Allen Farrington at
Quillette, on academia:
Parkinson’s Law holds that a task will take as long as the time allotted to complete it. It seems to be a kind of social equilibrium theorem applicable to any complex organisation. Normally such organisations would simply collapse under the weight of their own bureaucratic inefficiency, but academia is different. It will never be allowed to collapse because education is a right.
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Peter Thiel has given a uniquely scathing critique of the insanity of this system. . . . It is effectively a Ponzi scheme. No wonder Thiel calls college administrators subprime mortgage brokers. They get a cut on selling pieces of paper that are only as valuable as we all pretend they are.
All the local governments here just approved a county Economic Development Corporation, in the belief that a unified mouthpiece for rightthink from community leaders will attract new business and jobs. How it will achieve this goal remains murky, beyond the intention to bribe prospective employers with tax abatements, but there is much enthusiasm for "enhancing the workforce." Although it's unclear what anyone proposes to do to enhance the workforce beyond what we'd normally expect from public schools, the idea may be to create a para-academic institution in which useful knowledge is imparted to a select group of youngsters who want to learn it and can be expelled if they fail to learn or if they disrupt the classrooms too much. If that's the plan, I'll probably get on board, while regretting that we still have to fund the public schools with sky-high ad valorem taxes. Vouchers would let the parents choose the schools that produce results that suit their families, and watch the non-functioning schools die on the vine.
6 comments:
I have always viewed the economic development boards as a sort of make work program for politicians who can't quite cut it vis a vis getting elected- there always is some pseudo-gov job out there- we had some a 24 year old county commissioner appointed/elected here(you know what I mean -shoe in-D controlled county, full D support) ,he dyed his hair white around the temples in an attempt to ameliorate the callow youth look, he wielded his "studies" degree with such ineptitude they had to shuffle him off to some port commissioner job, the type of position every gov seems to have lots of, where the work metric is invisible and the pay ridiculous- I think he pulls in about 225,000 a year.
It's sad in part because higher education in some fields can significantly improve your ability to reason or engage the world. I wish more Americans were deeply instructed in history and/or philosophy, for example. Civics, in the sense of understanding the Constitution and your state's constitution, the structure and function of government, and how to engage your duty as a citizen.
But it does seem as if higher education doesn't do that much anymore; and the most popular major in America is psychology, which is a field especially bitten by the replication crisis.
IF history were taught as it should be taught, with rigor and a focus on what the documents and evidence say, history would indeed be a boon. As it stands at many colleges and universities, however, I don't recommend the field. It slides too easily into hypenated-studies.
I teach my students about how what we understand about history changes. That upsets some of them - they have been taught that the past is what they are told it is and that it is unchanging. When I show how new evidence, or updated/corrected/outside-the-field evidence (and inside-the-field politics) can change the story, the boggle. Heck, I boggle when I compare some of what I know now to what I learned *coughcough* years ago.
LittleRed1
Roger Scruton is talking about getting rid of universities "altogether."
https://humanevents.com/2019/05/13/roger-scruton-get-rid-of-universities-altogether/
Cosmology has the same problem as psychology. Look up how dark matter/energy came about. Also Newton's Three Body Problem.
Maybe this requires 98%, and 99.9% IQ percentiles. There's a lot of people on the internet, however, although strangely enough, it is never 1/100.
A good example is how the American narration over State Rights and Civil War 1, is easily disproved by reading the original Secession documents. It's right there, and it is not in Middle Shakespeare English.
As for what Lincoln was thinking, read his second inaugural address. Pretty simple. History as told by historians, a second or third sequence and order of detachment point of view, is incredibly biased, and also stupid due to the Normal Curve of Humanity.
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