A Modern Plato's take on education - and my unease after reading it.
As promised, I’ve got much to say about a series of three opinions posted in the wall Street Journal recently. Together, they describe the writer’s vision of what public schooling and education in America should be. It could be the tone, it could be the content, but all of them rub me the wrong way in one way or another. The first one, Intelligence in the Classroom, says that education need to take into account the innate intelligence of the people being educated. If soemeone’s IQ isn’t high enough, they’re going to struggle, he says, and there’s really nothing education can do about it other than teach them what they’ll be able to understand and leave it at that. Some people just aren’t smart enough, he says. And then he says: “It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence.” Not smart enough to learn, and so problems will follow them because they couldn’t learn. It’s their lot in life, and that can’t be helped, he says.
The second topic, What's Wrong With Vocational School? says that far too many people are going to four-year colleges where two-year colleges, technical and vocational schools are really where they should be. Again, because people just don’t have the brains to hack it in college courses. He does say that this isn’t necessarily a disadvantage, as there are plenty of professions and occupations that someone can perform with average-to-good IQs and intelligence. Just that college isn’t the place for them to go, and they should go get trained in a trade or a vocation instead. After all, with the power of the Internet, the college campus is becoming an unnecessary expense, and people can learn what they need to without having to put a foot on the campus (or having to step on campus much less often). At vocational schools, community colleges, and technical schools, they’ll get practical training in a shorter amount of time and be perfectly ready to take on the working world. He mentions that skilled tradesmen are going to be in high demand, can’t be outsourced, and make good money, so there’s no shame in taking one on. His solution is for society to stop putting a premium on four-year degrees, and for hiring to be more about experience and ability and less about degrees. That way, education costs for everyone go down and start becoming affordable, and only those who truly belong in four-year colleges, through the virtue of their superior intellect, actually end up going there.
Having left the stupid and the average to their fates as failures and craftsmen, he turns to the intellectually elite in his last piece, Aztecs vs. Greeks, and says that those rare few who are gifted with intelligence are the future of the country. They will gravitate to leadership spots, wherever they go, they will run the country, they will head up corporations, they will be inventors of the cure for cancer or the next big software system. As the guardians of the future, these people need to be educated not only in their professions, but in their citizenship. They need to be recognized as special and taught to accept the additional responsibility that comes with it, and how to be wise with their gifts. The gifted need to have their own educational track, he says, so that they can be challenged sufficiently. So they can be groomed to be responsible and good in their inevitable place as the rulers of the country.
And yes, he does, in the last one, make mention of how much like Plato’s city founded on the Myth of Metals this sounds like.
So what feels off-kilter about this set of three? Well, it runs up against the cultural notion of the American Dream - that everyone should have at least the opportunity to improve their station in life through responsible decisions and good work. Admittedly, the American Dream is becoming more and more like a pipe dream these days, but the theory still stands.
Furthermore, I have a certain aversion to just declaring a class of people to be unable to learn the necessary materials for a profession. With a lot of professions relying less on memorization of things (say, the Dewey classification tables) and more on having procedures and data at hand to be accessed, it’s possible for someone who can understand the concepts well enough to make it “good enough for government work” can be happily employed. In cases where more specialized knowledge is required, then others can be consulted or hired in to do that kind of work. Smart people are making it possible for less smart people to do the same kind of work, with the help of assistants, or through mechanization.
With regards to college, it’s true that there isn’t necessarily a lot of practical experience in the standard college education, but college often bills itself as a place where people learn how to think, be critical, and pick up skills that will serve them in any number of professions. I also happen to think that college is currently being used as a way for people to get the education they should have gotten in high school. Perhaps if high school could be the place where people could get sufficient education to get a job that could support them - or at least ensure they could go to a two-year college and then get that job, maybe the argument about too many people at college would hold some water. Plus, some of us have to go to four-year college to get into the graduate school so we can spend another two years learning the profession we actually want to do.
It’s in the gifted kids segment that I have my biggest objection - from experience. (I don’t really want to make much of being “gifted” - what really matters is that I’m good at what I do for work and life.) While I agree that gifted kids do need classes suited to their level of achievement, there’s a lot of problems that can accompany that. The feeling of being superior to the peons is a possibility, but there’s also the social interaction problems. If all you ever see are people who are as smart as you, there’s going to be some system shock when you start having to work with people who aren’t as smart as you. Plus, if anti-intellectualism is bad in this country, implementing this kind of system will likely aggravate it even more, and start it early in childhood. Neither side, the “smart” or the “average”, gets to interact with the other and see that they’re okay. Lastly, there’s no guarantee anywhere that the smart kids themselves can handle the programs designed to push them. I’m told that I could have continued in private education, but in addition to the school being quite far away from home (and Mom knowing we would get involved in extracurriculars), Mom knew that the private school would have simply pushed me as hard as I could have gone, until I broke. I don’t know if I would have broke, or been miserable, or what it would have been, but I can see it happening - the smart track pushing people to the limits and then discarding anyone who breaks under the strain. Possibly to the derision of those still there, who make fun of the person who had to go to school with the normals.
Admittedly, that’s an extreme case, but I’m not entirely sure that wisdom can be taught in aphorisms, Confucian texts, and the writings of the many masters through time. Some of it must be experienced (sometimes multiple times before it finally sinks in).
