  Open-source software (http://www.fsf.org/
)empowers people to access  information without expensive and
restrictive software licenses; open-source textbooks ( http://www.opensourcetext.org/index.htm )  (http://www.introecon.com/ ) make it
possible to share knowledge freely, and allow us to bypass the
textbook racket  CLEP tests(http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/about.html)  make it possible to cheaply document
non-traditional learning, bypassing the first two years of
college.  (I did the latter, so I know that it is doable.)  The
$100 laptop project ( http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/ ) makes the
hardware that facilitates the use of open-source software,
textbooks, and CLEP testing practical for the masses,
worldwide.  Internet connectivity can be provided by organizations
like www.dialinfree.net, which offers free, anonymous 56k dial-up
all across Michigan.

Perhaps we’re at the crossroads between schools that make us
passive consumers of information (or worse), per Ivan Illich, and
an era where education will be freely available, like Socrates’
dialouges were to his students.    There are other open-source
resources – Project Gutenberg, where .txt files of books in the
public domain reside, www.librivox.org, where volunteers record
books from Proj. Gutenberg and make audiofiles of them (MP3, etc.),
and free lectures, etc., on iTunesU, for example. Ubuntu even offers an educational variant – “Edubuntu,” which I am using, which is designed to support networking and administration for the basic needs of a small school.  Like all Linux distributions that I have seen, there are lots of open-source programs available in the science and mathematics fields, too.
The above is perhaps a bit of a ramble, but I hope that it stimulates some thinking and acting, and that the days of dinosaur football factory schools living off bloated federal research grants, student loans that pay for too-high tuition, textbook racketeer Profs, etc., are coming to an end, so that we can get back to the business of educating all who can make use of it.