The "get the job done" part is interesting. For all that we live in a fairly ruthless capitalist economy, there are lots of places for the incompetent* to hide, and paradoxically this becomes easier the more white collar the environment. I've done pizza delivery, where an inability to find a house or show up on time gets you unceremoniously fired. I've done data entry, where slacking off to read a sports website gets your pay docked. I've done blue collar work, where incompetence makes you the pariah of the shop and guarantees temporary misery and eventual unemployment. And finally I've done - and am at this second doing - middle management in corporate America, where busily doing eight hours of unproductive nothing a day gets you a matched 401k and health insurance.
In this sense, funneling people into roles that are contrary to their abilities actually makes a lot of sense. Few things have less impact on day-to-day life than the composition of a Google doodle or shuffling the menu options on the Uber app. If on the other hand that person can't check a brake system properly, or can't hang drywall correctly, the consequences are much direr.
Eventually the music will stop. But for the time being, arraying society to get as many people into home office sinecures as possible, ability be damned, is very, very rational, because what use is ability anyway when resources are so abundant and roles so meaningless?
*Many of these people being incompetent through little to no fault of their own; rather they are acting very rationally by taking opportunities afforded them by a society that thinks diplomas are magic scrolls that award not just a middle class life but actually denote someone's abilities.
Eh if you're in middle management then you're managing a team. If you're just hiring good people and letting them do their thing then that's just good management. A lot of people suck at it.
It's well-known that we tend, in our areas of expertise, to underestimate our own abilities and overestimate those of others. So it might well be easy for me to sit here and say "oh, it's easy - check in with the team, fill in some spreadsheets, reply to emails", while someone else may find that very difficult. Similarly someone may say to me, oh, songwriting's easy, just find a melody, get a hook, build a bassline, slip a bridge in there... and it's as if they're asking me to write Beethoven's Fifth in Braille.
Perhaps my point is less about the difficulty of the job itself and rather how far separated it is from the nuts and bolts of daily life. If I mismeasure the application of fertilizer to a fruit crop, I can poison people. If I miscalculate an angle, I can erect an unsound building. But if I middle-manage suboptimally? I might make someone's life miserable, at which point they go to HR... but really, it's hard to see any far-reaching effect beyond that. It's more about the stakes of the work than the difficulty of the work itself. Right?
I'm obviously not going to out my location, so I need to be necessarily vague, but let's go with an analytics company focused on web advertising. 95% of what goes on there ultimately has no impact on anything.
As someone who also mostly does white-collar nothing all day, I very much agree. Climate change, decaying legacy infrastructure, housing shortages, and other interrelated factors are going to force us over the next few decades to reacquaint ourselves with the fact that we still live in a physical world, no matter how much the tech companies try to convince us otherwise. The professional ramifications will be interesting to say the least.
Colleges should be the destination for those interested in Sartre and Camus, Planck and de Broglie. Attempting to transform universities into some kind of glorified vocational system that confers the final stamp before a white collar career is wreaking havoc on society. It is especially harmful to disadvantaged/working class populations who a) take on horrific amounts of debt in an attempt at a better life and b) are often unsuited to "creative" professions due to a mismatch in aptitude or temperament.
Amen! The behavior of not just for-profit schools but supposedly non-profit ones is nothing short of predatory. They sit on massive endowments and milk students for all they're worth.
There really was an era when you could become a lawyer or (medical) doctor without a cap and gown. Then universities muscled in. They transformed themselves. (Your first sentence nails it, to be sure.)
well, i can hardly agree, sarte sucks and so does camus. there are a great many other wonderful minds out there; the goal for me was becoming educated, not schooled, and especially not reading or studying tripe, which is in essence what discovering what one's focus is and what it is not.
I mean in terms of cultural literacy it's important to have some idea of who they are and how they fit in (meaning why the modern age produced them as compared to, for example, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment) regardless of any personal affection for their writing.
But for Camus I do enjoy _The Myth of Sysyphus_. It seems to me to be stubbornly, defiantly human in the face of the great emptiness of it all.
Even in the Ivies, there's a stark division between students who are there to learn stuff, and those who are there for the credential & connections. Law Schools & McKinsey might want to see your transcript but mostly just having a name school on your CV is enough. Even students from less-advantaged backgrounds graduate from these places clueless & entitled <wags finger at mirror>. I got better.
The first part of your post uses the term unprepared. That implies (in my mind) that they could be prepared under the right conditions. But the thesis of your book is that there are people with low ability and even the best education in the world isn't going get them to Stanford/Google.
Do you get a chance to talk to the type of people who would use "unprepared" in the literature? Your book makes such a compelling case I'd be so interested to hear their response.
It feels like a linguistic trick. If someone's unprepared, well, prepare them!
