Some parts copyrighted in 2002 and 2008, in total in 2012, by Mark Edward Vande Pol
All rights reserved.
This article proposes a complete reconfiguration of education in America. It is not a discussion of pedagogies or specific methods except in examples. So if what you want is to know how to teach algebra to your child, this article is not for you. If however, you want to know how to make it possible for your babies to learn algebra by the age of seven and have the equivalent of a lower division college education in a half dozen disciplines by the age of eighteen, this article is for you.
What is the whole point in getting an education? Most people respond citing the skills to get a decent job. Others come up with the historical and geopolitical knowledge to function as a responsible citizen. Then there are social skills, learning to live and work with others in harmony. Finally, there is the basic pleasure of an intellectual life and an appreciation for the fine arts. But what if I said that all of these goals pale in comparison to one?
An education comprises the working base of knowledge and skills with which one can acquire new skills and information to be applied toward an intended outcome.
Given the rapid development of new technology, the ability to learn becomes a necessity. Yet with that capability is still the need for discernment with which to observe, measure, and test, propose a model, distinguish opinions from useful facts (or even outright lies from mistaken impressions), analyze data, posit solutions, construct prototypes, validate performance, and communicate faithfully the advantages and risks to potential users.
While an economy is all about human productivity, few people ever attempt all of those facets of the product development process at the usual corporate level because the technical scope is so broad, multidisciplinary, and complex as to require whole teams of specialists; not one of whom can understand all of the pertinent facts. This is why we have lawyers making decisions about biology, accountants making decisions about chemical processes, or doctors performing diagnoses subject to insurance. We have psychologists treating PTSD who’ve never been near a battlefield. We have financial people making decisions about research. We have politicians making decisions about all of the above and people who know NOTHING of any of those technical details selecting the politicians.
Everybody knows it it’s a problem.
Now, I am not proposing that everybody become an expert at everything. Yet when the question involves assessing large scale risks from public health to “the environment,” it should be obvious that the general public (voters) should have at least some skills with which comprehend what the experts are saying and to assess whether or not it is credible. For too often the public has left such decisions to “the experts” only to find that they had succumbed to the corrupting influences of power, ideology, or money
Thus, whether the decision is in a team setting or political in scope, it remains essential to grasp the varied cultural and historic influences on the players. Effectively, society as a whole, while increasingly technical in execution, also needs a classical base in social sciences more than ever, for these choices are not just increasingly technical but often global in scope. One must know the history, resource geography, language, and philosophy that influence the people with whom one is doing business, worldwide.
OK, so now that we agree that nobody knows what they are talking about, I’m going to make that situation even worse. ALL of that education nobody is getting should be accomplished by the age of eighteen. Why?
One does not need to consider the disastrous consequences of Common Core or any other existing pedagogy to see that education as we know it portends the demise of the American middle class. It is hard not to note the high unemployment among recent college graduates or how many are staying in college seeking multiple bachelor’s or advanced degrees just to get a decent “middle class job.” Yet even so, simply imagine the most ideal (and increasingly rare) outcome of the existing system: a young woman lands said "good job" requiring an advanced degree. She would be at least 25-27 years of age at graduation, and possibly over 30. Now she gets a job, meets a guy, they court, get married, get settled, and she’s… 32? 35???
I hate to tell you how many women fitting that description are showing up at infertility clinics desperate to have a baby (my wife worked in one). Those who do get pregnant are having a much higher proportion of babies burdened with lifetime learning disabilities such as Down's Syndrome (she works in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit now). Effectively, our educational system is structured to preclude the middle class from replacing itself.
As this demographic trend continues, as the demands of what constitutes an education grow, and as machines replace even professional positions, the only people having kids even approaching their full potential will be the very well-to-do, with the very poor having little prospect of a competitive education at all. History teaches that this arrangement leads inevitably to social cataclysm, representing not just the death of a culture but a nation.
Worse, were it even possible to "fix" said existing system, we would have to wait between 15-20 years for the benefits to even begin to be realized. Needless to say given our parlous finances, disaster will have precluded even the possibility of that "eventual" marginal improvement.
Hence, simple reproductive biology teaches that this problem of "education" MUST be dissolved as a matter of life and death, NOW. The matter is too urgent to be left to succeeding generations, while improving the existing system won't cut it.
Transactions form the basis of any economy: One person is selling something another may want to buy. For the system to work, the buyer needs to understand and rely upon what the seller is offering, whether a product or a service. It is no different when the product offered is an education.
Consider SuperWidget, Inc. They make widgets and sell them to anybody who wants to buy them. As far as pleasing their stockholders is concerned, whether they make widgets in a borderline sweat shop or in a high-tech factory really doesn’t matter, but to their customers, it matters even less. The WidgitBot they’re looking at has considerable attractions compared to adding labor: It works 24-7 or close to it. It doesn’t need a parking lot, a toilet or a lunch room. It won’t hit up the owners for a raise. It doesn’t need contributions to its retirement or health care. Nor will the owners need a security guard to keep it from ripping them off. As a bonus, it can’t hire a lawyer. In fact, the stockholders of any business really don’t care if they have any employees at all. To SuperWidget, a “job” is a contract for services by which to make widgets, a job that they wouldn't offer at all unless it was to perform tasks WidgitBot cannot do as well for less.
