The Value of Stupidity
Nathan Harden writing in the American Interest argues that higher education as we know it is doomed. The short video clip below may provide an inkling why. “I want an education,” implores this lady student at a Chicago school in what passes for a class. Evidently, she doesn’t think she is getting it. Why is that?
In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.
One possible answer is that schools increasingly don’t teach anything the students find valuable. They teach stuff, but that stuff isn’t knowledge. Real knowledge makes a difference in your life; it makes you capable of doing things you couldn’t without it. In that respect education is like those magical rays superheros received in comic-books. Before a 90 pound weakling. Afterward, the Green Lantern, in the days before the Green Lantern was gay.
But there are no magic rays in the Chicago school classrooms. So they leave the classroom with nothing of utility in their possession despite the hours they’ve spent sitting still waiting for it. About all they can be sure to receive, if they grit their teeth and hang around long enough, is a devalued credential from a Chicago public school handed out by a functionary on a stage with the band thumping out “Land of Hope and Glory”. Is that worth years of their life?
Aware of the disgruntlement, some professors have decided to compete with the next most valuable use of students time: video games. If they can make classrooms pay off as much as a game, then maybe things can still work out. Professors are handing out badges, of the sort you can earn on Farmville.
Watson used them in an online graduate level course, and said students could see exactly what they would have to do to get the badges in order to show their mastery. Students even had the option to make the badges, once earned, publicly available on social media platforms.
This, Watson said, put the power back in the students’ hands. Employers can now go in and look at the skills that the student and potential employee have to offer, he said.
“It helps the student prove themselves,” Watson said. “They only have a transcript to show what they have learned, but the employer can’t see how that translates. Now they’ll have a type of portfolio that the employer can see with his own eyes.”
Meanwhile, reaction to the pilot program is mixed, he said.
“Some are seeing it as a different grade box,” he said.
That’s probably exactly what the badges are: a different grade box, instituted because the official grade box has become too corrupted to measure anything useful. The professors are printing their own currency because the academic money is worth about as much as Mickey Mouse Money.
But who says you can’t spend Mickey Mouse Money? David Frum explains to his readers that this is just what the system wants. It has long ago disconnected itself from reality. It lives in a hermetically closed universe where stupidity has become artificially valuable. The most sought after thing in the Obama administration today, a fact attested to by Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton is the ability to spout nonsense with a straight face. That requirement may shed light on the woes of the Chicago public school system. What if unabashed incompetence became the beau ideal?
Frum presents as Exhibit A Chuck Hagel. Citing David Aaaron Miller at Foreign Policy, Frum argues that Hagel was been chosen by Barack Obama precisely because he is so unqualified that he can serve merely as a rubber-stamp.
Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran sanctions: Much has been made of Hagel’s views on other matters — talking to Hamas, changing tack on Hezbollah, and questioning the value of sanctions against Iran. On all these issues, Hagel’s views are out of synch with current U.S. policy. I disagree with the former senator on all three (and make no mistake, should the nomination move ahead, he’ll be pressed on all three).
But we’re kidding ourselves if we think Chuck Hagel will be in a position to influence the debate on any of them. As I’ve written elsewhere, Barack Obama is the most withholding and controlling U.S. president on foreign policy since Richard Nixon. All power on the big and sensitive issues flows in and out of the White House, as John Kerry will discover too. Obama dominates; he doesn’t delegate. Don’t like what Hagel has to say on Hamas? Not to worry. Unhappy about his views on sanctions? Never mind. His views on this and other matters won’t count for much.
In other words what Hagel brings to the table isn’t what he knows but the fact that he knows nothing. It’s just like the public schools. They don’t exist to teach the students. They exist to employ the unions.
Real competence doesn’t matter any more in the Big Tent; it marches to a different drummer and neither should it matter in Big Tent Prep, the Chicago public schools. The system no longer values what you know; it values where you graduated — or so it says; it no longer cares about what you are as much as Who Sent You.
But there’s more. Nathan Harden by arguing that the Big Tent Prep system is collapsing is also arguing perhaps without being aware of it that the economic system it feeds will also change radically. The collapse of the educational system is the harbinger of the collapse of the system in which it serves. A world where “Harvard will enroll ten million students” will be a world where graduating from Harvard won’t matter. A gate ten million wide is no gate. In that torrent the grading power will shift to whoever does the recruiting. The emphasis will have shifted to what the graduate or certificate holder actually knows.
In that world, Chuck Hagel need not apply. Nor would perhaps Barack Obama be in a position to teach. But it might be a universe in which the disgruntled lady student could get answer to her plea. “I want an education!” she said. Want an education? Well go out and get it anyway you can.
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After the ‘more’, the video screen occludes the commentary. Must fix!
look on page 2
It’s fixed now.
See also VDH’s current rant on the subject:
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/a-most-peculiar-institution/
==
as John Kerry will discover too
I don’t think John Kerry is big on that discovery thing, he may like the Obambus environment, Kerry just another court jester.
==
The big schools know there’s something up, though just what it is perhaps they nor anybody does not yet know. Lots of educational startups, they can feel the heat. And they know they change only veeeery slowly, it’s in their charters. The “inverted” classroom seems the thing, first the student (even the fully matriculated on-campus variety) watch a video, at their own pace, at their own times, as many times as they like, and then come to class for HOMEWORK, in-person stroking, or whatever it is. Oh, same theory right down to kindergarten, btw. Certainly the ability to watch a video of the classroom presentation is a good start! Better yet if it comes with a transcript you can print, copy, and annotate. Not being required to come in, sit down, and shut up – may be non-conducive to pedagogy, if you ask me, and I’m talking right up through graduate school here. Not having students in the room to tell the professor if he is unclear or otherwise full of it, is also a lost benefit.
Still, overall, maybe it will work out. If and when we get solid academics from real institutions available online, I know I will participate. So gimme some bitcoin, that won’t stop me.
–
Finally as to ignorance being a hot commodity these days, especially when credentialed – that seems to be one of my major posting points around here on every topic, and one of the signature signs of our age. Better learn to love it. OTOH, is it new? Ayn Rand makes frequent fun of the idea, “I’m a disinterested party so my judgement should trump yours, just cuz it’s your ass on fire doesn’t mean we want your opinion on things, obviously you’re not seeing straight. So go stand over there in the ass-on-fire line and wait your turn. Here, you can watch this video while you wait, and earn a certificate, maybe even a Hawaiian birth certificate, hey it worked for me.”
I think the wave of the future is for higher education to be free and online. Your credentials will come from passing tests you have to pay for that are designed by people in the industries that want people who have such skills. And they won’t care that you didn’t get it from one of those old quaint universities that required you to take nine hours of oppression studies in order to get a degree in geology. And even if you have shiny University credentials, you still have to take the test. No exceptions.
Talent, rather than credentials, might actually begin to mean something again. It seems that many of the credentials passed out these days have all the value of those that were given to the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, the only differences being that they take longer and require less sacrifice to get.
