As I state in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 86), Freud was first to identify that we possess a dynamic, integrating subconscious mind, “dynamic” meaning continuously active and making connections whether we are awake or asleep. Thus, when we are asleep, our subconscious mind is constantly operating, connecting our many experiences of the previous day, week, or years, oftentimes manifesting the connections in dreams. But dreams are notoriously illogical and sometimes bizarre. What is the actual nature of the subconscious mind and what is its mode of operation?
We have a sense of how the conscious mind works. We direct attention to specific facts or events, identify and evaluate those facts or events, and as a result of the evaluation experience a favorable or unfavorable emotion. The knowledge, evaluations, and emotions then are stored in our memories, that is, in our subconscious minds for later retrieval and use. Thus, the subconscious is a valuable storehouse of all of our previous experiences. How well the storehouse is organized determines how easily or difficultly we can retrieve and use what is there. It is the conscious mind that directs this organization.
But how does the subconscious operate when it is not being controlled by the conscious mind, such as in our sleep or when we are focused elsewhere? Psychiatrist Eilhard von Domarus, in describing the thought processes of schizophrenics, posed a fascinating hypothesis about how the subconscious might operate. Because schizophrenics seem to have lost conscious control of their minds, they apparently exhibit raw, subconscious reasoning. And that reasoning is exemplified by the fallacy of undistributed middle, the error in thinking and form of overgeneralization that holds that if two subjects possess the same predicate, they are then the same. For example, dogs and cows both are four-legged animals, therefore all cows are dogs. The thinking is illogical and requires the attention and control of the conscious mind. The less educated, of course, commit the same error, but a major objective of education is to increase the child’s and adult’s conscious control over thought processes. When left uncontrolled, the implication is that the illogical processes of the subconscious take over, making less than rational connections. The illogic of this “von Domarus principle” would explain our more bizarre dreams.*
The von Domarus principle has been criticized as the result of subsequent studies (1, 2), but most of those experiments conclude only that schizophrenics do not exclusively use undistributed middle and/or that healthy people also commit the same fallacy. The more general conclusion to be drawn from the von Domarus principle is that if schizophrenics are left defenseless with no control over their behavior by the conscious mind, then their mental functioning may well represent the raw expression and operation of the subconscious. Obviously, more thought and study is needed to fully describe the subconscious mind. That the psychological profession today does not even acknowledge the existence of a subconscious mind indicates how far the science of inner reality must go to explain its subject.
Knowledge of the subconscious mind would enable us to harness its dynamic, connection-making powers by understanding not just its operation in sleep or mental illness, but also its role in aiding and influencing our everyday mental functioning. The more intelligent person, for example, is generally acknowledged to be the one who sees and understands connections among ideas before others who are slower. How does this happen? Is it a better organized subconscious mind than that of the slower thinker? Is it greater interest in the topic that drives the subconscious to look for specific connections? The more intelligent do not always possess greater knowledge about a subject than the less intelligent when hitting upon new connections. What is the role of the amount of knowledge one possesses in leading to quick links? And, of course, is there a genetic component in intelligence and how does this contribute to the efficient and effective operation of the subconscious? These are the questions that a science of the subconscious, if such existed, should be studying.
The dynamic subconscious is a powerful mental tool that can and should enable us to enjoy life by means of a well-ordered mental structure, a conscious mind interacting without obstacles or inhibitions with the subconscious to guide us smoothly to the achievement of our goals. Lack of knowledge of how this interaction takes place makes it more difficult for many of us to move forward without unnecessary extra effort to correct the organization of our minds. It is psychology that needs to give us this knowledge.
*Eilhard von Domarus, “The Specific Laws of Logic in Schizophrenia,” in J. S. Kassanin, ed., Language and Thought in Schizophrenia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1944), 104-14.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Faking Your Way Through Life
When I first came up with the title for this post, I thought I should google it to see if anyone had done anything similar. Sure enough. Phony!: How I Faked My Way Through Life, a confessional memoir, was just published. I have not read the book, but the publisher’s blurbs say it is the story of a young woman who lied about not having a college degree and rose to high positions in business. Degrees and diplomas do not impress me as qualifying anyone for anything, but I was taught that it is not nice to lie.