In a lot of cases this language shift makes sense. You can see the logic behind shifting "homeless" to "unhoused" - "homeless" makes it sound like an accident, or a circumstance, whereas someone "unhoused" can be 'fixed' by, well, housing them. Then it becomes a simple problem of resource allocation, rather than something we meditate on at while staring straight ahead through the streaks of the unsolicited windscreen cleaner.
But at some point, per Freddie, the rubber hits the road, and we find that preparation is merely a multiplier of ability, not a replacement for it.
The data seems pretty clear that there aren't all that many high ability unprepared kids. Or at least the vast majority of the problem is kids with low ability.
I really appreciate your articles about education. Between my family and my girlfriend, there are 6 teachers/professors and they nearly all tell of facing bureaucratic pressure to pass kids that aren't ready for various reasons, which only hurts them in the long run (only my brother, a teacher in Germany, doesn't face these problems). Ranging from my gf being asked to pass students in Geometry if they complete just one extra assignment despite failing the entire course to my dad having to try and teach international students who scored a 440 on the TOEFL test because they're cash cows for the university. They despise the excessive standardized testing like Pearsons but also know there needs to be an objective way to assess a student's abilities.
I remember my own absurd story from High School Trigonometry class where everyone did so poorly we had an extra credit multiple choice test just to pass people. And this was a blue ribbon school.
I've read that Germany has a three-tier schooling system with a big emphasis on vocational work. I've also heard a kind of idealistic view of this, where there is no stigma or shame in being in the "lowest" school, and that blue collar work isn't considered by any means a bad path for someone who isn't very academic. Do you know from your brother how true that is? I imagine that, if it is true, it at least partially relates to Germany's relatively strong unions, who in turn have a somewhat more cooperative relationship with capital than here in the US (e.g. unions are entitled to a place on a company's board of directors, strikes are unusual, etc.)
I'm curious as well. I think there is some strain of Americana that says anyone can be the CEO of Google if they just work hard enough. I think other countries have a better sense that most people just don't have the ability.
Bear in mind that Germany has powerful industrial unions and skilled workers can make a lot of money, so that's better compensation and probably results in less stigma.
"Codetermination in Germany is a concept that involves the right of workers to participate in management of the companies they work for. Known as Mitbestimmung, the modern law on codetermination is found principally in the Mitbestimmungsgesetz of 1976. The law allows workers to elect representatives (usually trade union representatives) for almost half of the supervisory board of directors."
Yeah that's fairly true from what he tells me although there are clear class distinctions between them, even though you can make a decent living with blue-collar jobs there. He teaches at a Gesamtschule where they try and combine all three elements (I guess closer to a U.S. school) and the interesting thing is that he teaches the same set of students until they graduate so he gets to know the kids really well and what their weaknesses are. Over there they require you to teach two subjects (english and history in his case) so he's teaching 5th grade history and eventually 10th grade history to the same class. He is asked to be lenient because his school has a large number of immigrant students but not asked to do the ridiculous things American teachers are asked of.
"you can make a decent living with blue-collar jobs there" - here in the Northeast US, the blue-collar/white-collar class distinction is strong, and yet I know an electrical contractor and a car mechanic with their own businesses who make more money than MDs do. And since this is america, where the only thing that matters is money, you would think they would be highly respected - not so much.
Yup, saw it. I read all your stuff but don't comment much; if someone's already said something I was going to, or if my comment doesn't really contribute (and is just me letting off steam), why waste the bits?
I was going to comment on the techdirt piece and on the no-one/strawman one, but it's all been said before. I will add that disengaging entirely from legacy media and (mostly) from twatter has done wonders for my mood.
This was a damn good article and disabused me of some wrong notions I hatched in my head by observing the trades where I live. In my state there's been a chronic shortage of the trades for at least 10 years (it's really bad right now, and getting worse), giving the impression that going into the trades means instant job security, a decent living without the college debt load and 4 year investment, and the ability to name your terms, pick your customers, and take frequent and long vacations. Apparently that's not the case everywhere, and is not assured to last even here. The part about annually diminishing employment prospects, after the initial jump start, was particularly interesting. I had no idea.
Yes, but how long can you realistically do that for. Doctors, in many cases, are able to practice well into their 80s if they so desire, but I know a car mechanic in his mid-40s whose body will probably give out on him within ten years, and I've heard electrical work is likewise very tough on the joints, as I think trades tend to be in general. Doesn't seem worth it.
I would also add that if you do go to a Grundschule, the lowest form, there is a pretty wide range of ability from what he says. Yes, some kids will go onto technical trades but a lot of them generally have low ability and just need to be taught basic numbers sense and literacy, so they will be your cashiers, sanitation workers, etc. Nothing wrong with that at all, and the german system also seems better at knowing what students should know. Like in math over there you just need Geometry to graduate whereas in the US I think it's Algebra 2, which is more abstract and not as useful for folks. The downside he says is for late bloomers since kids are tracked pretty early, by like 5th grade or so. Sure, you can switch tracks but most people just follow general inertia and stick with what they're in.