My understanding is “Harvard” (and Yale) education isn’t much better than your state college, it is however that Emblem on that piece of Parchment that makes the “big Bucks”, it means you’re a member of the club, a club that has for a long time included CEO, CFO, etc. (upper corporate management) of most of the major American corporations, the ones with those unbelievable Golden Parachutes! Which is funny how in the last several years we don’t hear too much about those “Golden Parachutes” of course a lot of them went to work for the 0bama Administration… Personally I think this current White House meeting has little to do with the Republicans leaders standing the “No New Taxes” ground (for which nearly every Republican Member was elected to do!) then their colluding with 0bama and fermenting a strategy to get something passed, I would even go as far as saying Mr. Boehner would conspire with 0bama to somehow get the thorn (Tea Party) in Mr. Boehner side out of the way by getting those members unelected, Mr. Boehner is a Big Government Republican!
Josh – The videos have commentary where you can say something like “I have no idea what was going on between timestamp a and b. Can anybody explain that part better?” and have a hope that somebody, perhaps the teacher, perhaps a fellow student will actually do it. If they won’t for free, you can get someone else to do it for cash and have a much better focused session because they too can see the problematic video.
Tcobb – This future will come when the HR departments start accepting these alternate credentials. Good luck. They’re dens rife with PC.
Free education is a pipe dream. Online Universities are here to stay and they are not free. In fact they are quite expensive if less so then a residential program. One of the main myths of the internet is that information wants to be free. Wrong, old information collated and indexed on the internet is free but it costs to create and disseminate new information.
Another myth is that the online experience is equal to a residential experience. That is simply not true. There are interactions that occur in person that do not happen online. The very best online schools like the Univeristy of Phoenix go out of their way to bring together students living in the same geographic location to enhance the experience.
People who want a credential can effectively get it at an online school. If you want an education, well that is something else.
Whenever I see widespread incompetence I see widespread easy meat. The fact is that “credentialled ignorance” – thank you Josh – cannot sustain itself, it can only block things and there is an asymptotic limit to the power of blocking.
For those who want to compete by making themselves competent at something that is both useful and in demand, credentialed ignorance provides vast herds of easy meat. Get your kids a decent education somehow; from private schools, from home schooling or wherever you can find it. They’ll tan the hide of some poor schmuck who majored in Unicorn Studies from the “University of Pretend That We Educated You”, every time.
Her temper is like my ex-girlfriend, who aroused something deep in my belly when ever she screamed.
Don’t feel sorry for this teacher- he is a lucky man.
In my limited foray into the Fortune 500 world and also my travails in the bowels of some big law outfits, the value of an Ivy league degree from places like Harvard and Yale was (and remains) sacrosanct. But this was never on account of any intellectual firepower that such a degree provided. Rather, it was for the Rolodex. One CEO of one Fortune 500 concern, a very good CEO but also one from (EGAD! Lovey!) U of AZ, told me point blank why he eagerly paid big money for the Harvard men: “People who go to the right schools know the right people.”
Of course that was a self-fueled dynamic. Everybody had a Harvard grad VP or partner stashed somewhere, so the presence of the network justified maintenance of the network. That Harvard also produced outstanding academic work at times was a extra bonus, but really nobody was too upset over grade inflation and whatnot. Academic work is not what you buy a Harvard man to do, usually.
I can’t see Harvard ever giving up that campus angle. The 10million on-line guys will be the 2nd tier guys, and everybody will still want to get on that campus.
But other schools: watch out.
Will there be unintended consequences when all schooling is online? Of course there will. There always is.
When education goes online
For every girl and boy
Results will show not much has changed
It’s just a new found toy
The kids who want to learn will learn
Much as they do today
While others simply waste their time
No matter what you say
But worst of all for students then
If true becomes this dream
The question foremost in their minds
Where is the football team?
Mark Twain had it right when he said “Don’t let school interfere with your education.”
Josh, MIT has a lot of its curriculum available online for free: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/
Frum is an idiot. He thinks “talking to Hamas, changing tack on Hezbollah, and questioning the value of sanctions against Iran” are “out of synch with current U.S. policy”? What does he think current US policy consists of, the Bush Doctrine?
10,000,000 on-line Harvard students but who is going to establish the curriculum? Cornell West (ex-Harvard).
Louis Gates, Ward Churchill, Elizabeth Warren etc.???
This type of education is coming because of the high cost of the current system. Also most colleges are not
providing the type of knowledge most students need.
I would suggest an on line degree which the student can choose from many different Universities. For example,
if Columbia has a good class in Western Civilization they add that to their study. Please note Columbia has discarded this core study. If MIT is good in calculus then they get the student traffic and fees.
This creates a competition between Universities on a more basic level.
Professors become an endangered species. Except for those who add to the existing knowledge.
tl @ 6: The videos have commentary where you can say something like “I have no idea what was going on between timestamp a and b. Can anybody explain that part better?” and have a hope that somebody, perhaps the teacher, perhaps a fellow student will actually do it. If they won’t for free, you can get someone else to do it for cash and have a much better focused session because they too can see the problematic video.
I see your link is to some sort of online crowdsourcing thingamabob. How’s that working out? Of course all of us posting here at PJM and BC are into crowdsourcing the management of the universe, and we do it all for free! Therein lies the problem, I think. You tend to get what you pay for, and there is a huge tendency to go with the lowest bidder, and there is no guaranty that the value of the highest bidder is indeed the highest value.
I’ve been doing a lot of online stuff since before the beginning, back in the day the contributions of semi-anonymous participants was called a “delphi process” (and hence the unlamanted “delphi” online service, briefly, back in the day), making the participants a little more known helps to improve the quality, which is why most sites today make you register or supply an email or somesuch, and this will be double-true for any educational service.
SR @ 12, so far every time I’ve gone to the MIT sites looking for free online stuff, I’ve found a bunch of outdated class notes worth about what they charge for it.
But Stanford has been fiddling with closed-circuit education around the peninsula since the 1970s, and now is offering actual scheduled online classes of various kinds from freebies to not at all freebies, UCLA Extension offers several online classes (and they are good for degree programs too), I have a friend who teaches some online (humanities) courses there says it has been an overall success, and he has attended a couple of conferences on online education – held in person (!?) in Erbil, Iraq, where at least some welcome a way to bring the outside world, in.
Sure, you’d better have some online forums for classroom discussion, and they might be much more extensive than normal classroom discussion, and the professor (and/or TAs) can participate or not, a lot or a little. And questions and criticisms of precise points on the video may even feed back to improved presentations – tho so might questions IN class. Yet, how many students want to ask questions in class, and how many professors seriously allow them, especially for large lectures – that normally have breakout sessions for just such follow-up. The online approach is worth a try, yet by the time it’s made to work, it may be pretty much like the university, classic, though perhaps more geographically available.
–
But maybe it’s better being ignorant. John Galt was smart, look what it got him.
In a world where knowledge is pain, ignorance is bliss.
Maybe there’s a business opportunity here, I think I’ll open up an anti-school. If you fail a test, I’ll give you an award, and charge a little more for each one you add. I’ll be rich in notime, and my alumni will be sought by the largest companies and government agencies.
