Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

In the big news in education today, MIT and Harvard are teaming up to make a Super Online Learning collaboration, inviting lots of little institutions to join them. While in the little news in education, a school in Melbourne is teaming up with lots of other schools to make a business out of their playing field. For which the Victorian Government has provided $40 000 in legal fees. To make the official agreement. To share it and it’s profit-making capabilities.

Education usually seems to move very slowly, taking maybe 20 years to make a decision to revert to the position of twenty years ago. At the moment it seems to be moving very fast.

Education appears to be lining up for position, ready to take us somewhere. Or, alternatively, it appears to be splitting up into playing fields, with their own sharing agreements and profit-making capabilities. There are the Online Universities, the Online Academies, the Online Consortiums, the Collaborative Research Centres and the Centralization of Research Papers. And then there is International Education, and after that is the education of young people in their local areas.

I don’t know what it is that is making education so frisky right now. For some dumb reason, every time I read something about it, I think of the moon. These days everyone seems to be after the moon. It’s such a prize, isn’t it? We’re all itching to get to it and hang up a banner: OPEN FOR BUSINESS. It’s as if we imagine that having the moon, the lights will never go out, the computers will never turn off, and things will just make themselves.

Maybe that’s what people thought in the ’60s, when we were trying to get to the moon.