Wednesday 22 February 2006

Pic of the day: "Develop better teaching techniques and deploy them early"

Everyone is a student

Recently I saw on the front of a newspaper, a professor complained about the low levels of students these days. And I thought to myself: Small wonder, when everyone is a student!

In the past, higher education was for the smart, or rich, or at least patient. Today, it is pretty much the ticket to reasonably stable employment. Want to build houses? Go to college. Want to cook? Go to college. It isn't just for scientists and lawyers and doctors anymore. If you don't want to be regarded as a second-class citizen, you have to study till well into your twenties at least.

***

As you may guess from my tone of writing, I think there has been some "education inflation". But I also realize that we live in a complex society, and this requires more background knowledge than in the old days where you learned all you needed by working together with your parents on their farm. There is just so much knowledge, and people have to specialize in some of it and work together with others who specialize in something else. So you need an education that is both deep and broad, and which you cannot get from experience. The workplaces expect you to have some skills before you even show up.

The problem is that not all people are intelligent enough to absorb all that knowledge. Motivation can also be a problem when you spend a significant part of your life in school and don't know from experience why you would need to learn things. But no matter how motivated you are, you may simply not be able to handle the giant card house of theory built upon theory, ever more remote from your everyday experience. And it doesn't help that most societies (in the west at least) selectively encourage the less intelligent citizens to breed while discouraging the more intelligent.

It is hard to argue this without coming out as a kind of "intelligence racist" and saying that we should eradicate the less intelligent part of the populace, a kind of internal ethnic cleansing. Perhaps we shouldn't, even by such peaceful means as punishing them for breeding. But then by all that's good and true, at least we should own up to what we're doing. Not continue to make believe that all people are born with equal intelligence, and then blame those who mysteriously cannot produce it when needed.

By making higher education ever more mandatory, we are squandering resources on a broad front. We waste buildings and valuable teaching capacity. We waste the best years of young people, and their money as well as that of their parents.

From my correspondence with young Americans, it seems that the colleges over there are partly adjusting by offering classes in what we Europeans would call hobbies. Even here we have ever more classes that don't make people more productive members of the workforce, and their only chance to make use of this pseudo-knowledge is to teach it to others again. I don't really mind if people spend their time on feminism or comparative religion, as long as it is on their own time and money. Knowledge is a good thing in itself. But when college becomes just another storage facility for children, children who should have become adults many years ago, that's when I object.

I was present, I was actually in the middle of it, when high school in Norway was restructured from being education to becoming a holding bin for teenagers. It happened between my first and second year in high school. Until then, it had been a preparation for college and for some jobs that required you to know more maths or English than average. Starting from my second year, pretty much anyone could enter – and was indeed expected to, although it did not become officially mandatory until much later – and the level of the teaching fell to include the new people. I remember my teacher telling us that we were the last class he could teach like this. It must have hurt, to know that he was fired as a teacher and hired as a ... prison warden or something, I guess.

And now it has reached college, so it seems to me. Everyone's a student, but not everyone can learn.

***

Really, who is the crypto-racist... me or the people who dare not admit that some people are born to be stupid? Look, if society had taken a different course, physical strength could have been the most important requirement for most workers. No matter how much I tried, I would never be able to carry 300 pound crates. Some people are just born to be scrawny, or (as in my case) struck by illness as children. I could have been the unemployable one. I wonder if the muscleheads would have had as much forbearance as we have with those who don't make it. More likely, I think, they would have threatened to break our legs unless we complied with their standards. Not that they would know words like "comply".

Unless some overwhelming disaster wipes out civilization, the future will not favor people with low IQ. On the contrary, we are moving year by year toward a society where only the most intelligent, a minority of the population, are able to create value, and the rest become consumers only. As the robots take over the "service" jobs as well, only priests and whores can offer something machines can not. They, and the people who are more intelligent and creative than any machine. We move toward a society where a large part of the populace can only be employed in mock jobs.

In the Nordic countries, we have had such mock jobs in local government for a long time. It is an employment of last resort, with less pay than the "competition-exposed" workforce. Yes, that is a literal translation of a much used Norwegian word, implying that much of our economy is not exposed to competition. Sometimes things change, though. The state- owned mail distribution system (which also took upon itself to do banking) has gradually been spun off from government to become like a private company, just with the state as owner. As such it has become exposed to competition. As a result, thousands of employees have been laid off. For one thing, this implies that there were thousands of employees that were not really all that much needed. But more intriguingly, most of them are now on disability pensions. Perhaps they were the whole time, certainly the pay wasn't that much better. But at least they had their dignity.

During the years of moderately conservative government here in Norway we have started a process of halting and even reversing the creation of mock jobs. The population does not grow anymore, unless you count immigration, and barely even with that. Unemployment is low, we need all hands. It sounded like a good idea. Unfortunately, hands are not much good without a brain. If you think firing the women who used to sort paper will increase the number of nurses, you are seriously deluded. (Or at least you have no idea what a real nurse is doing. Being cute and holding people's hands is NOT a job description. Do you have any idea just how many types of medication is used in an average nursing home? Do you know the side effects of each of them so that you would notice them as different from normal afflictions of the aging? Would you be able to spot a decimal error in a prescription?)

As we move fully into the information age, we need to make changes. In priority:
1) Stop selective breeding for stupidity (no extra welfare to unemployable parents).
2) Free or low-cost distance learning for all citizens.
3) Develop better teaching techniques and deploy them early.
4) Start selective breeding for employability (mandatory child insurance paid by would-be parents).

You can ask forgiveness from God and men, but not from reality. If you jump off a building, you fall, no matter how much you beg the law of gravity to make an exception. The same applies to the way we organize our societies.