Here's an interesting piece of education. You know the expression "It's not rocket science". Well, this is rocket science. "Rocket science made simple." It's linked to by Glenn Reynolds here, to illustrate how easy it is now to educate yourself, wherever you are. I tried copying and pasting some of it, but couldn't make the actual equations work ("simple" is a matter of degree with rocket science), so you'll just have to go there yourself if you want to learn more.
It's the same observation as the one about why homeschooling works so much better now than it used to. The average home is now better informed than even the best university a couple of generations ago.
Whatever else you read about education in the next few days, read this (from the latest Spectator), if you haven't already. Sample paragraph:
It isn’t just the ‘papersomeness’ (to quote the latest buzzword) of my job. It is the accountability. Fair enough, somebody needs to check on my competency and make sure that I am not financing my own extravagant lifestyle with school funds. But with so many stakeholders I can build my own stockade. I am accountable to the parents, who can blame me for anything and everything that goes wrong in their lives, because I am an easy target and expected to be accessible. I am accountable to governors, who have immense responsibilities but are not required to undergo any training whatsoever to equip them to discharge them. I am accountable to the LEA in County Hall, who seem to think they can dictate how I spend my time. I am accountable to the editor of the local newspaper, to all the solicitors in the town, to the consultants in the local hospital, to the police, to social services, and to the people who live nearby, all of whom have told me in no uncertain terms how to do my job. I am accountable to Mr Clarke. I am accountable to Ofsted, who come every two years on average and settle in for a week. The only people it appears I am not accountable to, whose lives I am directly affecting day in day out, are the pupils themselves. Yet it is they who are suffering from the actions of everybody else. So from now on I will be accountable only to myself, to my wife, and to God, because I have resigned.
I don't often refer approvingly to the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, if only because so many others with opinions similar to mine seem to do this all the time. But for the experience of this headmaster the phrase "Atlas shrugged" (the title of one of Rand's most famous novels) does seem very appropriate. This really is like one of Rand's put-upon railway workers quietly slipping away into the countryside, never to work on the railways again until sanity is restored.
Who was the Greek god of teaching? Or the teaching equivalent of Atlas? Anyone? Whoever he was, he is shrugging.
Gnat is learning. I have no children, but I guess that when it works, this is how it works.
Gnat has been drawing big heads with dots for features, squiggles for hair, lumps for ears. The usual toddler conceptions of humanity: formless mutants.“Look, Daddee. I draw an eye.”
I’m sure you did, honey. Can you draw a nose?
“No, I draw an eye.”
I looked: she had drawn an upper-case I. Her first letter. She copied it from a book. She pointed to the word BIG and said “BIG. B - I - G.”
Yes, she’s reading. Two years, ten months, and she’s reading. Mom, Dad, Cat, Dog, Bed, Pig, and several others - she understands them in different contexts. She reads the titles of old Disney cartoons; today she said “Fwee Liddle Pigs” when the title card came on. I’m sure she associated the music with the cartoon, which she’s seen a hundred times, but even so that’s pretty good. She knows that this music means this cartoon, and that those three words say “Three Little Pigs.” When we’re driving along she’ll point at a store’s sign and say “Open.” She knows the world is full of words and she interrogates each one to see if she knows it. She also understands ad campaigns - the Arby’s oven mitt amuses her, for some reason.
“Look!” she says, pointing up at the billboard. “Mr. Glove.” Later that day a commercial comes on, and she says “Mr. Glove, Daddee. He’s everywhere. He’s on the teevee an’ he’s on signs.”
Yes, that’s a direct quote. But it’s not the remark that bothered me the most today. We were in the car, driving along a suburban highway; she looked out at the foliage. “The trees are alll green,” she said. She paused. “These trees are greenish.”
Two years. Ten months. Greenish. God help me.
This is the kind of reason why the Lileks Bleat has a permanent place on the right hand side of this blog, but this bit makes me think he maybe should be in the "education friendly" category, because that bit could hardly be more education friendly, I would say.
Never mind. Good writing - I especially like the eye/I confusion at the beginning - is routinely impossible to classify.
More on the subjectivity of educational value, from the CrozierVision May archive. Patrick is having a go at Polly Toynbee, starting with a quote from her:
Spell out what good the state does and how much more it can do.What does she mean here? Notice, I am having to ask this with just about every line she writes. Is it because she is vague or I am being over-precise? Dunno. Anyway, I will continue on in this vein because that's the kind of guy I am.
