Hegemony and Education

¶ … Hegemony Affects Men and Women Differently in an Online University Environment

The caliber of colleges and universities differ from institution to institution as well as from country to country. I have been to some in countries other than the U.S.A. And institutions that are non-profit and would say that these seem to be less hegemony-imbued than those that others and I have attended in the U.S.A. From what I have heard and experienced, problems of hegemony particularly seem to exist in the online for-profit universities that are notorious for offering degraded syllabus and programs, being more of a diploma mill and requesting money than offering education.

All universities and institutions that I have attended have slanted their education according to the politics of their country with curriculum heavily slanting to their specific country and criticizing those that opposed their country. I also found that, occasionally, the curriculum of these institutions ridiculed cultures that had historically challenged them, for instance in battles or other events. Great stress too was laid on the cultural achievements of these countries and it seemed to me that males were often the prominent figures.

The online for-profit institutions, however, from what I have read and heard from victims go a step further in that they center their programs around the university itself with student having to research for each and every course, for instance, how the course contributes to and expands the institution's aim / motto / values (if 'values' there are), and how the student can use the course to accomplish the institution's mission.

More so, the institution's politics (usually liberal) are dismally reflected in the paucity of its curriculum, both in choice of textbooks, in selection of teachers, in biased subject matter, and in the way that this subject matter is addressed.

Certain subjects are more immune than others. The humanities are particularly prone to this treatment as is the Human Service field. 'Hard' sciences, such as physics and the mathematics is, mostly, excluded.

Hegemony, however, permeates into all nuances of these for-profit institutions from exclusive choice of lecturers (only those who condone them and represent their views) to treatment of students seeming (from incidents that I have encountered and heard) to privilege those who come from certain backgrounds, social circles, and races. Savvy social media skills and affluence are prized and these students receive more assistance and less exploitation than others.

Ethical issues that may arise from hegemony and how I would address those issues

It seems to me that hegemony is a result of the educational system becoming increasingly business minded, taken over in fact by the business making world, and this causes it to lose its direction and to become for-profit centered focused on gaining as much money as possible rather than providing its students with an education. When this is the fact, a slippery slope occurs where education becomes increasingly more corrupted and, led by businessman, enrolls mostly ignorant businessmen who accord with the university's role as their instructors:

An educational system that exclusively aims to transform people into commodities for consumption on the labor market must treat them in turn as passive consumers. The curriculum will consist of objects to be possessed in the form of facts and skills rather than objects of thought. (Elliot, 1992, 144).

This is actually the set of affairs in many of the American schools, particularly the for-profit ones that see their students as consumers, market to them as such, and, rather than focusing on education that may cause them to lose their consumers (or rather the money that they receive from foundations such as Sallie Mae), focus on making the syllabus as facile and simple as possible.

In fact, Saltman (2009), a regular critic of the American educational system and the hegemony inseparable from that system attributes decline of the American educational institution to the privatization of the public schools system and to an elite corporate structure imposing destructive liberal values on the system. Money and education should be separate. Unfortunately, in all too many schools in our country, the one dominates the other. Saltman (2009), as do so many others, calls for decentralization of the educational system.

The negative effects of hegemony on teacher effectiveness and recommendations for mitigating those effects

I see hegemony today as being no different to the indoctrination that occurred in the instructional system of the Middle Ages where instruction was skewed towards religion and people were ostracized if they as much s questioned their religious teachings. Some, if not many, of these schools in this country are no different to the cathedral or monastic schools since the teachers in these schools focused primarily on indoctrinating the students in a certain way of thinking. By teachers doing this, they consign themselves into a limited mindset and limit themselves from thinking broadly hence gaining a wider set of assumptions about their world.

What passes as 'pedagogy' in fact may be seen as a set of assumptions about learning and strategies for teaching that screw both teacher and student into a very narrow hole that resembles something like the cavern in Plato's tale where men tied to the floor see only their shadows not the reality and openness beyond.

I think teachers should expose students to all forms of experiences, particularly those that they disagree with or that oppose their specific cultural leanings.

Students and teacher moreover should attempt to take the defense of viewpoints that go counter to their culture's history, values, and principles and try to obtain an empathic feeling into the why and wherefores of that culture. Students and teacher, in fact, may go so far as to attempt to practically relive it and experience it in order to actually 'step into the shoes' of the other. Only so can one gain a less rigid, more flexible sense of thinking. Education, too, should become qualitative rather than quantitative. It should free itself of authoritative, conventionalized institutions of learning, and if teachers recognize that only a certain material or type of book is used, they should deliberately introduce others that bring in a different, opposite, perspective.

Philosophy of education

Education is supposed to liberate us making us the man who can step out of eth cave and see the shadows. On the contrary: the education of toady, particularly in certain institutions, only indoctrinates its students with a corporately controlled mass media hegemony distorting our understanding of many ethical, personal, and spiritual issues and indoctrinating us to accept the irrational teachings and mindset of corporate consumerism