As the company grows and technology advances, the demands for skills become more specialized and the one-on-one contract system for a particular skill starts to break down. Inventing an “unprecedented” SuperDuperWidget then requires an array of talents, hiring from an array of people, each with unique combinations of skill sets, making a “perfect match” of team members highly unlikely. Thus, when it comes to putting the team together, neither the owners nor the prospective employees can do more than guess whether the skill sets a particular candidate offers match the job demands. This usually requires a third party to validate the candidate’s claims.
Over the first half of the 20th Century, that latter task gravitated toward a “human resources” department (treating people as equivalent to raw material). At first, these employees were hired to find other people to make widgets. Yet today they are hired as contract enforcers because they understand labor law; most have never made a single widget themselves. They too have little ability to discern whether the potential hires are capable of doing what they claim.
Enter the university, the ultimate “human resources manufacturer.” They market people with credentials, a BS, MS, or PhD degree in “Widgetology,” or some such, a degree that supposedly means their graduates can perform all the functions attendant to a particular job.
"Supposedly"? That’s right, no guarantees.
It is that degree, that credential, for which we wage-serfs scrimp and save for decades (and our kids go into debt for decades more). Together with our taxes, we spend all that money for the great privilege of letting our precious children regurgitate what the communist academics want to hear, all so that they can get that credential saying that they “MIGHT” be able to do whatever-job-the customer-wants about which the university knows next-to-nothing!
Well, it gets worse. Let’s take a look at those credentials and see what they imply. If a person gets a degree in let’s say, electrical engineering, would that person be qualified to work with a biologist on an implant? Engineers seldom study advanced biochemistry while biologists rarely understand materials science, physics, or computer science. Seldom do these specialists know how to understand each other’s concerns with which to exchange and synthesize ideas, much less to debate the relative merits of completely alien approaches. Worse, for those companies too small to hire all the specialists they might need, how do they find people who are capable of managing a such a complex problem?
Effectively they cannot, because the investment of time and money to acquire a university education is so great that most college graduates have mastered but one field of study. Effectively, university curricula are designed to produce only specialists, of which the PhD degree is the exemplar. These are the people we call “experts” who happen to know a huge amount about very little. Yet the moment they are called to opine outside their study (which is usual), most are about as knowledgeable as most anybody with a bachelor’s degree. Yet when dollars hang in the offing, few of these "experts" are willing to admit a lack of qualification. Even if they were so qualified, many companies cannot afford all the experts they might need, much less assure that they can all communicate effectively. Those they can afford to hire are expected to deliver despite insufficient knowledge to learn what they need to know from another field.
Technical specialization is exactly why the Anthropogenic Global Warming scam was so easy to perpetrate for so long upon so many otherwise intelligent, talented, and highly trained people. One cannot expect a specialist in carbon sequestration or coral reefs to understand climatology, much less the dendrochronology (e.g. tree ring studies) from which some prominent historic temperature records reconstructed. Experts in only one field simply must rely upon the integrity of the peer review system within other fields for the bases upon which they perform their own work. Yet in this instance of "global warming," there were several core studies upon which huge amounts of work were premised, that had relied upon ridiculously small cherry-picked proxy data, while allowing little to no access to review that source material. Billions of dollars in research and the technical reputations of millions of university graduates are built on work that cites those very shaky premises. Whole nations were sold the crooked gambit of carbon trading. Yet the problems with these datasets were so obvious to an educated generalist that the ubiquity of credulity among so many scientific experts is almost incomprehensible.
By contrast, notice how a handful of multidisciplinary amateurs such as Steve MacIntyre, John Daly, or Anthony Watts have done so much to cut the legs out from under this multinational multibillion dollar government/university Global Warming behemoth. Whole nations are quietly backing away from carbon trading schemes because their work has been of such quality that it has held up to the desperate attacks of "experts" from all sides (in my opinion, Steve MacIntyre deserves a Congressional Medal of Freedom for the work he has produced under such constant assault). Because of their work experience, these people had the education to pursue their interests outside their expertise. Yet they still lack access to traditional peer review process for their work. Why?
They are not "peers." The university system has no advanced credential for self-taught generalists addressing multidisciplinary problems at a high level. Nor does anyone have the time or money to acquire such education at the university level despite the fact that there is an evident and massive advantage to general capability in the real world marketplace.
This problem gets worse when it comes to people expected to make technical decisions lacking ANY technical background. Consider a judge, business manager, investor, or purchasing agent expected to make decisions involving biological or chemical hazards, where mistakes can be catastrophic to an entire industry. Such are the perils of a symptom of relying upon advanced specialized training at the expense of broad technical education.
Yet most of the great inventions that have produced whole new industries, have been multidisciplinary syntheses taking advantage of new developments. Examples are the automobile (chemistry, electrical, chemi