The first question an employer ought to ask is “Have you read a good book recently?”
Do not confuse “Education” with “Learning”. Autodidacts are more learned. That is what counts.
“the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs”
We will still be paying their pensions though. Imagine that; a class of people, not necessarily better than anyone else has managed to steal the wealth from unborn children. It is sickening. And they will try to get you to take a bunch of liberal arts crap so they can indoctrinate you with their values. Can you effectively parrot the teachers belief system, but this time with feeling? – Instant A. Does your critical thinking cause you to question the moral values of the teacher? No A for you!
“The most sought after thing … is the ability to spout nonsense with a straight face.” All this takes is being a true believer. Serving a higher cause than the truth. Knowing what is good for others.
“Not having students in the room to tell the professor if he is unclear or otherwise full of it, is also a lost benefit.”
I have taken a number of online courses through the local university and the professors are very sensitive about their online reputation from my experience. Weekly Skype call in and an active message board. I offered a little uninvited criticism to one professor and he was all over me until we had a consensus of sorts. Maybe the problem is unions and tenure. They seem to bring out the least in educators.
“Your credentials will come from passing tests you have to pay for that are designed by people in the industries that want people who have such skills.”
Kind of already doing that. I have begun to get certified in a bunch of disciplines that I have been performing for the past 30 years or so. I am studying to be an itinerant worker so I can escape Kalifornia.
My last year in formal education, 1963, included an 11th grade English class where students were required to read out loud and the rest of the students were required to follow along regardless of the pace. I can’t imagine how, although I know that it is, worse than that.
The last 16 years of my career were spent as a self-employed coder where I was always on contract. Coders (software developers) were almost always known via word-of-mouth. You were involved in successful projects and moved from one to the next. It also helped if you were actively involved in online communities such as the IBM sponsored OS/2 Advisors on Compuserv.
There are some very good online schools with limited curriculum. This site, Udacity, appears to offer quality software development classes by knowledgeable professors for free.
In the UK law and accountancy firms are now offering apprenticeships which bye pass any university time and lead directly to employment in the firm and late partnership-if you cut the mustard.
Germany has programs of trade apprenticeships that bypass the last 2-3 years of high school-they are very productive- apprentices in mechanics, plumbing, carpentry etc earn much more in their 20s than their contemporaries who have wasted 4 years on a liberal art degree.
University level science, engineering and medical degrees continue to have value-but they will be delivered differently-through the cloud and the net.
The disintermediation and consolidation of higher education is going to be brutal in the next few years.
The hysteria and whining about Chuck Hagel is bizarre and pathetic
Chuck Hagel is clearly competent, qualified and an American patriot and combat hero.
A few years ago he pointed out that he was an American Senator-not an Israeli Senator
That statement is accurate, correct, valid and important-why the hysteria and whining when an American Senator states that he puts American fundamental interests first?
There will always be a few elite liberal arts university, however, as they are seen as increasing the chances of marrying well and joining an elite and wealth network-parents will pay for their kids to join the club.
mp @ 15: Do not confuse “Education” with “Learning”. Autodidacts are more learned. That is what counts.
That is not my experience or conclusion. I have a degree in X, and I never run into autodidacts in X that seem to have the context, and who don’t as a result tend to have gaping holes in their knowledge of X. I am an audodidact in Y (and Z), and gosh darn it if I don’t continually find gaping holes in my own knowledge of Y (and Z).
Now, that is not to say that I find everyone with a degree in X is a fine fellow and never wrong, just that in general, the degree does seem to correspond to some positive qualities not otherwise common.
This post begs the question of just what is an education anyway?
Most students want good paying jobs for as little effort as possible. Hence the rush every few years from one trendy area of study to another. Prelaw used to be hot, then not. Computer science was hopping, then every one was dropping. Finance majors were all the rage, now they’ve had to turn the page. Fat jobs is what students want not an education.
We are living in an Age of Barbarism where sophistry is what sells. We await a new Socrates to defy the establishment and reframe the way education is portrayed. Of course, we all know what happened to Socrates, right?
“Sorry, didn’t take that humanities stuff, dude!”
All: Try DIYscholar.
Example: for those who want to go deeper into graduate level mathematical physics, the extension lectures by Leonard Susskind at Stanford are choice. The graduate engineering math lectures by Steve Boyd are also excellent.
What is happening is that many first rate universities are posting some of their best courses on the web. In part this appears to be a genuine public service. In part it is an advertisement to attract talented students.
In either case, these lectures allow the student to go through the material at his own pace. Fall asleep at some point, or your mind wanders a bit, and you merely back up and pick up the missed material. Try doing that in a two hour professional physics or math course – or a course on Shakespeare, for that matter (Harvard offers an excellent course on Shakespeare).
Except for the fact that you cannot ask questions of a recorded lecture in real time, this is clearly a superior way to present material. My old colleague, Judy Burns, teaches screen writing over the web with real time chat room interaction and full UCLA credit. Merging web based, real-time interaction with pre-recorded lectures is likely to be a dominant form of education in the future. And much less expensive than the current model.
Chet
FWIW, one of our esteemed local V.I. Senators was recently indicted on a host of fraud and corruption charges including [allegedly] pressing one of his fellow ‘public servants’ on his staff to the task of doing the coursework for a University of Phoenix degree for him.
The current union-dominated education system may indeed be frelled beyond all reason, but the much heralded technological replacement that’s been hyped since the 1980′s ain’t there yet by a long shot…That forever bright future is as far away as Moonbase Alpha’s thorium mines, and trans-oceanic tube trains.
Anyway, down here inna deh i’lands dem, parents who [really] care about their kids find some way of scraping together the six to twelve thousand+ dollars a year for private schooling for each of their children. This in a captive area with one of the lowest wage and graduation rates and highest costs of living and murder rates in the nation. My parents (God bless them) worked their damn fingers to the bone and our family sacrificed our middle class so that my brother and I could achieve a decent private grade school education; much less attend some fanciful prestigious off-island university populated by post-modern fairies and technicolor unicorns chanting “Kumbayah” with clenched fists. We worked. For as long as I can remember, wayward little [lucky] working kids with half a brain could be kept in line with threats of being sent to the very public schools they’ve watched chew up, and destroy, their less fortunate or credulous friends who bought into the popular imported progressive zeitgeist…Public schools are still literally the boogie man[?] – a real one…Who’ll f up your life if you fall into her benevolent grasp.
…Meanwhile, politicians and their benighted apparat forever talk lip about how great and dedicated to excellence our public school teachers and school administrators are -and there are parking lots full of shiny car driving admins at each school- while they ALL send their own kids to the most exclusive richy rich private schools. All I can say is thank God for the couple remaining church run schools that still offer a remotely achievable alternative (which is to say, considerably under 12+ grand a year per rugrat) to parents who aren’t cronied-up rent seekers, monied from off-island, local gentry, bureaucrats or the token scholarship worthy…See, they are quite a diverse crowd.