Lastly, one of the things I really like about the German trade system that is often overlooked is that they mostly wear the same uniform. Carpenters dress a certain way, painters dress a certain way, construction workers dress a certain way. There's a standard of excellence that is applied to each trade and they tend to take even their presentation seriously.
I too remember such a Trig class exam, probably 10th or 11th grade. At a STEM magnet school with the smartest kids in the county averaging 50% or 60% scores. They rounded us way the hell up on a curve. I couldn't understand why. 40 years later I think it probably meant that the teacher sucked at teaching Trig.
I think part of the solution is letting teachers... teach. Let them decide what each student needs and leave the administration out of it. Raise the bar for teaching. Require real world experience for teachers instead of requiring the least challenging degree universities offer. I am so against the teachers unions but so very much FOR individual teachers.
Also the governor of Oregon just waved requirements for being able to read or do basic math a pre-requisite for graduating high school because she feels that black people can't be expected to do these basic things. Any pushback against this, even from black people, is deemed racist.
I would quote Zizek now but I'm exhausted and have a therapy session starting in 10 minutes. (Literally)
That may be the governor's secret motivation, but she, or at least the backers of the measure, do have other explanations. In the first place, they haven't waved them permanently, they've waved them while the work out what the new standards are going to be. In the second, they aren't saying that standards are bad, but that the old standards were bad in ways that disadvantaged [list of every ethnic group] and that while they're working out the new standards, rather than use the old (flawed) ones they're just not going to have any.
Now, you can agree or disagree with this, but it's not simply the state of Oregon throwing up its hands and saying black kids are too dumb to read, so let's stop checking if they can.
One thing that sort of blew my mind at the time early in college was that there were a lot of people who were probably relatively well prepared for college (ie they had good HS GPA and good enough standardized tests to get into a moderately selective college), who had ambitions of being doctors but then immediately failed first semester chemistry. Most of the students I knew in that boat ended up switching to communications or something and eventually graduated, but there must be so many people who took out loans and bounced out without a degree.
This is why cut courses are critical, and I hope people are still doing them.
If we priced college in a sane way then bouncing around for a year or two until you found out what you were good at (or that you were in the wrong place) wouldn't be a problem.
This is such an important topic and I know you're always on thin ice for writing about it with intellectual honesty vs. dogmatic posturing so...thank you. One thing I'm thinking about is what it means to be "prepared" for college. In math or computer science, it's easy enough to see how you can't take a college-level class w/out the pre-reqs. Where it's murkier to me is in the humanities where students who may not be stellar writers and might have trouble with some of the reading material (I'll pause here to note that I didn't undertand a good % of my freshman syllabus which was heavy on Aristotle, Kant and just-fail-me-now Aquinas but this hasn't held me back in life) -- but who might be completely capable of engaging in classroom discussions and may, with some extra help, improve on their reading comprehension and writing ability. To me, that doesn't devalue the college experience in any way that I care about -- yes, it might devalue it from the perspective of professional oneupmanship if non-stellar students are graduating from my elite institution but this might be a good thing, to flatten the hierarchy of higher education and just make college a place to explore, learn as best you can, and exchange ideas (again, rocket/computer science excepted).
What I think he means is a college degree from X university should mean that you can learn Y amount in Z time. A company that hires kids from X university knows that 90% of them can make it through the 6 week 8 hour a day training program and retain enough to do their jobs. If you start passing less able students that percentage is going to decline because the students lack the ability to learn at the pace required.
The movement to lower standards has reached university physics. The American Physical Society ran an editorial by a Nobel Prize winner advocating re-formulating physics classes to best fit the lower third of the students (not a crazy policy position), and explicitly denying the existence of any relevant talent variation (a pretty crazy factual claim). Worse, it turns out that the published research papers used to support the general position are amazingly incorrect, with explicit logic errors. I describe the technical aspects here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05647.
To the great credit of the editor of the journal that published the research papers (a branch of Physical Review), they are about to publish most of my technical critique. (The arXiv version also discusses two papers published since my journal version was submitted.)
Bless all of you who expend time and energy on pushing back against the lowering of standards, even at risk to your standing within your profession. These days you never know whether a well-reasoned infusion of logic and technique critique will get you praise or excommunication.
We had the same problem when I worked at a community college. Students failed remedial classes over and over until they gave up. We tried everything. Tutoring, co-reqs, learning communities. Forgiving their debt so they could try again.
It was hard to point to one problem. Some students never came to class because they had work or childcare problems. Some seemed to have undiagnosed learning disabilities; we rarely assessed for that although we provided accommodations like “extra time” for those who came in with documented disabilities.
There was a lot of pressure on instructors. Some had very low passing rates, year after year (like 25%) while others regularly passed more than half. Of course, the instructors with low passing rates said their colleagues were inflating grades. The administration said they were bad teachers.
I never knew who was right. But either way, the point still stands because even the instructors with “high” passing rates had students who just could not get there for whatever reason. Ability, motivation, something. A lot of them left with nothing but debt.
