I don’t often respond to blog articles directly, but I read this and couldn’t seem to leave a comment locally, so here we are. Being a former educator, I think I can bring a certain perspective to the issue – or at least share my biases. Mainly, I have found that educational institutions earn their money by offering network access. This is why top-tier school can charge what they want. It also argues that other schools may now even be worth the price of admission. The student loan debate in the US may be Exhibit B.
I found this thoughtful and broadly persuasive, especially the treatment of education as a historically contingent field of selection rather than a neutral transmission of knowledge. I agree that institutions do not merely distribute information; they decide what counts as knowledge, competence, legitimacy, and intellectual seriousness.
My hesitation concerns the breadth of education as the organising term. Much of the critique seems directed more specifically at institutional schooling: curricula, examinations, credential hierarchies, universities, tuition, disciplinary structures, and labour-market preparation. Knowledge acquisition, inquiry, intellectual formation, credentialing, and institutional reproduction overlap, but I am not sure they should be treated as one object.
This distinction also sharpens the commodification argument. Elite institutions often charge not because they possess otherwise inaccessible knowledge, since much coursework is now available through books, lectures, open courses, and other online resources, but because they sell positional access: selected peers, faculty patronage, alumni networks, recruitment channels, prestige, and a credential recognised by other gatekeepers. In that sense, the scarce commodity is often less knowledge than institutional membership and social placement.
There are certainly exceptions involving laboratories, archives, specialist supervision, unpublished research, or unusually strong seminars. But these seem insufficient to explain most of the price premium attached to elite undergraduate education. The institution is often selling educational capital rather than education alone.
I also wonder whether the essay first dissolves education as a coherent ontology and then partially restores it through terms such as ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic education’, now defined as critical, emancipatory, interdisciplinary, and resistant to domination. I am sympathetic to that orientation, but it still seems to select one preferred practice from among several rather than recover the essence of education.
Perhaps the more diagnostic vocabulary would distinguish learning, schooling, credentialing, intellectual formation, network access, and institutional reproduction. This would preserve the force of the critique whilst making clearer which function is being criticised at each point.
Philosophics 