Anyway, I figured out long ago as a kid that the political class of this tiny little *deep-sea blue corner of The United States has a vested interest in maintaining an ignorant and downright educationally retarded population shot through with stark class divisions in a society design engineered to be nearly impossible for unconnected law-abiding, tax-crushed, subjects to defend themselves or their loved ones against armed criminals in the streets or in the legislature…Even if most of us peons weren’t rendered ignorant of our inalienable right to do so un-infringed.
Whether by historic example or through some corrupt osmosis, our movers and shakers have learned that a house retarded is easier to rule…They just haven’t quite groked the inevitable outcome yet.
*NOTE: Vice Pres Biden and family took their Christmas vacation here…The coconut telegraph didn’t report whether Krugman and his life partner made it down this time.
Final Performance
35. blert
But, in any event, neither could solve the ‘hot atom’ erosion problem, as discussed before.
”””””
Yeah, I know you’ve said this before. I absolutely believe that the Russians encountered this problem.
However, Americans investigating the matter have said that the US had an operating Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor running for four years from 1965-69.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
The reactor was abandoned because it was not dual use and it was not operating in a district advantageous to Nixon. (He wanted nuclear work to be done in southern California to get some extra votes.)
I notice that Harden has little to say about courses of study that require some hands-on work on the student’s part as well as didactic instruction. I had three-times-per-week laboratory sessions in the zoology and geology courses I had to take to meet distribution requirements in a classical liberal arts degree program– and these courses made no distinction between majors and non-majors, so the lab sessions were rigorous (granted, this was back in the day when a B.A. indicated mastery of course content rather than proof of political indoctrination; Josh has already mentioned VDH’s new post). But apart from liberal arts programs, there are all kinds of college-level courses of study that would be difficult to distill into online-only versions. These include technical and engineering programs, the performing arts, and others. It’s difficult to see how schools as otherwise different as Juilliard, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University– all of which confer bachelor’s degrees in their respective fields– could simply certify students through online competency examinations. And contra Victor, I am skeptical that the health professions can prepare students purely online for treating the human (or animal) body or mind at the graduate or professional school level. Yale Med has already found that contemporary medical students are less skilled in the art of the physical examination than their pre-computer predecessors. It’s true that the Germans classify specialized institutions of tertiary education as Hochschulen– a term that includes some German medical schools, theological seminaries, and schools of veterinary medicine as well as schools of architecture, music conservatories, drama schools, and schools of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen). It may be that some American universities will turn schools or departments of this type into separate institutions and offer all other courses online.
Last, there are the service academies. The Long Gray Line and its counterparts at Annapolis, Colorado Springs, New London, and Kings Point require rigorous physical training along with meeting character as well as academic requirements. There may be no simple substitute for residential education for future military leaders.
Victor,
“The hysteria and whining about Chuck Hagel is bizarre and pathetic
Chuck Hagel is clearly competent, qualified and an American patriot and combat hero.”
A few years ago he pointed out that he was an American Senator-not an Israeli Senator”
I slightly agree with you but still dislike all of the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, which I suppose eliminates every candidate for the SecState job save for Barry Goldwater’s ghost.
But even David Frum like a broken clock can be right twice a day and he’s correct to point out that the SecState in an Obama Administration now that Hillary is leaving is a non-entity anyway.
And while others complain that you are constantly telling BCers how great a friend Turkey is to the United States (does said friendship include Erdogan making Syria safe for the Muslim Brotherhood?) I don’t see such posts. Everyone accuses me of being a Russian shill just because I correctly pointed out that Saakashvili was a Soros protege thug who would eventually be tossed by the Georgian people in free and fair elections…and that there is an anti-Russia lobby in this country dedicated to peddling all sorts of hysterical nonsense (including the ’9/11 trutherism’ that Ayman al Zawahiri is a ‘KGB asset’) and keeping the Cold War going forever at our expense.
We have seen ‘Distance Education” and it is not all it is cracked up to be, but then neither is what most are doing now. There is better out there in small clusters, I have seen it. Sure we need a new paradigm for education, both secondary and post secondary. It doesn’t come cheap, which is supposedly the virtue of ‘On Line.’ A few people, relatively few, can be successful with on line education but for most it is dreary, lonely and will leave our children depressed failing loners. We really don’t want to go there. Education, learning if you want to use the modern buzz word, is important but both schools and universities, good ones at least, are about for more than just the academics.
If you want to see what really works look at High Tech High in San Diego (and no, it is not all about “High Tech” stuff) or look at Quest, a private university in Squamish BC. Both are different in unexpected ways, both provide a great education and to an old codger who believed that traditional school delivered with traditional values was the only way to go, both are a startling revelation.
A Peek into the Clouded Future
December 26th, 2012 – 10:24 pm
Re:”The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”
30. Twobyfour
But 2 points may suffice.
1. The author uses the fact that in pre-classical Greek literature (or in the oral tradition later transcribed), the hero speaks of himself in third person and uses this as a proof that there was no concept of “I” in ancient times.
2. Jaycen assumes that the ancient human brain differed from ours, to support his notion of bicameral mind. There is simply no evidence for any such difference. Furthermore, 3 most archaic human groups–Australian Aborigines, P&NG Aborigines and African Bushmen–have the same brain morphology as we do,
…………….
Agree on both points. Further there are a lot other fuzzy things in Jaynes work. And I disagree with Jaynes about the nature of information itself. (He thinks information as in language/math/computer language is invented Ex nihilo from nothing. That information exists only in our heads. I think rather that information as in language/math/computer language is discovered–like gold or a great fishing hole or the New World or the double helix. That for example the information that prescribes–as opposed to describes–the conversion of energy to matter E=MC2 is as much a part of nature as the conversion itself. Only God is outside of nature.
That said, neither of the points you mention are central to Jaynes work. First of all Jaynes is not talking about primitive man. Historically he’s only talking about a period of time between roughly 9000 BC and 1000 BC –and only in the “advanced” civilizations with the transition time from the bicameral mind to the modern mind in the Mediterranean basin running from 1000 BC to about the beginning of CE or 0 AD. And in the New World and Oceania in the Years after the Spanish arrived after 1500. “Advanced” here means only that they had temples of one stripe or another. The central question addressed by Jaynes is “What is the intellectual reason for the temples.” Jaynes says that these temples came about because people heard a second voice in their head depending on the muse or place they were at. Unlike today where people recognize that they are only talking to themselves–”advanced” civilizations thought the other voices in their heads were coming from the gods. The purpose of the temples was to amplify the other voice or the voice belonging god of the temple. The reason the temples kept getting bigger and bigger was that the the increasing size and complexity of civilization required ever larger works to inspire the wonder and awe that would provoke the second voice.
To understand how thoroughly undermined this system was by the time of Jesus all over the Roman world–its helpful to understand the greatest of the Greek scientists of the age were usually engaged in developing little water hydrological or heat & cooling powered parlor tricks for the temples–which inspired the people to wonder at the power of their gods–and generated a great deal of income for the temple priests.
The temples themselves were very big business. The chief reason that St Paul was often driven out of town was because the local temple merchants feared he would interfere with their business.