Maybe. It’s hard to say how many students would be incapable of passing high school level math and reading under perfect circumstances (high motivation, great teachers, access to lots of support) — and how far away we were from that, whatever it is.
As far back as 1964, an English visitor described the US something like this: "The question was not 'Have you got a degree?' but 'Where did you get your degree?'"
The end game may have to be that everyone has a degree and employers ask for other evidence of ability.
Not to give the rest of what you were saying there short shrift...
"....including academic abilities, and that the only humane path is not to force everyone to be smart, or to stop using tests and assessments to identify who’s smart, but to build a world that respects, nurtures, and protects those who aren’t."
Part of the reason that "correct" people don't want to hear about innate talent discrepancies is because they think that immediately means we want those less talented or gifted to suffer. There may be some Libertarians who think that way, but I don't.
Someone once told me, sort of jokingly sort of not, that I had devised a book topic designed to repulse anyone from wanting to defend me, and that was very on-brand.
college is an interesting experience and i found it partially useful but not so much so that i went on to an MA and Ph.D.; those would have destroyed my capacity to do what i wanted to do which was a broad interdisciplinary degree far different than anything i could have received in the university system, even in the 70s. I believe strongly in education, not schooling. and i believe in extremely high standards of intellectual achievement; without it, it all becomes a joke, as the US is fast becoming in every way possible. Reagan really screwed the US education system when he began focusing it on being a vocational process rather than an education process. There should always have been at least two tracks, one vocational another liberal educational, with some people going into STEM fields out of the liberal track. But the system has been so perverted now that it is not salvageable. I don't know what the solution is, but i do know that a striving for excellence and to do as well as those i respect, or as close to it as i can get, is what education is all about. i was lucky enough that that sort of thing was still possible when i came up. but the plain truth is that not all people are meant for college or university and it should be fine that they are not. there needs to be a place for all of us in this country, not just some of us. And i do bemoan the incredible stupidity that is now occurring among my liberal tribe about intellectual excellence and in my country, too. as well, the cruelty of the culture toward anyone not part of the elite . . . we are well and truly in bad territory.
Well, OK. I guess this is what your book is about. Didn't read the book, so I don't know what you say in it.
This is the thing, if its not worth it for people with more ability to work hard... they won't do it. People with talent - and that could be in any domain - aren't just these bright souls that are bursting with the desire to do work all the time for free. Sure, our culture loves the idea of an undiscovered genius working for free making music or an invention in his garage just for the rush of being an original creator, but 99% of talented people aren't doing that sort of thing. And that's a good thing.
Its a pretty thankless system to have more talent than others, and for people to think that because you are more capable, that you should take on more tasks and more responsibility to get things done. I've been in plenty of situations where people feel that they were owed my talent. Times when a supervisor gave a person in an equal position as mine one task, and me four tasks, and had a more demanding schedule for when I got stuff done; a system in which I was working late nights and an unreliable people (or people with children) never worked those hours. Why would I take on more worry and more work, if I don't have any oversight (power) over how those things are getting done or more reward (money, benefits) for those efforts? Its like being the smart kid in science class and the teacher always puts you with the kids that aren't doing so well, and the kids that struggle don't show up to do the group project because they know you'll do all the work to get an A; to boot, these are the exact kids that spread rumors about you and make your life miserable.
Work doesn't have to be everything in life. You leave it. You go home. You have a different world and a different set of values, including family, beliefs, community, volunteering, hobbies, friends, queen bees, whatever you do. That's where you get value in your life if you aren't particularly talented at something that pays. But in a pluralistic society, we can't build a standardized set of customs and values that provide that value (outside of work) for you. You have to build it. And I get that it is hard for some people to build their own value systems.
Despite Freddie so generously, borderline recklessly, sharing the nuts, bolts, and implications of his book online via Substack, I want to further support his work and buy it online. Anyone have a firm grasp of the best platform to buy from? I'd like a hard copy so I can give it away afterwards.
The "get the job done" part is interesting. For all that we live in a fairly ruthless capitalist economy, there are lots of places for the incompetent* to hide, and paradoxically this becomes easier the more white collar the environment. I've done pizza delivery, where an inability to find a house or show up on time gets you unceremoniously fired. I've done data entry, where slacking off to read a sports website gets your pay docked. I've done blue collar work, where incompetence makes you the pariah of the shop and guarantees temporary misery and eventual unemployment. And finally I've done - and am at this second doing - middle management in corporate America, where busily doing eight hours of unproductive nothing a day gets you a matched 401k and health insurance.
In this sense, funneling people into roles that are contrary to their abilities actually makes a lot of sense. Few things have less impact on day-to-day life than the composition of a Google doodle or shuffling the menu options on the Uber app. If on the other hand that person can't check a brake system properly, or can't hang drywall correctly, the consequences are much direr.