My interest in the subject is not so much why people fake reality in a big way like the author of this book, but why do they fake reality at all? Why do people misperceive the most obvious facts? Why do they exaggerate and embellish them? Why do they have selective memories? Why do they fake reality in the smallest of ways when, to an outside observer, a simple statement of truth would be so easy and anxiety-free to make?
As creatures of habit, we learn much of our behavior from others, especially by example from our parents and other admired adults. Sometimes, those lessons are not the best ones to learn. For instance, an attendant at the ticket booth of a tourist attraction, where children under six were admitted free, related this story. One parent said that his daughter was under six, but the daughter, proud of her recent birthday, shot back with an “I’m six!” Lesson learned and seed planted? Fake your way into paying events and, when generalized, fake your way through life, such as saying you have a college degree when in fact you do not. Why would the father say such a thing? Affordability aside (the ticket price was trivial), he presumably learned it at an earlier time from his admired others.
This line of thought only leads to an infinite regress. At some point, someone must have decided on his or her own, absent outside influence, that something is not true or completely true and yet went on to recite the falsehood. The standard motivations offered to explain lying are fear and glory. Fear of being caught for having done something wrong and glory of enhancing one’s image in the eyes of others. And children are known to exhibit both motivations. When children become adults, however, some follow the straight and narrow of truth-telling, others do not. Among the others, some become self-aware fakers; the rest fall into that fuzzy middle ground and become BS’ers (1, 2, 3), all the while insisting that they are completely honest. Why?
The answer has to be some combination of influence from the outside and decisions made by the individual. The myriad decisions made daily, from childhood to adulthood, about the myriad influences that come into our minds from the outside ultimately determine how we go about living our lives. A commitment from early on to perceive facts as facts and to state facts as facts, without regard for the consequences of getting caught or for an unearned image in the eyes of others is the path to developing a mind that will find faking of any kind anathema to living a decent life. A lesser commitment leads to fudging, guessing, and being susceptible to the influence of fear and the siren calls of glory. A lesser commitment leads to the adult who, in a seemingly confident and oh-so-precise manner, asserts in a meeting that the vote two years ago was nine to nine to one, when in fact there was no vote at all.
The result of these decisions and commitment is what Ayn Rand called psycho-epistemology, the mental habit built up over time that determines each individual’s unique way of perceiving reality. This is not determinism in the philosophical sense that we have no genuine alternatives in life because every decision and action is causally preformed and could not have been otherwise. Our decisions and actions could have been otherwise because of the myriad decisions we have made since childhood. The cause of our behavior is the decisions we have made, and continue to make, about outside influences. We make them every minute of our waking lives. That the results of the decisions have become entrenched premises in our subconscious minds since childhood only makes changing them as an adult difficult, but not impossible. It is in this sense that our behavior is self-caused.
This means that the policy of faking one’s way through life could have been and, in the present, can be otherwise. Changing a psychology at an advanced age can be achieved, though it can be challenging—and painful—to go against the years or decades of prior decisions. Preventive medicine calls for making correct, reality-focused decisions in one’s early years. The task of parents and teachers is to be especially alert to these decisions and encourage their children and students by example and instruction to see facts as facts and then to communicate the facts as facts. Nothing more or less.
My interest in the subject is not so much why people fake reality in a big way like the author of this book, but why do they fake reality at all? Why do people misperceive the most obvious facts? Why do they exaggerate and embellish them? Why do they have selective memories? Why do they fake reality in the smallest of ways when, to an outside observer, a simple statement of truth would be so easy and anxiety-free to make?
