Building a self
Steven Pinker, via
Maggie's Farm, on "
What's Wrong with Harvard":
I submit that if “building a self” is the goal of a university education, you’re going to be reading anguished articles about how the universities are failing at it for a long, long time.
I think we can be more specific. It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.
On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.
I believe (and believe I can persuade you) that the more deeply a society cultivates this knowledge and mindset, the more it will flourish. The conviction that they are teachable gets me out of bed in the morning. Laying the foundations in just four years is a formidable challenge. If on top of all this, students want to build a self, they can do it on their own time.
15 comments:
Good thinking, that man. Good points about "holistic" admissions too:
What about the rationalization that charitable extracurricular activities teach kids important lessons of moral engagement? There are reasons to be skeptical. A skilled professional I know had to turn down an important freelance assignment because of a recurring commitment to chauffeur her son to a resumé-building “social action” assignment required by his high school. This involved driving the boy for 45 minutes to a community center, cooling her heels while he sorted used clothing for charity, and driving him back—forgoing income which, judiciously donated, could have fed, clothed, and inoculated an African village. The dubious “lessons” of this forced labor as an overqualified ragpicker are that children are entitled to treat their mothers’ time as worth nothing, that you can make the world a better place by destroying economic value, and that the moral worth of an action should be measured by the conspicuousness of the sacrifice rather than the gain to the beneficiary.
Damn straight. Education is a kind of capital investment, and that investment should be made in proportion to the person's ability to use it for something.
University education can accomplish two major things....the pursuit of knowledge, and indoctrination. (That's why, if you utter an un-PC thought, the most common comeback is that you are "ignorant." Why? Because they learned the opposite idea in school, and picked up the notion that "educated" people Just Don't Think Those Thoughts.) When the student is mismatched to the school...he'll get the degree, and the indoctrination, but not the knowledge.
(Using "knowledge" in a broad sense, to include habits of rational thought as described in the article.)
I strongly suspect that "building a self," if you gave that mission to a university, would look a hell of a lot like "pure indoctrination."
His section on standardized testing warms my heart greatly, but he evades a straight-on confrontation with why these have fallen out of favor: "Disparate impact." Griggs v. Duke Power. "Institutional Racism."
As Prof. Pinker rightly says:
So why aren’t creative alternatives like [standardized tests] even on the table? A major reason is that popular writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, pushing a leftist or heart-above-head egalitarianism, have poisoned their readers against aptitude testing. They have insisted that the tests don’t predict anything, or that they do but only up to a limited point on the scale, or that they do but only because affluent parents can goose their children’s scores by buying them test-prep courses.
But all of these hypotheses have been empirically refuted. We have already seen that test scores, as far up the upper tail as you can go, predict a vast range of intellectual, practical, and artistic accomplishments. They’re not perfect, but intuitive judgments based on interviews and other subjective impressions have been shown to be far worse...
How right he is. Before you know it...he'll recommend that people go back and sample Read This Book and Lose Your Job>, by Mephistopheles Minor and the Dark Lord Sauron.
When I was in college, graduate school, and the USAF--and since; the process never stops--I built a self via the hard work involved in getting the education and then then the hard work involved in doing work.
Eric Hines
Hm.
Damn straight. Education is a kind of capital investment, and that investment should be made in proportion to the person's ability to use it for something.
Not obviously. The capital belongs to the family, after all, for whom the student is an absolute good -- an end in himself (or herself), compared to which the capital is a mere means to ends.
Developing the student's capacities to the maximum degree, whatever degree that is, is a reasonable thing to do. At least it is if you're the one whose son or daughter is being educated, and the one who is therefore paying for it.
you're the one whose son or daughter is being educated, and the one who is therefore paying for it.
This isn't obvious, either. I paid for three of my four years of undergrad education and all of my grad school. My parents paid for one year.
It's true enough that my parents provided the framework and support/upkeep through high school, but aside from that being a near thing, it was a joint venture--I had to do the work; they couldn't do it for me. Nor could they make me learn the lessons associated with doing my own work.
Eric Hines
Well, OK: I got through undergrad on scholarship, so my parents weren't paying for it either. Since it was a government scholarship, you could say that everyone was -- bringing you close to Joseph's point -- or that I was, by doing the hard work necessary to maintain eligibility.
The point is, there's a huge difference in the moral structure of investing in your child, or yourself, versus investing in some piece of capital (say a printing press). The printing press is a means to an end. The child, or oneself, is itself an end.
Developing the student's capacities to the maximum degree, whatever degree that is, is a reasonable thing to do. At least it is if you're the one whose son or daughter is being educated, and the one who is therefore paying for it.
