That’s true… I always thought the best way to describe Marx is a mix between Smith and Hegel.
Yes. That’s true. A friend of mine was recently talking about how he thinks our field should not require books, but journal articles. Academic books, at least in history, often repeat themselves as they reiterate their point and many times could be summed up in 40 or so pages, at most. No one makes money off writing books in academia and really important books go unread because they get lost in the shuffle… I’ve seen the number of sales for some of my friends… it’s not pretty.
I’ve struggled with this question, which seems like it’s been a core question of revolutionaries, radicals, leftists, and reformers: reform vs. taking it all out. I think Zizek is one of those folks talking about how it’s so hard to imagine anything else, so we fall back on imagining the end of the world, especially in popular culture. We have problems coming up with alternatives to modernity, that we can only embrace the cleansing fires of the end of the world. Whenever I watch Walking Dead, I do find myself thinking… well, maybe living in a prison, with zombies outside wouldn’t be so bad… Yet, despite the availability of the alterantive–living more off the land, engaging less with the system, modernity, technology, etc–I’m more than willing to admit I’m lazy. I think my love handles will attest to my laziness. Besides, if I didn’t have the net, I could have nice conversations like this one.
I am an infidel… all religious say so. Except maybe Buddhist? And Pastafarians for sure embrace me. 
I think being skeptical of the model as anything other than supplemental to education is not the same thing as rejecting it out of hand. Do I think we need to think critically about education in this country, from the top down, sure. Should we accept new technologies uncritically… I’d say no. I’m not saying it can’t be effective as a teaching tool, but that doesn’t mean it is or will be. Plus, I have a double layer of skepticism since large corporations looking to make a profit are involved. Education is and always has been dependent upon the culture that it comes from–society has collectively decided what is needed, and figured out how to deliver it. Despite the dire prognosis many have, we forget that we are an incredibly literate society compared to the past. People spend far more time reading and writing than ever before–they might not be reading literature and they might not be writing grand epics, but as a culture we do read and write more than ever. I think that while the economy should help shape how education looks, we should think about trying to shape the economy to our ideal education. I realize that a utopian vision is out of the question, because those have a tendency to end poorly (I’m looking at you, Stalin!!), but I am suggesting that we should as a society decide what sort of society we want to have–market centered as the libertarians like to argue, or as Polyani and Papa Francisco argued, people centered–and then figure out a way to craft our education around that. I think that education should be one of those things that are free to all, and yet not forced. I like for people to have options, frankly. You want to send your kid to a Catholic school, go for it, you want to homeschool, cool, you like a Montessori, great! Actually, there was some public library that started offering HS degrees recently–offering classes to patrons, and that’s a great idea. But I have just about as many answers as you do to fixing anything.
I think there is some value in this. I have a cousin who is in school to become a mechanic. Obviously, this is a specific skill set, which requires a specific sort of education… he’s not doing the same sort of things as me, but he’ll likely have better job prospects at the end of the day. I think the danger in this sort of model you’re suggesting is that it creates class divisions. I’ve never seen my getting a PhD as being worth more than my cousin who is going to work on cars—he’s fantastic at it. He took his brother’s dash off to do some work in like 5 minutes flat… I could NEVER do anything like that.
So, I don’t know man. We should start our own university. What do you say? We can fix ALL THE THINGS!!! 