As creatures of habit, we learn much of our behavior from others, especially by example from our parents and other admired adults. Sometimes, those lessons are not the best ones to learn. For instance, an attendant at the ticket booth of a tourist attraction, where children under six were admitted free, related this story. One parent said that his daughter was under six, but the daughter, proud of her recent birthday, shot back with an “I’m six!” Lesson learned and seed planted? Fake your way into paying events and, when generalized, fake your way through life, such as saying you have a college degree when in fact you do not. Why would the father say such a thing? Affordability aside (the ticket price was trivial), he presumably learned it at an earlier time from his admired others.
This line of thought only leads to an infinite regress. At some point, someone must have decided on his or her own, absent outside influence, that something is not true or completely true and yet went on to recite the falsehood. The standard motivations offered to explain lying are fear and glory. Fear of being caught for having done something wrong and glory of enhancing one’s image in the eyes of others. And children are known to exhibit both motivations. When children become adults, however, some follow the straight and narrow of truth-telling, others do not. Among the others, some become self-aware fakers; the rest fall into that fuzzy middle ground and become BS’ers (1, 2, 3), all the while insisting that they are completely honest. Why?
The answer has to be some combination of influence from the outside and decisions made by the individual. The myriad decisions made daily, from childhood to adulthood, about the myriad influences that come into our minds from the outside ultimately determine how we go about living our lives. A commitment from early on to perceive facts as facts and to state facts as facts, without regard for the consequences of getting caught or for an unearned image in the eyes of others is the path to developing a mind that will find faking of any kind anathema to living a decent life. A lesser commitment leads to fudging, guessing, and being susceptible to the influence of fear and the siren calls of glory. A lesser commitment leads to the adult who, in a seemingly confident and oh-so-precise manner, asserts in a meeting that the vote two years ago was nine to nine to one, when in fact there was no vote at all.
The result of these decisions and commitment is what Ayn Rand called psycho-epistemology, the mental habit built up over time that determines each individual’s unique way of perceiving reality. This is not determinism in the philosophical sense that we have no genuine alternatives in life because every decision and action is causally preformed and could not have been otherwise. Our decisions and actions could have been otherwise because of the myriad decisions we have made since childhood. The cause of our behavior is the decisions we have made, and continue to make, about outside influences. We make them every minute of our waking lives. That the results of the decisions have become entrenched premises in our subconscious minds since childhood only makes changing them as an adult difficult, but not impossible. It is in this sense that our behavior is self-caused.
This means that the policy of faking one’s way through life could have been and, in the present, can be otherwise. Changing a psychology at an advanced age can be achieved, though it can be challenging—and painful—to go against the years or decades of prior decisions. Preventive medicine calls for making correct, reality-focused decisions in one’s early years. The task of parents and teachers is to be especially alert to these decisions and encourage their children and students by example and instruction to see facts as facts and then to communicate the facts as facts. Nothing more or less.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Coerced Altruism, Involuntary Servitude, and Contempt for the Less Well Off
“Many people need to be coerced to do things for their own good.” This is a common refrain heard from social liberals and religious conservatives alike.
National service was advocated by both presidential candidates in the recent election; young people are to be coerced to “do good for their own good.” Advocates of the military draft have always argued that it is the duty of eighteen-year-olds to serve their country and to die for it; unless current ideological trends change, future drafts will extend involuntary servitude to young women, putting them next to the young men so they may also die for their country. And in the government-run, government-coerced education system “service learning”—the notion of learning about the poor and downtrodden while at the same time receiving an altruistic jolt by serving them—is abuzz. Students are forced to clean bedpans in nursing homes and give food to the homeless.
Such notions are usually put forth by the more highly educated. The less educated just follow along in agreement. Two questions come to mind: Why do so many people think this way? And how do they come to think of children, young people, and others in general as their slaves? The first is readily answered as the two-and-a-half thousand years of cultural tradition that equates altruism and self-sacrifice to ethics. The second is more subtle and takes us into psychology.