Herod’s temple was a bit more sophisticated in its business practices. They made their money with extortionist/rapacious currency exchanges because the people were required by law to make pilgrimages to the temple and make sacrifices. Jesus recognized that turning a temple into an extortion racket interfered with its chief purpose–which is prayer.
Matthew 21:13
English Standard Version (ESV)
13 He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”
Now what is so precious about prayer. So lets be jewish about this. Lets answer a question with a question. What do you think of schizophrenia? Answer. I’m of two minds about the matter.
What’s so precious about prayer is that prayer addresses the Maker of the Universe, Ultimate Reality. Address your thoughts in truth to Ultimate Reality/God/The Maker of the Universe because God has power.
Honestly, who can stand to listen to those shrieking droolers in those videos any longer? Just garbage.
I liked what Andrew Ferguson called the college experience:
“What we’re left with instead is an entity that isn’t the one thing or the other, neither a preparation for productive employment nor an Arnoldian idyll, though it combines elements of both: it’s in part an apprenticeship, in part an immersion in the finer things; part summer camp, part group therapy, part booze cruise.”
Maybe the future consists of corporations competing for the best young minds and educating them at their expense in return for employment for a specified number of years. The NFL, NBA, MLB should already be footing the bills for the NCAA sports programs since they get a ready-made workforce while dodging the training costs. When one of my Statist friends was on a rant about ‘big-Pharma,’ I asked him why a company couldn’t compete by paying for the college of chemical engineers in exchange for a non-compete contract, IOW, they had to ply their trade with that company alone. Naturally,he replied it would not be fair to the student because they could not compete for salary with other students with the ‘big-Pharma’ companies. I told him,”Welcome to the free market pal.” He was clueless.
28 @vanderleun
Understandable, but at least here was a mind that had some realization that she was being horribly shortchanged by the system and that her teacher was a lazy hypocrite who didn’t give a damn about his students. I’d be pretty frustrated too, if I had an inkling of the greater world of possibilities but was trapped in that hellhole. I wouldn’t judge her too harshly based on her limited means of expressing her anger. The rest of the class (at least the ones who were vocal) do seem to fit your label.
Universities and colleges will be kept afloat by ineffective personnel resource management in companies and organizations which will default to a credentialing piece of paper over any other means to fill vacancies and to avoid the ever present threat of legal entanglements by one special interest/protected group or another. Until management moves personnel from the liability side of the ledger to the asset side of the ledger, not much will change in that aspect of American business. You’ll perceive the change when they directly invest in the education of their potential work force and not rely upon institutions, which are demonstratively hostile to their existence, to do it for them.
I teach at a rural community college. That doesn’t necessarily make me an expert, but it has given me the opportunity to observe a few things:
1) On-line and other sorts of distance education demand an engaged, motivated, and disciplined student. As someone observed earlier, most students want the maximum credential for the least effort. This may, in some measure, explain the 50% drop/failure rate in most on-line courses.
2) Administrators often view on-line education as a cash cow. Almost every institution of higher education is pushing to expand their on-line offerings–substantially. We take their money whether they pass or not. Maybe the administrators are right.
3) Rather than sounding the death-knell of bricks-and-mortar education, I suspect the on-line/on-site education relationship will develop along a line that is something more akin to the relationship between video/on-demand viewing and movie theater attendance. The simile is not perfect, but I think it’s illustrative, nonetheless. Having taught in a variety of media and delivery methods, I believe there are possibilities for learning with a bunch of people in one room–possibilities that simply don’t exist in other formats. Distance education is a tool of convenience. Convenience does not always translate as quality. For example, I have learned a tremendous amount over the years by lurking here. However, how much richer and more educational could that experience have been, sitting in the same room with Wretchard and all of you, listening in on the conversations? Perhaps this illustrates the point better: why do people go to bars when they could sit in their living rooms with and go on Skype or face time with a fifth?
4) No educational institution can teach that which will not be learned. I used to be a great believer in general education, but that was back when colleges tried to insure that graduates had the tools to understand mathematics, rhetoric (and the importance of clear expression), the humanities, history, physics, biology, the arts, etc. Now that general education has come so often to mean “grievance studies,” my belief has faltered. I sometimes think no course should be required as general education. Rather, we let people enroll only when they see some intrinsic value in the subject matter. Then again, my wife believes all high school students should be required to work at McDonalds before they are allowed to go to college. She seems to think it would help the level of motivation.
Once again I refer to that 1993 ABC TV documentary in which they looked at 3 recent college graduates that could not get the kind of job they wanted. They had majored in French, Art History, and International Studies and wanted appropriate jobs. For example, the International Studies guy wanted to be a US Senator but had to get a job as a door to door salesman instead.
To me, taking those kinds of majors in college is rather like going into a nice restaurant, eating just the butter patties and saltine crackers they have on every table, and then thinking that since you must have gotten a good meal in such a fine establishment, then it sure is strange that you are still so hungry.
In that same TV show the Sec of Labor, Robert Reich, was asked a surprisingly intelligent question, that perhaps the 3 college graduates should have taken courses that were more practical. He replied, stunningly enough, that it did not matter what courses students took in college since their employers would teach them what they needed to know. Presumably this would include people who got a job as the Secty of Labor.
So the most basic problem is: What courses should you take? Underwater basket weaving is probably more useful than Feminist Studies, but is either one a marketable skill? I think that the days of a college degree having to be just an indicator, merely an initiation ritual, that enables you to get a job are over.
@25. Not Uncle Joe
Thanks-the israeli hasbara gang patrols BC and attempts to enforce their hasbara PC-they promote Pollard as an israeli hero
To the vast majority of American Jews and all patriotic Americans Pollard is a traitor who should be executed-
The leader of the hasbara campaign-that is the guy who got all the money-is ex FM Lieberman-who is a convicted child abuser, under indictment for corruption and a prior member of a terrorist group-kack kahane.
All professions, Law, Medicine, Accounting etc provide apprenticeships and the prior university degrees do not add value – on line interactive instruction will be better.
The issue of US Military education is interesting and important.
Up until now the NCOs run the show for all except pilots, submarine duty and the fleets.
We should clearly invest in the best education for our forces-through simulation-hands on training and traditional instruction.
Our leading edge force has moved from massive armor which requires logistics-to Special Forces Operations-which require intelligence-stealth-rapid transport-extreme focused violence etc–most of these these skills involve muscle learning, desensitization, simulation and practice.
d51 @ 32: Until management moves personnel from the liability side of the ledger to the asset side of the ledger, not much will change in that aspect of American business.
Yes, and this is a big change in the US business culture from 20-30 years ago, back then HR was an asset, today it is a liability – to be minimized by shipping offshore, the numbers are cheaper there so what could possibly go wrong?
In IT and STEM generally (and I presume in most other areas) employers want “skills” by which they mean training and experience with precise commercial tools – of which almost none have any great academic value. Employers disvalue everything in the degree but the title. Did this precede or follow from the hollowing out of the degree? Don’t know, but the pieces fit nicely, don’t they. Back in the day companies would train (and value) employees and retain them for decades, today not so much, they are afraid that education will walk the staff out the door for better wages. That position is such a brute statement of poor management that I tend to think the poor management is a phenomenon of its own, does not follow *from* academic degeneration.