Eventually the music will stop. But for the time being, arraying society to get as many people into home office sinecures as possible, ability be damned, is very, very rational, because what use is ability anyway when resources are so abundant and roles so meaningless?
*Many of these people being incompetent through little to no fault of their own; rather they are acting very rationally by taking opportunities afforded them by a society that thinks diplomas are magic scrolls that award not just a middle class life but actually denote someone's abilities.
Eh if you're in middle management then you're managing a team. If you're just hiring good people and letting them do their thing then that's just good management. A lot of people suck at it.
It's well-known that we tend, in our areas of expertise, to underestimate our own abilities and overestimate those of others. So it might well be easy for me to sit here and say "oh, it's easy - check in with the team, fill in some spreadsheets, reply to emails", while someone else may find that very difficult. Similarly someone may say to me, oh, songwriting's easy, just find a melody, get a hook, build a bassline, slip a bridge in there... and it's as if they're asking me to write Beethoven's Fifth in Braille.
Perhaps my point is less about the difficulty of the job itself and rather how far separated it is from the nuts and bolts of daily life. If I mismeasure the application of fertilizer to a fruit crop, I can poison people. If I miscalculate an angle, I can erect an unsound building. But if I middle-manage suboptimally? I might make someone's life miserable, at which point they go to HR... but really, it's hard to see any far-reaching effect beyond that. It's more about the stakes of the work than the difficulty of the work itself. Right?
I'm trying to think of a business where a poorly run department doesn't have a far reaching impact.
Looking out of my office window, I could throw a rock and hit a dozen.
Such as?
I'm obviously not going to out my location, so I need to be necessarily vague, but let's go with an analytics company focused on web advertising. 95% of what goes on there ultimately has no impact on anything.
As someone who also mostly does white-collar nothing all day, I very much agree. Climate change, decaying legacy infrastructure, housing shortages, and other interrelated factors are going to force us over the next few decades to reacquaint ourselves with the fact that we still live in a physical world, no matter how much the tech companies try to convince us otherwise. The professional ramifications will be interesting to say the least.
Colleges should be the destination for those interested in Sartre and Camus, Planck and de Broglie. Attempting to transform universities into some kind of glorified vocational system that confers the final stamp before a white collar career is wreaking havoc on society. It is especially harmful to disadvantaged/working class populations who a) take on horrific amounts of debt in an attempt at a better life and b) are often unsuited to "creative" professions due to a mismatch in aptitude or temperament.
Amen! The behavior of not just for-profit schools but supposedly non-profit ones is nothing short of predatory. They sit on massive endowments and milk students for all they're worth.
There really was an era when you could become a lawyer or (medical) doctor without a cap and gown. Then universities muscled in. They transformed themselves. (Your first sentence nails it, to be sure.)
well, i can hardly agree, sarte sucks and so does camus. there are a great many other wonderful minds out there; the goal for me was becoming educated, not schooled, and especially not reading or studying tripe, which is in essence what discovering what one's focus is and what it is not.
I mean in terms of cultural literacy it's important to have some idea of who they are and how they fit in (meaning why the modern age produced them as compared to, for example, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment) regardless of any personal affection for their writing.
But for Camus I do enjoy _The Myth of Sysyphus_. It seems to me to be stubbornly, defiantly human in the face of the great emptiness of it all.
Even in the Ivies, there's a stark division between students who are there to learn stuff, and those who are there for the credential & connections. Law Schools & McKinsey might want to see your transcript but mostly just having a name school on your CV is enough. Even students from less-advantaged backgrounds graduate from these places clueless & entitled <wags finger at mirror>. I got better.
The first part of your post uses the term unprepared. That implies (in my mind) that they could be prepared under the right conditions. But the thesis of your book is that there are people with low ability and even the best education in the world isn't going get them to Stanford/Google.
Fair. "Unprepared" is a commonplace in the literature so I slip into it.
Do you get a chance to talk to the type of people who would use "unprepared" in the literature? Your book makes such a compelling case I'd be so interested to hear their response.
It feels like a linguistic trick. If someone's unprepared, well, prepare them!
In a lot of cases this language shift makes sense. You can see the logic behind shifting "homeless" to "unhoused" - "homeless" makes it sound like an accident, or a circumstance, whereas someone "unhoused" can be 'fixed' by, well, housing them. Then it becomes a simple problem of resource allocation, rather than something we meditate on at while staring straight ahead through the streaks of the unsolicited windscreen cleaner.
But at some point, per Freddie, the rubber hits the road, and we find that preparation is merely a multiplier of ability, not a replacement for it.
I assume there are unprepared people with both high and low ability.
The data seems pretty clear that there aren't all that many high ability unprepared kids. Or at least the vast majority of the problem is kids with low ability.