Of course, most advocates of these ideas do not think of their victims as slaves. The word is harsh, but forcing someone to do something against his or her will does not make that person an autonomous individual. That it is the highly educated who espouse these notions indicates an air of superiority over those who are coerced. Historically, it has always been the upper-class aristocrats who have taken it upon themselves to make decisions that control the lives of their subjects, the lower, less educated classes. Today, we do not have an official aristocracy, but Plato’s philosopher kings (1, 2) have most certainly been replaced by our present-day PhD kings, the ones who hold authoritative (and authoritarian) positions in various government agencies.
Interestingly, this elite, when pressed for details about why they believe what they do, exhibits not just an air of condescension over the lower and less-educated, but also an apprehension to let the uncultivated guide their own lives. There appears to be a fear, not unlike that of the old aristocracy, to the effect: “I know what’s best for the uneducated, but I don’t want to associate with them. We have nothing in common.” Do I dare say that the attitude of this contemporary elite is “I don’t want to associate with the ‘great unwashed’”? The elite fears a loss of status or rank, and therefore power, over its subordinates by hobnobbing with them; the dirt may rub off and cause contamination. The elite fears that they might lose their pseudo self-esteem.
The essence of this attitude is a profound lack of respect for the less well off accompanied by the contemptuous sorrow known as pity that apparently gives rise to the need to lord it over them. The need to lord it over others, as I pointed out in a previous post, derives from defensive anxiety. Having grown up in the ranks of the “less well off” and “less educated,” I can attest to the lack of respect communicated by those who thought they knew what was best for me. Ironically, neither I nor most of my friends or relatives considered ourselves “less well off” or “disadvantaged.” Our unquestioned assumption was that we would do better than our parents. Self-esteem, it seems, is precondition not just to raise oneself above one’s original station in life, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to avoid turning around and looking down on those from whence one came.
The conviction to impose altruism and involuntary servitude on others stems from unexamined premises embedded in our culture for thousands of years. The root of the premises, though, is the thousands-of-years old view of human nature that certain types of people are incapable of helping themselves or, especially, making sound decisions for themselves. And “types of people” here means anyone of a certain skin color, gender, religion, nationality, or level of income, education, and occupation, etc. The source of this theory of human nature, in turn, seems to be rationalization for the fears those in power feel toward those who are lower in status. This is a case of psychology influencing and determining perception.
Altruism is the main premise in our culture that needs to be examined. It does not mean kindness or gentleness. It means giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower or non-value. It means self-sacrifice. The first step to questioning altruism is to acknowledge the full meaning of the adage, “We were put on earth to serve others.” The full meaning is implied in what one wag added to the familiar phrase: “ . . . but I don’t know why the others were put here.” The others were put here to collect our sacrifices and it is our duty to continue sacrificing to those others. That is the meaning of altruism. It is ancient ethics still reigning over us in the twenty-first century.
National service was advocated by both presidential candidates in the recent election; young people are to be coerced to “do good for their own good.” Advocates of the military draft have always argued that it is the duty of eighteen-year-olds to serve their country and to die for it; unless current ideological trends change, future drafts will extend involuntary servitude to young women, putting them next to the young men so they may also die for their country. And in the government-run, government-coerced education system “service learning”—the notion of learning about the poor and downtrodden while at the same time receiving an altruistic jolt by serving them—is abuzz. Students are forced to clean bedpans in nursing homes and give food to the homeless.
Such notions are usually put forth by the more highly educated. The less educated just follow along in agreement. Two questions come to mind: Why do so many people think this way? And how do they come to think of children, young people, and others in general as their slaves? The first is readily answered as the two-and-a-half thousand years of cultural tradition that equates altruism and self-sacrifice to ethics. The second is more subtle and takes us into psychology.