She could mean that because the state, say, provides some schools which provide some education to some children it is therefore a good thing. But if she were saying this it would be terribly disingenuous. The real measure is how the state compares with the alternatives.
And then we get into a real problem. Because how do you make that comparison? Which is better, that ten children are educated to level 9 or that one child is educated to level 100 and the others not at all? Which is better quality or equality? This is assuming that you could ever come up with a linear scale of education - surely and impossibility.
And even then there is the whole question of whether education itself is so much better than its alternatives. Personally, I rather think that a vast number of 14-year olds would be far better off (and not just financially) by leaving school and entering the world of work.
I suppose what I am arguing is that you (and by extension government) simply cannot know what "good" is, let alone deliver it.
I don't quite go along with that last bit. It seems to me that "you", and I, and anyone else we cooperate with (such as our children) can devise a good education for ourselves, because we know each other, and because in accordance with the civilised rule that I trust we are following, any individual not satisfied may opt out (and I'd include the child in that). It's when we all decide, "by extension", that we also know what is best for people we've never met, and don't allow them to opt out, that the trouble starts. I'm sure Patrick agrees with that, but it isn't quite what he said.
Patrick is of course entirely in tune with the general spirit of this blog, which includes (but which is not exclusively devoted to) spelling out what harm the state does and how much less it should do. So apart from that one quibble: indeed.
Yesterday I commented on this PhD overproduction thing, along the lines that once a measurement becomes a target it ceases to measure. But I did it badly, and I'm going to take another crack at it. Nothing like doing my duty for two days with one idea, is there?
The central point is the difference between measuring a mere symptom, and measuring the degree to which someone has deliberately scored highly, but only by that measurement.
Take the matter of PhDs, since that was the original subject. Time was when a PhD was a symptom of the fact that you were a budding scholar. You didn't do your research into your favourite brand of forest beetle and then write about it for your fellow scholars in order to get your PhD. You did it in order to find out more about the beetle and to tell friends and rivals about it and about the larger significance of it. The PhD was just an outward sign of your scholarly progress. Now, people say: "I want a PhD, what shall I do it in?"
Now of course I am somewhat romanticising this. Scholars have always been competitive and status conscious, and aware of the importance of titles and jobs. But at least they were concerned with scholarly jobs. The trouble erupts when a PhD, like a degree before it ("I want a degree, what shall I do it in?"), is treated as a qualification for the non-scholarly, real world out there.
What the real world used to value in PhDs was their genuine scholarly abilities, their ability to look at merely business problems from a fresh, even if rather bumbling and eccentric, angle, and to bring different sorts of knowledge and a different (more intellectual) sort of intellectual attitude to bear. Now (and I have friends exactly like this) you get smart, besuited go-getters showing up for interviews to become corporate go-getters, who do not now have and never did have any serious scholarly achievements or ambitions but who now call themselves Doctors. All very confusing. I suppose it's a symptom of the fact that, to an unprecedented degree these days, technical knowledge and intellectual facility is also money (human capital, etc.), and so therefore you have a new breed of money seeker who goes to money via knowledge and intellect, and via the honorific trappings of knowledge and intellect.
Please do not misunderstand this as any kind of attack on the principle of go-getting and money-making. I'm all for it. I'm just trying to contrive a world in which effort leads to actual results, instead of merely to pointless – and even career-blighting or life-ruining – educational qualifications.
A more extreme-for-illustrative-purposes example of the symptom/target muddle would be trying to cure a high fever by putting the patient in a fridge. Temperature does serve as a sign of illness, in the normal course of things. But merely bashing the temperature over the head by any means available is not the same as administering a cure.
That's a case of trying to remove something bad by hacking down the bad number which was measuring it. Now here's a real-world example of trying to stimulate something good by bashing up the good number. (Appropriately enough for here, it's another educational example, and one closely related to the problem of PhD overproduction.)
Observation: countries with lots of universities do well economically. Let's assume that that's true, approximately speaking. Ergo: we must build lots of universities and stuff into them any lazy thickos we can round up, perhaps by bending the academic entrance requirements. This may do some good things for some people, but the bit after Ergo absolutely does not automatically follow.
What if the proliferation of universities is a mere symptom of an underlying intellectual enthusiasm in the country, which is in no way stimulated by merely erecting more of the architectural consequences of such an enthusiasm? As soon as you identify "number of universities" as the good variable, and start to try to increase that number by going at it directly (instead of by somehow stimulating "intellectual enthusiasm", whatever that is and however you do that, and assuming that that is what is really causing the economic development, which may also not be true), then the number stops being useful as a measure of future economic prowess.
