We occasionally get inquiries about how to secure academic credit for our courses. The answer we give may seem a bit odd, but it's all we have: "No, we do not offer academic credit; we offer the conceptual tools that can enable any thinking person to understand today's baffling economic problems!" Over the years -- we've been offering these courses since 1972 -- various colleges have seen fit to grant credit for our courses, on a student-by-student basis. We have never sought accreditation. And yet -- amazingly -- people continue to take our courses! What we offer here is learning for its own sake, in the old, proud (and all- but-forgotten) tradition of popular education. Whatever else we are doing here at HGI, we are certainly going against the tide of educational policy and practice today. The idea of learning being its own reward is just not fashionable. The liberal arts degree (that last holdout of idealistic navelgazing) is increasingly seen as a career move, a proving ground in the struggle for spots in elite professional schools of law, business or medicine. Art, music and theatre programs are always the first to be cut when budgets run short. Education today is considered an investment, not an enrichment. It wasn't always that way. It may be hard to imagine, today, but Henry George's treatise on political economy, Progress and Poverty, was a runaway best seller! On the strength of Henry George's literary (and oratorical) reputation, the United Labor Party secured 30,000 signatures to convince George to run for Mayor of New York in 1886. A hundred years ago, most people had drastically longer attention spans than they do now. A well-regarded orator would draw the kind of crowd that nowadays would attend the Ice Capades. Stump- or Chautaqua speakers would break for dinner and hundreds of people would return to hear them take up right where they left off, and go on for two more hours! Indeed, most schoolkids who read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address never learn why the speech truly astounded the listening audience of its day: it was breathtakingly short! The President's warm-up speaker on that day spoke, as was customary, for over an hour. It was simply unheard-of for the President to speak so briefly. No, there was a time when the elucidation of ideas and principles was fashionable. Of course, the process probably wasn't pure. Most of those "educators" had some ax to grind, either a political party to advance, a faith to evangelize or a bottle of snake oil to sell. But no matter: at one time, it was actually possible to sell snake oil by explaining stuff to people, just to satisfy their own well-rounded curiosity! In the field of political economy, that sort of thing obviously had to be stopped. Here was this Henry George, and others like him, going around telling people that they could understand how the economy worked (and didn't work). Here was Henry George telling people that the application of logical reasoning was all they needed to understand the problems of poverty, depressions, money, banking and trade! No, that wouldn't do at all, and the landlords, monopolists and bankers hired the top intellectual guns to create a study of economics was abstruse, mathematical, the domain of credentialed experts. Thus the field of "neoclassical economics" was born. This process spread out and corrupted other fields as well, until by somewhere around the 1950s people hardly trusted themselves to understand anything without expert guidance. Women could no longer trust even their own breast milk; trained (male) scientists using advanced research would concoct "superior" nutrition for their babies. Nobody could so much as rewire a lamp without calling in a licensed electrician. Specialization reigned supreme. To understand the meaning of all this reliance on specialists, one had to consult a specialist on the phenomenon of specialization; there was just far, far too much to understand and one could never hope to catch up. To me, the process reached its apotheosis when Ronald Reagan, making a televised speech early in his first term, displayed a graph, comparing two projections of economic health over the next four years: one robust, soaring curve representing his administration's program, and the other anemic, faltering line depicting the best the Democrats had to offer. The interesting thing about this graph was that the co-ordinates were not labeled, and the President didn't trouble to say what they represented. What did it matter anyway? Even if they were named, we certainly couldn't understand what they meant. We simply had to trust the President's choice in specialists. Some of the best students in the HGI's correspondence program are prisoners. Here are people who have had occasion to question what they have been told about how society works. The works of Henry George and his modern interpreters are a revelation to such students. They express deep gratitude for our program (despite the fact that it offers them nothing in the way of career advancement). They spread the word (the HGI has never spent one penny advertising its courses for the prison market). And a number have gone on to teach political economy from their prison cells. There is something very satisfying about learning for its own sake. And we at the Henry George Institute aren't pure either, in case you were wondering. We too have an axe to grind; in our case it is a comprehensive program of economic reform that surprisingly few people know about -- yet it has never been successfully refuted, and it has never been more desperately needed. And the first thing, the most urgent imperative, is to get the word out -- to get people to understand basic principles and to think for themselves. And in the process, we have discovered how very rewarding it is to show people -- often for the first time in their lives -- that they truly have the power to do that! Lindy Davies, Program Director, HGI |