Of course, most advocates of these ideas do not think of their victims as slaves. The word is harsh, but forcing someone to do something against his or her will does not make that person an autonomous individual. That it is the highly educated who espouse these notions indicates an air of superiority over those who are coerced. Historically, it has always been the upper-class aristocrats who have taken it upon themselves to make decisions that control the lives of their subjects, the lower, less educated classes. Today, we do not have an official aristocracy, but Plato’s philosopher kings (1, 2) have most certainly been replaced by our present-day PhD kings, the ones who hold authoritative (and authoritarian) positions in various government agencies.
Interestingly, this elite, when pressed for details about why they believe what they do, exhibits not just an air of condescension over the lower and less-educated, but also an apprehension to let the uncultivated guide their own lives. There appears to be a fear, not unlike that of the old aristocracy, to the effect: “I know what’s best for the uneducated, but I don’t want to associate with them. We have nothing in common.” Do I dare say that the attitude of this contemporary elite is “I don’t want to associate with the ‘great unwashed’”? The elite fears a loss of status or rank, and therefore power, over its subordinates by hobnobbing with them; the dirt may rub off and cause contamination. The elite fears that they might lose their pseudo self-esteem.
The essence of this attitude is a profound lack of respect for the less well off accompanied by the contemptuous sorrow known as pity that apparently gives rise to the need to lord it over them. The need to lord it over others, as I pointed out in a previous post, derives from defensive anxiety. Having grown up in the ranks of the “less well off” and “less educated,” I can attest to the lack of respect communicated by those who thought they knew what was best for me. Ironically, neither I nor most of my friends or relatives considered ourselves “less well off” or “disadvantaged.” Our unquestioned assumption was that we would do better than our parents. Self-esteem, it seems, is precondition not just to raise oneself above one’s original station in life, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to avoid turning around and looking down on those from whence one came.
The conviction to impose altruism and involuntary servitude on others stems from unexamined premises embedded in our culture for thousands of years. The root of the premises, though, is the thousands-of-years old view of human nature that certain types of people are incapable of helping themselves or, especially, making sound decisions for themselves. And “types of people” here means anyone of a certain skin color, gender, religion, nationality, or level of income, education, and occupation, etc. The source of this theory of human nature, in turn, seems to be rationalization for the fears those in power feel toward those who are lower in status. This is a case of psychology influencing and determining perception.
Altruism is the main premise in our culture that needs to be examined. It does not mean kindness or gentleness. It means giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower or non-value. It means self-sacrifice. The first step to questioning altruism is to acknowledge the full meaning of the adage, “We were put on earth to serve others.” The full meaning is implied in what one wag added to the familiar phrase: “ . . . but I don’t know why the others were put here.” The others were put here to collect our sacrifices and it is our duty to continue sacrificing to those others. That is the meaning of altruism. It is ancient ethics still reigning over us in the twenty-first century.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Child As Small Adult
The education literature since at least Rousseau has cautioned against viewing the child as a small adult. The meaning of the phrase, however, is not totally clear.
“Small adult” usually means that children are viewed as adults in miniature, that is, as small in height and weight and weak in physical strength, but otherwise as possessing an adult brain that is merely absent content. The job of educators and parents, then, is to fill that brain with knowledge to move the children, as they reach maturity, up to the level of educated adults.
The problem with this view is that the children obviously do not possess adult brains. And most parents and teachers have a sense that this is correct, namely that the brains of children are as immature as their bodies, that their cognitive capacities and abilities vary by age and among each other at the same age, and that pace of learning and interest determine what and how much any particular child will learn at any particular time. This is what the concept of “stages of development” is all about.
Yet adults continue to demand that children learn the way they, the adults, think they learned, by attempting to stuff the brains of children with knowledge the children are not ready for or interested in and by expecting this learning to take place and be completed at one time. I say “think they learned” because I doubt that many adults in fact learned the way the adults expect their children to learn.
The worst mistake adults make when relating to children is to demand obedience to authority. “Learn your multiplication tables or there will be a consequence.” “Pick up your clothes, or else . . .” Adults may or may not be consciously aware of acting on this premise, and sometimes it may be an act of desperation when nothing else works, but demanding obedience to authority is not nice when made either to children or to other adults. It is the demands of a dictator or authoritarian mentality; I’ll assume a more innocent motivation in adults for the rest of this discussion.