Actually I heard just the opposite description as well, though it leads to the same conclusion, a disvaluing of the contents of the degree, that in MBA-land employers really don’t care what they studied in school as they are expected to use Google to fill in their expertise as required. This from a guy running around giving management seminars at a high level. Leaves me mostly speechless, but I haven’t run into anyone who tells me otherwise.
Well, I empathize with that young lady. There are good professors and there are bad professors, just as there are motivated students and those who are just putting in the time. For my money, #32 Don51 and #33 wow&flutter called it right. I took brick and mortar classes and online courses. You have to be very careful when choosing an online school. I have yet to meet a happy Phoenix student. Ever. When I went back to get my degrees, I did a thorough investigation of online schools, their credentialing, and their reputation with employers. It was by far less expensive in both time and money – I didn’t have to fight traffic, fight for a parking place, or listen to a professor – a tenured one at that – castigate himself for past sins (God, that was a horrible class!). All my professors were working in their fields and it proved out in their courses. I had mandated discussions which had to be more than “Gosh, your paper was really good…” We got into some truly excellent debates that influence me still to this day. I loved it, but it also suited my learning style – it is not for everyone. I had friends who thought online schooling would be easy and came away whimpering.
“To the vast majority of American Jews and all patriotic Americans Pollard is a traitor who should be executed” well Victor I agree with Angelo Codevilla, who happens to be a Roman Catholic not Jewish:
http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2000/071700a.htm
Oh and for those who doubt that there are White House/Cointelpro operatives posing as neoconservatives and genuine right wingers — check this post out:
http://reginaldquillbigsis.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/unsourcedfakesourced-pr-newswire-releases-the-pysop-of-tagging-gun-owners-as-neoconfederates-continues/
It seems the Hal Turner paid provocateurs are back trying to tie your guns to ‘neoConfederates’. Just in time for Barry Soetero to play Lincoln. And Facebook is shutting down pro-2nd Amendment pages while Twitter blocks me from taking on these scum in that medium. No matter. I’ve sent my story out to Barnhardt, Sipsey Street Irregulars, Hagmann, you name em’ so they know what’s coming and can spread the word.
http://www.infowars.com/facebook-purges-pro-gun-accounts/
Subotati I hope you’ll be there to break me out of a FEMA camp someday if I’m taken unawares.
Nothing can replace walking down to the campus coffee shop, finding 3 or 4 of your professors at a table, and joining them for a couple hours of free wheeling conversation. Nothing can replace spending time in a lab with your professor, not your graduate student TA or some downloaded presentation. Nothing can replace living among the campus monuments and memorials to great men and women of your state and learning that you stand on their shoulders. Nothing can replace a living teacher, pacing the room a few feet in front of you, and with words, gesticulations, outbursts and sweat telling what he knows of a subject that is worth your own attention. Reading Meacham’s biography of Thomas Jefferson, one learns that Jefferson was profoundly grateful for the time spent with a few men who were his teachers when he was young. You hear the same sentiment from Marcus Aureleus two thousand years before. Education is a matter of acculturation and socialization not just an accumulation of facts or a formula for thinking. I am glad that I am too old to have got my education in this “brave new world”.
Why would a manager think that someone who cannot navigate the challenges of a college campus could function in a professional capacity in any large organization?
There is one possible use for which online courses are ideal – “vocational” courses of much lower level than degrees. One reason for this is the previously noted tendency of HR departments to have a “box-ticking” culture in which it doesn’t matter how much skill you have – if you don’t have the appropriate piece of paper then you don’t even get looked at. I’ve run into this a lot in the last few months, being currently unemployed.
An example might help. I have looked at many jobs with a view to applying, and applied for a few, and requirement for certificates in IT skills (basic stuff like Word and Excel in daily use) is very common even for jobs that don’t obviously require such skills. I am faced with the probability of having to attend NVQ level 2 courses in IT (for non-Brits, that corresponds to GCSEs normally gained at age 16, which I believe is usual American high-school graduation age) despite having worked and messed with, including basic programming, computers since literally before the PC standard was invented. (My first computer was a Commodore 64 and second was an Amiga.) And also despite having an honours degree from Cambridge University.
Ridiculous, isn’t it? In such circumstances, online courses that give certification at the end might be a very good idea indeed.
Someone wise once predicted that the last man & woman on Earth would spend the last days of our species arguing about how to educate the child they never had. This thread would seem to support that view.
College-level education is part & parcel of the dysfunctional society that is failing in front of our eyes. The end of today’s dens of Leftie Political Correctness will be merely collateral damage from the failure of today’s Fascist states — although collateral benefit might be a more accurate term.
In the meantime, what about the real issue in education — K-12? (Primary & secondary education, in BritSpeak). The Chattering Classes may be fixated on college credentials, but most human beings even in Western countries never see the inside of a college. Those non-college kids need a better education too! And if we can correct the same Leftie Political Correctness problems in the grade schools, the troubles with college-level education will largely resolve themselves. Foundations, dear boy. Foundations!
Much of the problem academe faces is within the social structure of the PhD itself. It is an import from Germany, specifically from the University of Berlin in early nineteenth century Prussia.
Nearly every complaint that is presently being made about university professors was made one century ago. The difference is that the social prestige of the doctorate of philosophy had much greater appeal then, partly because experts had it, partly because credentials were becoming fashionable, and mainly because the PhD was German. German music, engineering, science, and education were greatly admired by influential men such as Abraham Flexner.
The PhD was originally correlated with American xenophiliacs who despised American culture and sought to improve America by importing German ideas of social engineering. The original PhD’s were from the same social set as other people who sought to “uplift” America by preaching the glories of French Impressionism. The problem with the PhD is that while the actual schools that print them are American, the mentality that suffuses the academic culture still self-consciously differentiates itself from other Americans.
Just as earlier generations of academics sought to eradicate various Indian cultures in the name of progress, a present generation of academics seek to eradicate various white cultures now. It is the same process of condescension. From the point of view of such academics, Indian removal merely replaced one group of inferior savages with another. Such people feel a need to demonize other people so they can assert their moral and cultural supremacy. Despite how they rage against colonialism, they actually have the most backward and colonial mentality of all.
So, it should be no surprise if the range of opinions found among American university professors uncritically reflects the culture of Imperial Germany from one century ago. Likewise, much of the social structure of Hollywood also reflects its German roots.
“The most sought after thing in the Obama administration today, a fact attested to by Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton is the ability to spout nonsense with a straight face.”
Gales of riotous laughter. You da Man!
“betta teach sumin” … As a society we’ve been conditioned to view education as something that is done to us. Worse yet, we’ve been conditioned to view education as something that government does to us. Education is something we do to ourselves, and this young lady is so close, and yet so far.
@4.Tcobb:
“I think the wave of the future is for higher education to be free and online. Your credentials will come from passing tests you have to pay for that are designed by people in the industries that want people who have such skills.”
