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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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 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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"..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.
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. :(
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.
“Students are consumers now and consumers get what they want”
Brilliant. The customer is always right lol