I really appreciate your articles about education. Between my family and my girlfriend, there are 6 teachers/professors and they nearly all tell of facing bureaucratic pressure to pass kids that aren't ready for various reasons, which only hurts them in the long run (only my brother, a teacher in Germany, doesn't face these problems). Ranging from my gf being asked to pass students in Geometry if they complete just one extra assignment despite failing the entire course to my dad having to try and teach international students who scored a 440 on the TOEFL test because they're cash cows for the university. They despise the excessive standardized testing like Pearsons but also know there needs to be an objective way to assess a student's abilities.
I remember my own absurd story from High School Trigonometry class where everyone did so poorly we had an extra credit multiple choice test just to pass people. And this was a blue ribbon school.
I've read that Germany has a three-tier schooling system with a big emphasis on vocational work. I've also heard a kind of idealistic view of this, where there is no stigma or shame in being in the "lowest" school, and that blue collar work isn't considered by any means a bad path for someone who isn't very academic. Do you know from your brother how true that is? I imagine that, if it is true, it at least partially relates to Germany's relatively strong unions, who in turn have a somewhat more cooperative relationship with capital than here in the US (e.g. unions are entitled to a place on a company's board of directors, strikes are unusual, etc.)
I'm curious as well. I think there is some strain of Americana that says anyone can be the CEO of Google if they just work hard enough. I think other countries have a better sense that most people just don't have the ability.
Yeah, and it goes both ways. There's a lot of benefits of open opportunity and meritocracy. But there are also huge, glaring downsides.
Anybody *from India* can be CEO of Google. Good ol' Larry stepped down years ago.
Bear in mind that Germany has powerful industrial unions and skilled workers can make a lot of money, so that's better compensation and probably results in less stigma.
I referred to that explicitly in my message ;) Their unions are powerful and tend to be represented at board level.
"Codetermination in Germany is a concept that involves the right of workers to participate in management of the companies they work for. Known as Mitbestimmung, the modern law on codetermination is found principally in the Mitbestimmungsgesetz of 1976. The law allows workers to elect representatives (usually trade union representatives) for almost half of the supervisory board of directors."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
Yeah that's fairly true from what he tells me although there are clear class distinctions between them, even though you can make a decent living with blue-collar jobs there. He teaches at a Gesamtschule where they try and combine all three elements (I guess closer to a U.S. school) and the interesting thing is that he teaches the same set of students until they graduate so he gets to know the kids really well and what their weaknesses are. Over there they require you to teach two subjects (english and history in his case) so he's teaching 5th grade history and eventually 10th grade history to the same class. He is asked to be lenient because his school has a large number of immigrant students but not asked to do the ridiculous things American teachers are asked of.
"you can make a decent living with blue-collar jobs there" - here in the Northeast US, the blue-collar/white-collar class distinction is strong, and yet I know an electrical contractor and a car mechanic with their own businesses who make more money than MDs do. And since this is america, where the only thing that matters is money, you would think they would be highly respected - not so much.
You may be interested in this: https://freddiedeboer.medium.com/lots-of-talk-about-the-trades-not-much-evidence-d7009d8db49e
Yup, saw it. I read all your stuff but don't comment much; if someone's already said something I was going to, or if my comment doesn't really contribute (and is just me letting off steam), why waste the bits?
I was going to comment on the techdirt piece and on the no-one/strawman one, but it's all been said before. I will add that disengaging entirely from legacy media and (mostly) from twatter has done wonders for my mood.
This was a damn good article and disabused me of some wrong notions I hatched in my head by observing the trades where I live. In my state there's been a chronic shortage of the trades for at least 10 years (it's really bad right now, and getting worse), giving the impression that going into the trades means instant job security, a decent living without the college debt load and 4 year investment, and the ability to name your terms, pick your customers, and take frequent and long vacations. Apparently that's not the case everywhere, and is not assured to last even here. The part about annually diminishing employment prospects, after the initial jump start, was particularly interesting. I had no idea.
Yes, but how long can you realistically do that for. Doctors, in many cases, are able to practice well into their 80s if they so desire, but I know a car mechanic in his mid-40s whose body will probably give out on him within ten years, and I've heard electrical work is likewise very tough on the joints, as I think trades tend to be in general. Doesn't seem worth it.
I would also add that if you do go to a Grundschule, the lowest form, there is a pretty wide range of ability from what he says. Yes, some kids will go onto technical trades but a lot of them generally have low ability and just need to be taught basic numbers sense and literacy, so they will be your cashiers, sanitation workers, etc. Nothing wrong with that at all, and the german system also seems better at knowing what students should know. Like in math over there you just need Geometry to graduate whereas in the US I think it's Algebra 2, which is more abstract and not as useful for folks. The downside he says is for late bloomers since kids are tracked pretty early, by like 5th grade or so. Sure, you can switch tracks but most people just follow general inertia and stick with what they're in.
Lastly, one of the things I really like about the German trade system that is often overlooked is that they mostly wear the same uniform. Carpenters dress a certain way, painters dress a certain way, construction workers dress a certain way. There's a standard of excellence that is applied to each trade and they tend to take even their presentation seriously.