The testing part is the way it used to be, before Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971). Since Griggs, employers can not use such tests because they are “loaded” and discriminate against minorities. Possession of a degree has become a proxy for the pre-employment test. A number of unintended consequences have followed, including the proliferation of worthless degrees, the diversity plague, and the “Higher Education Bubble.”
Josh @ 36 & 19 – That is why autodidacts are superior. You can’t Google innovation. It’s like the difference between natural selection, a choice among pre-exisiting alternatives, and The Origin of Species, the creation of new alternatives.
You cannot teach innovation of new alternatives because it is virgin territory. You need to “boldly go where no man has gone before”. It requires something from within, not without. Waiting for someone to teach you how to do that is useless.
Probably the best indicators of success would be the kind of company one keeps and experience. No one taught me about using a venturi tube to extinguish oil well fires. I was taught about creating flow in chimneys. I extropolated that into a well control tool.
As the foreman of the well control team said, “You’ve got to be careful or it will suck your heart out”. For most people, using flow into the tube to achieve a suction at the inlet would be counter-intuitive. But it worked.
“The most sought after thing in the Obama administration today, a fact attested to by Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton is the ability to spout nonsense with a straight face.”
Liars are what they want.
Apparently, that’s what the country wants as well. It wants to live in fantasy land.
I’m not sure I’d call her a lady.
mp @ 47: You cannot teach innovation of new alternatives because it is virgin territory.
Well, this is an old, old debate, tho more commonly in the arts: should an artist study, or will that just cause him/her to repeat old patterns?
I know which side I’m on.
Heck, Hillary said something about Obambus and learning on the job, you like his government innovations so far?
I could give a more rigorous argument at length, and it would include the idea that yes, you CAN teach innovation, you can teach people to innovate in much the same way that the genome “innovates”.
You don’t teach the innovation, you teach the process of innovation. (tho you can go too far on this, you can’t say, “You have 24 hours to invent cold fusion, go!” which happens to be Obambus’ idea of how it works)
And then there’s the old, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”.
/overposted
46. Ernie G , “Griggs v Duke Power”
There is no solution that does not involve repeal of the “civil rights” laws that leave employers vulnerable to lawsuits if they don’t hire the “right” number of women and minorities.
Hiring needs to be taken away from HR, and given back to the managers to actually evaluate candidates, with HR just handling the forms once the hiring decision has been made.
Good luck with that.
Kinuachdrach – You may or may not know that it is official government policy in the UK (started under Labour IIRC but continued under Tories) for 50% of school leavers to go into university. The figure achieved is somewhat less than that, so “most never see a college” is technically correct, but it’s still a large minority.
The consequences of this policy were obvious to anyone with half a brain. First, given that the proportion of people who can actually benefit from a decent, rigorous university education is somewhere below 10%, college degrees were and are devalued and most of the extras were and are in completely useless subjects. Second, the system of free university education (which you may disapprove of, but worked for us) simply had to be dismantled because it was unaffordable; we now have a system of student loans similar to that of the USA – similar particularly in that such loans are not subject to “forgiveness” in bankruptcy, and in that college graduates spend decades trying to pay them off.
And, because courses in hard sciences and engineering are simply more expensive (partly because of the need for practical lab experience, for example) school-leavers are discouraged from taking such courses – which happen to be the ones that are useful to the economy. A graduate engineer is valuable; a media studies graduate not so much, to say the least.
The 50% policy was and is a transparent attempt to cover up the lack of useful employment in the UK – because students are not included in the unemployment figures. This coverup is now being extended; it is now going to be just about impossible for anyone to leave education before the age of 18. This, of course, means that anyone who actually wants to learn is going to find it extremely difficult to do so, given the hordes of stupid, ill-educated yahoos who don’t want to be there.
I sometimes wonder whether the next step will be semi-compulsory PhD courses. The political indoctrination in the education system is actually (IMHO) the smallest part of the problem.
Wow and Flutter #33:
“Rather, we let people enroll only when they see some intrinsic value in the subject matter.”
Back in the early 70’s, The Word on campus was “Relevance.” Activist students said that they only wanted to take what they wanted to take, things they found to be “Relevant.”. Of course the fallacy in this idea was that a young person who wished to be taught was in no position to determine what was Relevant to their goals, assuming they had any goals in the first place. One who is his own professor at 18 years of age has a fool for his only student.
So if the student determines what he should take in college then the college has become, at best, the equivalent of a DIY auto repair shop, but which still charges as if the customer was still just sitting in the lounge enjoying doughnuts and coffee. The attitudes of the early 70’s seem to have taken over, but then again, far too many professors seemed to be living in a theoretical ivory tower world in which the only relevance was to itself anyway; they were ill equipped to defend their world.
However, even in the early 70’s, I found that most professors had no idea what the stuff they taught was good for, other than for becoming a teacher. This was especially true in the humanities, but I even recall some math teachers that had that attitude. Most engineering professors did know why they were teaching the subject, but to this day I wonder what good were some of the basic courses. I think that at least in engineering, courses should be divided up so the first half is theoretical and the 2nd half practical applications and associated implications.
Now, I think that studying, say, Shakesphere, will help make you a better writer and also add to the pleasure of your life. My only study of The Bard was in high school, but even so phrases from his work come to mind on occasion. How we explain that to the students, though, I do not know. And I fear that the professors often do not have the faintest idea themselves.
Survival depends on innovation in the moment. What would General Schwarzkopf’s reputation look like today if the oil well fires were still burning? They had the fuel to burn for a century.
Those fires needed to be killed there and then. And they were killed.
Another example would be Fukushima Dai-Ici. Where would Japan be today if we did not bring it under control back in March 2011?
You can’t create leaders through on-the-job training in the midst of a crisis. You can only give future leaders inspiration through what they see as they follow their existing leaders. That is why experience is so valuable. You’re more likely to have faith in what can be done, if you have seen miracles being created.
Government, under the Progressives, is constantly creating crises. So real leaders need to do what they do best, LEAD, and thereby expose the evils of Progressivism! The denizens of the Ivy Towers would hate such demonstrations, as those demos would undercut their raison d’etre. Students would flock to places where miracles happen, such as the Bakken Shale oil field. And the Ivy League will starve from lack of funds.
The greatest skill one can learn is to “run with what you brung”,
Ernie G at 46 has the root of a lot of the problem.
Griggs and its progeny severely cramped an employer’s ability to test, made legally accepted testing VERY expensive, and all but eliminated the subjective, personal interview as a hiring practice. The net result has been slapping a degree requirement on jobs for which a degree would otherwise be totally unnecessary or, in the alternative, moving the minimum qualifications down to “fogs the mirror” and lets the probationary period sort out the incompetents -maybe.