So, while a lot of what this person says is probably true, I don’t necessarily like the conclusions being drawn out of it. Of course, I could be putting up straw men and setting them on fire, too. So if there are things I haven’t considered, logical errors I’ve made, or other things, don’t hesitate to point them out. I am, after all, still learning.
The second topic, What's Wrong With Vocational School? says that far too many people are going to four-year colleges where two-year colleges, technical and vocational schools are really where they should be. Again, because people just don’t have the brains to hack it in college courses. He does say that this isn’t necessarily a disadvantage, as there are plenty of professions and occupations that someone can perform with average-to-good IQs and intelligence. Just that college isn’t the place for them to go, and they should go get trained in a trade or a vocation instead. After all, with the power of the Internet, the college campus is becoming an unnecessary expense, and people can learn what they need to without having to put a foot on the campus (or having to step on campus much less often). At vocational schools, community colleges, and technical schools, they’ll get practical training in a shorter amount of time and be perfectly ready to take on the working world. He mentions that skilled tradesmen are going to be in high demand, can’t be outsourced, and make good money, so there’s no shame in taking one on. His solution is for society to stop putting a premium on four-year degrees, and for hiring to be more about experience and ability and less about degrees. That way, education costs for everyone go down and start becoming affordable, and only those who truly belong in four-year colleges, through the virtue of their superior intellect, actually end up going there.
Having left the stupid and the average to their fates as failures and craftsmen, he turns to the intellectually elite in his last piece, Aztecs vs. Greeks, and says that those rare few who are gifted with intelligence are the future of the country. They will gravitate to leadership spots, wherever they go, they will run the country, they will head up corporations, they will be inventors of the cure for cancer or the next big software system. As the guardians of the future, these people need to be educated not only in their professions, but in their citizenship. They need to be recognized as special and taught to accept the additional responsibility that comes with it, and how to be wise with their gifts. The gifted need to have their own educational track, he says, so that they can be challenged sufficiently. So they can be groomed to be responsible and good in their inevitable place as the rulers of the country.
And yes, he does, in the last one, make mention of how much like Plato’s city founded on the Myth of Metals this sounds like.
So what feels off-kilter about this set of three? Well, it runs up against the cultural notion of the American Dream - that everyone should have at least the opportunity to improve their station in life through responsible decisions and good work. Admittedly, the American Dream is becoming more and more like a pipe dream these days, but the theory still stands.
Furthermore, I have a certain aversion to just declaring a class of people to be unable to learn the necessary materials for a profession. With a lot of professions relying less on memorization of things (say, the Dewey classification tables) and more on having procedures and data at hand to be accessed, it’s possible for someone who can understand the concepts well enough to make it “good enough for government work” can be happily employed. In cases where more specialized knowledge is required, then others can be consulted or hired in to do that kind of work. Smart people are making it possible for less smart people to do the same kind of work, with the help of assistants, or through mechanization.
With regards to college, it’s true that there isn’t necessarily a lot of practical experience in the standard college education, but college often bills itself as a place where people learn how to think, be critical, and pick up skills that will serve them in any number of professions. I also happen to think that college is currently being used as a way for people to get the education they should have gotten in high school. Perhaps if high school could be the place where people could get sufficient education to get a job that could support them - or at least ensure they could go to a two-year college and then get that job, maybe the argument about too many people at college would hold some water. Plus, some of us have to go to four-year college to get into the graduate school so we can spend another two years learning the profession we actually want to do.
It’s in the gifted kids segment that I have my biggest objection - from experience. (I don’t really want to make much of being “gifted” - what really matters is that I’m good at what I do for work and life.) While I agree that gifted kids do need classes suited to their level of achievement, there’s a lot of problems that can accompany that. The feeling of being superior to the peons is a possibility, but there’s also the social interaction problems. If all you ever see are people who are as smart as you, there’s going to be some system shock when you start having to work with people who aren’t as smart as you. Plus, if anti-intellectualism is bad in this country, implementing this kind of system will likely aggravate it even more, and start it early in childhood. Neither side, the “smart” or the “average”, gets to interact with the other and see that they’re okay. Lastly, there’s no guarantee anywhere that the smart kids themselves can handle the programs designed to push them. I’m told that I could have continued in private education, but in addition to the school being quite far away from home (and Mom knowing we would get involved in extracurriculars), Mom knew that the private school would have simply pushed me as hard as I could have gone, until I broke. I don’t know if I would have broke, or been miserable, or what it would have been, but I can see it happening - the smart track pushing people to the limits and then discarding anyone who breaks under the strain. Possibly to the derision of those still there, who make fun of the person who had to go to school with the normals.
Admittedly, that’s an extreme case, but I’m not entirely sure that wisdom can be taught in aphorisms, Confucian texts, and the writings of the many masters through time. Some of it must be experienced (sometimes multiple times before it finally sinks in).
So, while a lot of what this person says is probably true, I don’t necessarily like the conclusions being drawn out of it. Of course, I could be putting up straw men and setting them on fire, too. So if there are things I haven’t considered, logical errors I’ve made, or other things, don’t hesitate to point them out. I am, after all, still learning.