Which is (roughly) equivalent to what I was saying. Getting an education for a child (or, for that matter, a wife, or a self) who is able to do the work is a fine thing to do.
I don't agree with your distinction about means and ends. The child already exists and will exist whether he goes to college or not; so the child is not an "end" that is achieved by means of school.
The child's happiness (or fulfillment) is the real end. An education that helps him accomplish something real that he actually can accomplish...an education that helps him produce some kind of value...will help achieve that end. But whatever helps someone increase his productivity (of value, not necessarily of physical things) is a capital investment, ought to be treated as such, and ought to be made where it will do the most good.
A child who wouldn't do well at university...and that's a lot of them...might profit more from another kind of investment, like a piece of land with some livestock, or being taught a trade.
(By coincidence, last night Mrs. W. and I watched the 1937/Spencer Tracy version of Captains Courageous...I'm guessing Manuel would not have gotten much out of Harvard; but what his father taught him and left him, he rightly praises in a very touching speech. The boy, on the other hand, is definitely sharp enough for advanced education - he just has to learn some moral lessons first, which makes for a beautiful story.)
We recorded that yesterday, but haven't had a chance to watch it yet.
I don't agree with your distinction about means and ends. The child already exists and will exist whether he goes to college or not; so the child is not an "end" that is achieved by means of school.
I'm borrowing Kant's phrasing to try to express something about the 'capital investment' analogy that bothers me. Kant says that rational beings, unlike other things and even other animals, cannot be morally used as a mere means to some end. They have to be thought of as ends in themselves.
So the point isn't that the child needs to be brought into being, but rather that the child is valuable in and of himself. Unlike a printing press, which you'd invest in only because you were pursuing some other goal (i.e., as a mere means to an end), educating your child is the sort of thing you'd do because you love your child (i.e., because the child is an end in himself).
Naturally what that means is that you should value his happiness, and education is thought to be useful in that regard. That's what Kant means: he says elsewhere that there are two basic duties, a duty to pursue your own perfection and a duty to pursue the happiness of others. He differs from Aristotle who takes happiness (in the sense of flourishing) as the end of ethics period; Kant says you can't have a duty to pursue your own happiness, nor can you have a duty to pursue someone else's perfection.
Exceptis excipiendis, of course: a father educating his son is hopefully doing it in a way that will improve the child's moral perfection. That's another purpose of education, one that will hopefully make the child happy (eventually), but which needs to be done so that he can learn to do his own duty towards himself.
We watched "Captains Courageous" last night at last. Yikes, what a little brat! You can see where C.S. Lewis got the character of Eustace in "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." Nothing like a change of scenery to straighten us out sometimes.
Tex - Indeed. But that made his moral transformation all the more poignant. And what a set of performances!
Grim -
So the point isn't that the child needs to be brought into being, but rather that the child is valuable in and of himself. Unlike a printing press, which you'd invest in only because you were pursuing some other goal (i.e., as a mere means to an end).
The printing press doesn't analogize to the child, though. The printing press analogizes to the education, or the apprenticeship, or the piece of land. Each of them is an investment that will help some human, or group of humans, produce some value. And each of them is a means to an end...and the happiness and satisfaction of humans is the ultimate end.
So if your child was like the crusty old editor in Call Northside 777...who dropped out of school but was skilled at editing newspapers (after, doubtless, many years of writing for them)...buying him a printing press would do him a world more good than buying him four years at Harvard, especially the kind of Harvard Pinker describes.
Yes, it was excruciating to watch the little wanker at first, but tolerable because I knew what was coming. Who would have thought Spencer Tracy could be a convincing Portuguese fisherman?
Next up is "Witness for the Prosecution," which a friend has been trying to get me to watch for ages.
Oh, good heavens, yes, yes, YES!!! One of the greatest lawyer roles ever...and Charles Laughton's performance is, to my mind, the best he ever did, and the true forerunner to Leo McKern's long run as Rumpole.
Tyrone Power was okay in that one as well...but if you want to see him take a real bastard role, look up Nightmare Alley sometime. (Which I believe is free, or very low cost, on YouTube.) But don't wait another day for Witness for the Prosecution.
(Agree 100% on Spencer Tracy's performance in Captains Courageous...it passed muster with Mrs. W., too, and she's a half-Portuguese Brazilian.)
The printing press doesn't analogize to the child, though.
That's fine. The phrasing was ambiguous: you could mean that the education was only worth investing in if it lets the child do something (which is apparently what you did mean); or you could mean that the child is only worth investing in if it makes him useful somehow. But that latter is not right.
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