Because indeed, it may not be true that "intellectual enthusiasm" is the good variable here. What if what universities really signify is the mere presence of lots of rich people with time and money to burn arsing about at university, drinking and, yes, thinking – but not in a way that will ever enhance the nation's economic prowess? What if, in other words, proliferation of universities is entirely the consequence of economic prowess, and in no way its cause? I don't entirely believe this, but there's certainly a lot to this surmise, I'd say. If that's true, then to seek national economic success with a university building programme is like trying to get rich by buying your wife a diamond necklace, on the grounds that rich wives tend to sport diamond necklaces more often than poor ones.
(Another example of a symptom getting misused as a measurement would be if I measured my success here only in terms of how well I stuck to my minimum-of-one-posting-per-weekday rule. But mentioning that also points up that imposing such a number rule can do good things, because I believe that this rule, crude though it may be, has served me very well. Business people often use this kind of technique. Maybe just banging up more universities might do good after all, because it would at least get the gandchildren of coal-miners into the habit of thinking, and get them to realise that they might be able to make a better living by thinking better.)
Getting back to the PhD thing, Michael, I feel for you. (Doctor Michael Jennings, now holidaying in Bilbao (try the first link to the site as a whole if the second to the actual holiday posting doesn't work), commented glumly on the previous posting.)
Michael strikes me as a PhD of the genuine, original sort, one of life's actual scholars and gentlemen, complete with crumpled corduroy jacket that he ought to change more often and strange bow tie, spiritually if not literally, and a ton of knowledge about all manner of things and bags of intellect. The title "Doctor" ought to be reserved for the likes of him, so that employers could identify his special virtues, which I know him to possess, and realise that the cord jacket and bow tie (spiritually speaking) is just part of the package.
Personally, I'd like to see a verbal distinction made between scholars and the medical profession. I enjoy asking people who are only "doctors" in the economics of marketing (who are thus in my eyes doubly undeserving of the title) to cure my increasingly blocked sinuses. But that's a different argument.
Jonathan Wilde emails thus:
I am a big fan of your education blog. …
A big fan. There you go, I have big fans. The desire to flatter is flattery itself, I always say. So what do I have to do for you, JW? Oh yes …
… I have made a post on the value of a PhD that you might be interested in on my blog.…
… and say things about it. Fair enough.
Opening paragraph:
How many times have you heard someone say, "The solution is education," in response to an endless list of social problems. Or, "Society needs educated people in order to thrive," or "The best thing we can do for the youth of America is give them a proper education"? Education is often regarded as the modern day panacea for societal ills. Pick a problem, any problem, watch some TV, and a talking head will propose education as the solution.
But Wilde goes on to note that, according to some, one of the biggest educational problems these days is the over-production of people with PhDs.
Wilde's piece is about the subjectivity of value – the value of things generally and the value to an employer of higher education in particular – and about the fact that all these excessive numbers of people with PhDs think they have something of "objective" value, but are mistaken.
Concluding paragraphs:
And the key point is this – what the employer values in an employee is completely subjective. As circumstances change, what the employer seeks in an employee changes. Just ask any computer programmer who was raking it in three years ago but cannot find a job today. The mistake that the PhD degree seekers often make is believing that by getting a PhD, they are getting objective economic value. They believe that after 4 years of college, 5 or more years spent pursuing a PhD, being published in journals, and writing and defending a thesis in front of scholars of their chosen field, they have something that is intrinsically valuable.But as the Austrian school reveals, nothing is intrinsically valuable. Nothing has objective economic value. Job training, specialization, postgraduate degrees, certification, etc are only valuable if others value them enough to exchange wages for the labor of those who obtain them.
And of course, the larger question is – if education is to be the cure all for society's ills, how can a top-down structure ensure by design that employers value the skills and training obtained by graduates?
Indeed.
Moving off at a tangent somewhat (i.e. changing the subject almost totally), it seems to me that what we have here is also a confusion between the permanent (if still subjective and maybe over-produced) value of some item of actual education, some actual acquired ability, and the temporarily useful but soon overtaken-by-events sign that one is up at the front of some queue to demonstrate some combination of clevernesses such as one always had but needed somehow to prove. As soon as lots of people have PhDs, having a PhD ceases to prove that you are at the front of the PhD queue, merely someone who is in it..