I too remember such a Trig class exam, probably 10th or 11th grade. At a STEM magnet school with the smartest kids in the county averaging 50% or 60% scores. They rounded us way the hell up on a curve. I couldn't understand why. 40 years later I think it probably meant that the teacher sucked at teaching Trig.
I think part of the solution is letting teachers... teach. Let them decide what each student needs and leave the administration out of it. Raise the bar for teaching. Require real world experience for teachers instead of requiring the least challenging degree universities offer. I am so against the teachers unions but so very much FOR individual teachers.
Also the governor of Oregon just waved requirements for being able to read or do basic math a pre-requisite for graduating high school because she feels that black people can't be expected to do these basic things. Any pushback against this, even from black people, is deemed racist.
I would quote Zizek now but I'm exhausted and have a therapy session starting in 10 minutes. (Literally)
That may be the governor's secret motivation, but she, or at least the backers of the measure, do have other explanations. In the first place, they haven't waved them permanently, they've waved them while the work out what the new standards are going to be. In the second, they aren't saying that standards are bad, but that the old standards were bad in ways that disadvantaged [list of every ethnic group] and that while they're working out the new standards, rather than use the old (flawed) ones they're just not going to have any.
Now, you can agree or disagree with this, but it's not simply the state of Oregon throwing up its hands and saying black kids are too dumb to read, so let's stop checking if they can.
One thing that sort of blew my mind at the time early in college was that there were a lot of people who were probably relatively well prepared for college (ie they had good HS GPA and good enough standardized tests to get into a moderately selective college), who had ambitions of being doctors but then immediately failed first semester chemistry. Most of the students I knew in that boat ended up switching to communications or something and eventually graduated, but there must be so many people who took out loans and bounced out without a degree.
"Of course you can be a doctor. You can be anything you want to be!" said the admissions counselor.
"Of course you can drive a Lambo. You can afford the payments!" said the luxury vehicle lessor.
This is why cut courses are critical, and I hope people are still doing them.
If we priced college in a sane way then bouncing around for a year or two until you found out what you were good at (or that you were in the wrong place) wouldn't be a problem.
Someone should ask the OR governor how the suspension of proficiency requirements will help AAPI students in particular and all students in general.
This is such an important topic and I know you're always on thin ice for writing about it with intellectual honesty vs. dogmatic posturing so...thank you. One thing I'm thinking about is what it means to be "prepared" for college. In math or computer science, it's easy enough to see how you can't take a college-level class w/out the pre-reqs. Where it's murkier to me is in the humanities where students who may not be stellar writers and might have trouble with some of the reading material (I'll pause here to note that I didn't undertand a good % of my freshman syllabus which was heavy on Aristotle, Kant and just-fail-me-now Aquinas but this hasn't held me back in life) -- but who might be completely capable of engaging in classroom discussions and may, with some extra help, improve on their reading comprehension and writing ability. To me, that doesn't devalue the college experience in any way that I care about -- yes, it might devalue it from the perspective of professional oneupmanship if non-stellar students are graduating from my elite institution but this might be a good thing, to flatten the hierarchy of higher education and just make college a place to explore, learn as best you can, and exchange ideas (again, rocket/computer science excepted).
What I think he means is a college degree from X university should mean that you can learn Y amount in Z time. A company that hires kids from X university knows that 90% of them can make it through the 6 week 8 hour a day training program and retain enough to do their jobs. If you start passing less able students that percentage is going to decline because the students lack the ability to learn at the pace required.
The movement to lower standards has reached university physics. The American Physical Society ran an editorial by a Nobel Prize winner advocating re-formulating physics classes to best fit the lower third of the students (not a crazy policy position), and explicitly denying the existence of any relevant talent variation (a pretty crazy factual claim). Worse, it turns out that the published research papers used to support the general position are amazingly incorrect, with explicit logic errors. I describe the technical aspects here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05647.
To the great credit of the editor of the journal that published the research papers (a branch of Physical Review), they are about to publish most of my technical critique. (The arXiv version also discusses two papers published since my journal version was submitted.)
These dismal research papers, like the one on GRE's I discuss here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHEvLUxTWGsAjNjR3epRiQw and here https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09442, give us a taste of the pseudoscientific drivel toward which we seem to be heading.
Bless all of you who expend time and energy on pushing back against the lowering of standards, even at risk to your standing within your profession. These days you never know whether a well-reasoned infusion of logic and technique critique will get you praise or excommunication.
Being retired helps.
We had the same problem when I worked at a community college. Students failed remedial classes over and over until they gave up. We tried everything. Tutoring, co-reqs, learning communities. Forgiving their debt so they could try again.
It was hard to point to one problem. Some students never came to class because they had work or childcare problems. Some seemed to have undiagnosed learning disabilities; we rarely assessed for that although we provided accommodations like “extra time” for those who came in with documented disabilities.