Interestingly, were it not for the fact that white males are so unfashionable, there is fertile ground for the plantiff’s bar in the fact that degrees that don’t have business utility are now forming a pretextual bar to employment of white males. In fact degrees are quite generally used as an artificial bar to promotion. Government accounting is a good example: governments (and most other large organizations) use proprietary accounting and budgeting systems and the only way you can learn the arcana is on the job training. The credential bias will slap an accounting degree requirement as a minimum qualification somewhere in the upper-level technical or entry-level supervisory classifications. Yet, a CPA with an accounting degree from the finest business school is as helpless with the proprietary system’s spells and incantations as is an 18 year old right out of high school with no accounting education and no work experience. I use this example because I’ve been a part of several tearful resignations of newly minted CPAs hired as supervisors who simply couldn’t function. This is an endemic problem in government and also the basis of a severe political liability for Republican government executives.
Both for political reasons and to avoid discrimination suits, most governments allow entry into job class series with either just a GED or HS Diploma or with substitution of experience rather than a degree. If there’s an opening and an applicant meets the MQ, they get the job and there is very little subjective evaluation of suitability or competence, though a lot of evaluation of which affirmative action block is checked. This causes all sorts of problems because the entry positions are usually direct service positions and the public gets to deal with lots of people who are by no stretch of the imagination competent. If the government has good supervision, the incompetents get weeded out in the usually six months to a year probationary period and if the supervision is not effective, you get the DMV in a Democrat-run state or the welfare office in a doughnut city.
As I discussed above, at some point in the techical levels or lower supervisory level a degree is required to progress but will also allow entry at that level without prior experience. This is the domain of the “Communications” and “Studies” majors and the affirmative action candidates. These sorts of degrees are certificates of attendence and indoctrination. They are also the domain of true believers particularly in resource fields. Two bad things happen: First somebody with no work experience and no direct knowlege of the work gets hired above people who’ve worked their way up, survived, maybe prospered, and can actually do the job, and, second, somebody whose only qualification is thorough indoctrination can often find themselves in a supervisory position over people with true technological or scientific expertise. The “Studies” major gets hired as an entry level supervisor of a technical or administrative unit and with a decent work ethic and good social skills or just by sleeping with the boss before long can be a high-level supervisor or manager controlling the work product of people who actually know what they’re doing. It is real easy to wind up with a “Natural Resources Studies” major who is a rabid Democrat and greenie managing all your biologists in your fisheries unit or all your geologists in a minerals management unit. If you’re a Republican elected or appointed official, you really don’t want these people having any authority inside your government but they’re usually merit system employees so you can’t dismiss them for political reasons. I had the same problem when I came back to the executive branch to supervise a staff that had been hired by Democrats who’d let the unions vett the hires to labor relations positions whose job it was to represent the employer in dealing with those unions. Took me a little over a year to get rid of most of them and the last Democrat hire was gone in a little over two years amidst much wailing and knashing of teeth.
And don’t think these dyanamics are limited only to government, large private organizations are just as bad. While few large private organizations would have the political issues, private organizations are much more susceptible to the “networking” hiring system where the only qualification is that you know someone. Government is more honest about this and usually, almost always, has a merit system employee whose job is to be the patronage hire’s “keeper.” Pretty much any time you see the word “Assistant” in a merit system job title, the real job is to be the keeper of a political appointee.
And yes, HR offices are cesspools of political correctness and litigation avoidance, but they also make good harems in lots of organizations. It helps to make up for the personal computer having taken away the typing pool and the personal secretary.
RWE @ 53–I agree that when we are 18-24, most of us have little idea of the vastness or depth of the oceans of our own ignorance. Nor, as a consequence, do we have the first idea what tools we will need to navigate that ocean. I try to explain to students that anything they have paid for in time and effort to truly know (as opposed to something they simply rented to pass an exam) is information and experience they will put to use over the course of their entire lives. I sometimes give the analogy of farmers where I grew up being able to make all sorts of mechanical repairs using only baling wire and a pair of pliers. Points for inventiveness, yes. However, how much easier, faster, and more permanent could those repairs have been, using tools better suited to the job? Can you get through everyday life without higher math or even algebra? Yes, but those tools make everyday life easier. And no, you’ll never use these tools if you don’t have them in your toolbox.
When I started my first community college job, I was told the demographic was 37-year-old, divorced, female. For the most part, it was a student population able to see some intrinsic value in almost everything that happened in the classroom. Now, I teach a more traditional age group. I like the energy, but I do miss the maturity.
“Land of Hope and Glory”? I was about to reply that at American schools we march the graduation two-step to the tune of Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March No. 1 — I had to google it to find out they are one and the same. I didn’t know the march had another name. (“Land of Hope and Glory”, huh? Wow, those chauvinistic Brits really thought highly of themselves a hundred years ago, didn’t they? Before liberalism convinced them their economic system and imperialism were morally wrong. And, my, what a difference a hundred years makes.)
I urge anyone with any interest in symphonic music not to judge Edward Elgar by that one piece — not that it’s a bad piece, but it’s just so hackneyed that it can’t really be appreciated for what it is anymore. Elgar was one of the greats. His “Enigma Variations” is very moving and quite beautiful. On the Telarc label, there is a surprisingly good recording of this by the Baltimore Symphony (conducted by David Zinman). Well, I like it. The recording reveals a good, solid B or B+ orchestra, but accompanied by a ridiculously great, knock-your-socks-off, kick-ass low-brass section. (It’s really an all-star trombone section; at least two of the trombonists moved on to the “great orchestras”, but back in the day they counted rests in relatively humble Baltimore.) As a bonus, you also get Elgar’s “Cockaigne” Overture, which is underplayed here in the states. It contains all the majestic, sweeping lyricism that “Land of Hope and Glory” does.
In spite of it all, the Pomp & Circumstance Marches are good music. What graduation ceremonies have done to ruin an essentially good piece of music serves as an analogy for what the schools have done for math, English, and history: reduced them to a signature riff.
Speaking about Fukushima, how short a period of time ago was it that we were discussing Wretchard doing a riff on “The House of the Rising Sun”? November 27, 2012? Thirty two days ago to be precise.
Now the Wall Street Journal has this item today (12/29/12 in my time zone)
http://preview.tinyurl.com/bw4deqv
Tokyo Reconsiders Nuclear Phaseout
“Run with what you brung!”
So what if there is the possibility, no matter how remote, of another massive tsunami?
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT!
The collapse and shrinkage of the current higher educational system has been foretold by many, including the Blogfather. May it be so!
We will all be better off.
#41. Fletcher Christian “(for non-Brits, that corresponds to GCSEs normally gained at age 16, which I believe is usual American high-school graduation age)”
Usual US high school student’s age at graduation is 18 (though I can’t find a good quantification of it). The data is better supported here (for Canadianstudents) http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-004-x/2010004/article/11360-eng.htmuation
#60 Real Old Salt – OK, so I’m wrong. Further to what I earlier said, GCSEs are the lowest qualification available from our education system and are usually gained first. NVQ level 2 is supposed to be roughly at that level.
The real point was that because of credentialism and the laziness and bureaucratic inertia of HR departments (with a little bit of aversion to taking on new staff because of employment legislation mixed in somewhere) I am likely going to have to sit in classes for months twiddling my thumbs instead of actually doing something useful – like looking for a job, or learning something I don’t already know.