For what it is worth, what I hear now (and that means that this could already be way out of date) is that the current big "meal ticket for life" qualification is being in or having been in one of the big name management consultancies. But give it ten years, and ex-McKinseyites (who all swallowed the claim that McKinseyness would indeed be a meal-ticket for life and who were thus hired for crap wages in vast numbers by McKinsey and used to clean their toilets and carry the luggage of the real McKinseyites and who barged in on the real McKinsey business and thus without realising it ruined McKinsey as a star enterprise and turned it into a mere brand-X enterprise) will likewise be flooding the labour market, and mostly likewise be unemployable. Not least because they were too stupid to see that this was happening.
This is a particular example of the general law, famously stated by somebody very important whose name I can't remember, that as soon as some particular variable is publicly identified as the way to measure something, it ceases to measure it, or for that matter to measure anything much at all. Something like that. That's a principle that applies to educational "results" of all kinds, not just PhDs.
Have a nice day.
Category: Examinations and qualifications • Relevance
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At the end of last week, a friend brought a Telegraph article to my attention in paper form, but I spent the weekend linking, and have only just encountered it in its linkable version. It's about the headmaster of Newton Prep, in Battersea, London, and it's called "How I'd scrap state schools":
Privately educating every child in the land wouldn't be as costly as you might think, says Richard Dell.Picture your local school. It is vibrant, happy, filled with excited teachers and motivated children. The resources are first-rate: computers abound, the library is overflowing with books, and the governors are thinking of buying new playing-fields.
So is this your local private school? Yes. And is this yet another school that is too expensive for ordinary people? No. This school charges no fees. It is entirely free, right down to all the books and trips.
Sound too good to be true? Well, it shouldn't. We could create the best independent education for all our children without charging any fees whatsoever. How this could be done is wonderfully simple.
Well, yes, it does sound too good to be true, but the piece conveys what is called infectious enthusiasm, and I intend to study it some more and I recommend that some of you people do also. I think I might even email this man. I wonder what he might say. Something like this?
So do not complain that governments are getting our education system wrong. They should not be running it anyway. Stop whingeing and start doing. We can revolutionise education in our country.
Stop whingeing. Sounds like he's been reading this.
Some of our greatest schools exist because individuals rather than governments invested in education. Four leading independents have just announced a return to their founders' ideals with regards to means-tested scholarships - providing, in other words, the best education for the neediest of pupils.
Despite myself, I am impressed. More research is needed.
Yes, people. Look over to your right. What you thought would never happen (what with how often I have promised it) has happened, and this is now a Real Blog. It may not yet be a very good one, but it definitely now is one.
My deepest thanks to all those who have had me on their permanent links lists without me reciprocating, and in general my apologies in all directions for having taken so long to get this essential aspect of blogging even semi-properly organised.
Any comments on or complaints about these links would now be very welcome. Faced with the difficulty of classifying many of these links, I have for now contented myself with only one distinction, between a link to a blog and a link to a not-blog. That nuance aside, everything educational has been hurled into two alphabetised buckets, with learned commentators on educational policy rubbing shoulders with chatty clappy Christian homeschoolers, maths study guides with websites devoted to privatising everything educational that you can think of. In short, I gave up trying to get it completely right, and have concentrated on getting a first base established. I'd welcome any suggestions about how to classify these various links more exactly, and thus perhaps more helpfully.
And now that I know how to do all this better than I did before, now would be a good time to suggest more blogs and sites that it would make sense for me to include. In fact, comments on any aspect of this operation – from links that actually don't, to spelling blunders, to further suggestions, and even to suggested dismissals on the grounds of, I don't know, being ghastly.
One possible addition Real Soon Now may be a clutch of official British government sites on educational matters, and another obvious one would also be the education pages of the cost-free mainstream media.
I also suspect that when I take another crack at this, part of the answer may be to have pages like the one that Jim of Jim's Journal has at his site. Jim has favoured this blog with a number of comments over the last few weeks, and when I looked at his page of favourite blogs I discovered how very much I admired this man, who, incidentally, has an very educational job. Reynolds, Lileks, some guy called Pepys, Sullivan, Pournelle, Postrel, various others, and me, twice. Thrice, if you count Samizdata. (And Jennings.)
But more to my point here is that short descriptions of blogs, rather than just these massive lists, may prove to be the way to go, as has already been suggested by Alice, although I'm afraid I can't find when or where, for the usual boring Blogger reasons. (Although I hear that they are promising to do better, Real Soon Now.)