There was a lot of pressure on instructors. Some had very low passing rates, year after year (like 25%) while others regularly passed more than half. Of course, the instructors with low passing rates said their colleagues were inflating grades. The administration said they were bad teachers.
I never knew who was right. But either way, the point still stands because even the instructors with “high” passing rates had students who just could not get there for whatever reason. Ability, motivation, something. A lot of them left with nothing but debt.
What were the chances many of them just weren't smart enough?
Maybe. It’s hard to say how many students would be incapable of passing high school level math and reading under perfect circumstances (high motivation, great teachers, access to lots of support) — and how far away we were from that, whatever it is.
As far back as 1964, an English visitor described the US something like this: "The question was not 'Have you got a degree?' but 'Where did you get your degree?'"
The end game may have to be that everyone has a degree and employers ask for other evidence of ability.
And now the same is true in England. A degree from Bath is not the same as a degree from Bristol.
"..we cannot achieve equality in schooling because human beings are not equal in their abilities"...
This obviously true statement is now verboten in polite society.
Not to give the rest of what you were saying there short shrift...
"....including academic abilities, and that the only humane path is not to force everyone to be smart, or to stop using tests and assessments to identify who’s smart, but to build a world that respects, nurtures, and protects those who aren’t."
Part of the reason that "correct" people don't want to hear about innate talent discrepancies is because they think that immediately means we want those less talented or gifted to suffer. There may be some Libertarians who think that way, but I don't.
Someone once told me, sort of jokingly sort of not, that I had devised a book topic designed to repulse anyone from wanting to defend me, and that was very on-brand.
except sports it seems like that's one area where performance matters.
college is an interesting experience and i found it partially useful but not so much so that i went on to an MA and Ph.D.; those would have destroyed my capacity to do what i wanted to do which was a broad interdisciplinary degree far different than anything i could have received in the university system, even in the 70s. I believe strongly in education, not schooling. and i believe in extremely high standards of intellectual achievement; without it, it all becomes a joke, as the US is fast becoming in every way possible. Reagan really screwed the US education system when he began focusing it on being a vocational process rather than an education process. There should always have been at least two tracks, one vocational another liberal educational, with some people going into STEM fields out of the liberal track. But the system has been so perverted now that it is not salvageable. I don't know what the solution is, but i do know that a striving for excellence and to do as well as those i respect, or as close to it as i can get, is what education is all about. i was lucky enough that that sort of thing was still possible when i came up. but the plain truth is that not all people are meant for college or university and it should be fine that they are not. there needs to be a place for all of us in this country, not just some of us. And i do bemoan the incredible stupidity that is now occurring among my liberal tribe about intellectual excellence and in my country, too. as well, the cruelty of the culture toward anyone not part of the elite . . . we are well and truly in bad territory.
Well, OK. I guess this is what your book is about. Didn't read the book, so I don't know what you say in it.
This is the thing, if its not worth it for people with more ability to work hard... they won't do it. People with talent - and that could be in any domain - aren't just these bright souls that are bursting with the desire to do work all the time for free. Sure, our culture loves the idea of an undiscovered genius working for free making music or an invention in his garage just for the rush of being an original creator, but 99% of talented people aren't doing that sort of thing. And that's a good thing.
Its a pretty thankless system to have more talent than others, and for people to think that because you are more capable, that you should take on more tasks and more responsibility to get things done. I've been in plenty of situations where people feel that they were owed my talent. Times when a supervisor gave a person in an equal position as mine one task, and me four tasks, and had a more demanding schedule for when I got stuff done; a system in which I was working late nights and an unreliable people (or people with children) never worked those hours. Why would I take on more worry and more work, if I don't have any oversight (power) over how those things are getting done or more reward (money, benefits) for those efforts? Its like being the smart kid in science class and the teacher always puts you with the kids that aren't doing so well, and the kids that struggle don't show up to do the group project because they know you'll do all the work to get an A; to boot, these are the exact kids that spread rumors about you and make your life miserable.
Work doesn't have to be everything in life. You leave it. You go home. You have a different world and a different set of values, including family, beliefs, community, volunteering, hobbies, friends, queen bees, whatever you do. That's where you get value in your life if you aren't particularly talented at something that pays. But in a pluralistic society, we can't build a standardized set of customs and values that provide that value (outside of work) for you. You have to build it. And I get that it is hard for some people to build their own value systems.
Sorry, this is a hill for me. :(
And you think the alternative presented by the "equity" forces in education, which I'm critiquing here, will be better?
Despite Freddie so generously, borderline recklessly, sharing the nuts, bolts, and implications of his book online via Substack, I want to further support his work and buy it online. Anyone have a firm grasp of the best platform to buy from? I'd like a hard copy so I can give it away afterwards.
https://read.macmillan.com/lp/cult-of-smart/
Includes links to avoid Amazon and Barnes & Noble, if that's your interest
Many thanks!
“Students are consumers now and consumers get what they want”
Brilliant. The customer is always right lol