A widely common mistake that adults make in relating to children is what I call “one-time learning.” It manifests itself often in the (sometimes angry, sometimes exasperated) question, “What did I just tell you?” The question can be asked about anything, ranging from multiplication facts to dirty clothes on the floor to catching a softball with two hands. The assumption is that the child has been informed—the knowledge has been put into the brain; therefore, he or she should be able to instantly grasp, retain, and act on what was just “learned.”
Such expectation, however, is patently absurd. Adults do not as adults, and did not as children, learn that way. Experienced teachers know that two requirements of good teaching are repetition and patience, for the variety of reasons mentioned in the third paragraph above. Some children are just not ready to learn what the adults seem to think they should be learning right now. And others are just not interested in learning that great wisdom of the adults. What the experiments of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley Schools (1, 2, 3) have demonstrated is that children, when left free to pursue their own interests, will in fact learn to read, do arithmetic, and even go on to college, but not on the schedule that adult educators think they should be on.
This last was made obvious to me recently in my duties as assistant coach of my daughter’s softball team. One of the coach’s jobs is to repeatedly shout to the girls to use two hands when catching the ball, which they seldom do. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed, without my chiding, one girl (eight years old) all of a sudden was catching with two hands. Subsequently, in a game, she even made a semi-spectacular two-handed catch of a pop fly. Lesson learned, by the adult? Children march to their own drummer when it comes to learning! Something clicked in the girl’s mind that I could not have predicted. One-time learning certainly did not produce the result.
On the other side of the coin, adults who treat children as small adults often fail to grant them the cognitive capacities and abilities that they in fact do have. Montessori demonstrated this abundantly by teaching children to read at age four and by teaching lower elementary children geometry, algebra, and history, among other subjects that the education establishment long ago relegated to much later ages. Children desperately want to grow up and become adults, but adults have to allow them to do so, at their own pace and when they are interested enough to learn the ways of the adult.
The bottom line of the issue of viewing children as small adults is that children need to be viewed as children, not more than they are and not less than they are. And each child has to be viewed as a unique individual with unique desires and abilities. Recognizing and responding to those uniquenesses is one of the traits that separates teachers from those who would appear to be dictators.
Postscript. The recent financial bailout lunacy in the United States has sufficiently tweaked my boredom with politics to make this comment. The simplest, concise explanation and solution to the lunacy can be read here by Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute. For more detailed and equally competent comments, read many of the last month’s posts on the Mises blog, but especially this recent one by George Reisman (also posted here).
“Small adult” usually means that children are viewed as adults in miniature, that is, as small in height and weight and weak in physical strength, but otherwise as possessing an adult brain that is merely absent content. The job of educators and parents, then, is to fill that brain with knowledge to move the children, as they reach maturity, up to the level of educated adults.
The problem with this view is that the children obviously do not possess adult brains. And most parents and teachers have a sense that this is correct, namely that the brains of children are as immature as their bodies, that their cognitive capacities and abilities vary by age and among each other at the same age, and that pace of learning and interest determine what and how much any particular child will learn at any particular time. This is what the concept of “stages of development” is all about.
Yet adults continue to demand that children learn the way they, the adults, think they learned, by attempting to stuff the brains of children with knowledge the children are not ready for or interested in and by expecting this learning to take place and be completed at one time. I say “think they learned” because I doubt that many adults in fact learned the way the adults expect their children to learn.
The worst mistake adults make when relating to children is to demand obedience to authority. “Learn your multiplication tables or there will be a consequence.” “Pick up your clothes, or else . . .” Adults may or may not be consciously aware of acting on this premise, and sometimes it may be an act of desperation when nothing else works, but demanding obedience to authority is not nice when made either to children or to other adults. It is the demands of a dictator or authoritarian mentality; I’ll assume a more innocent motivation in adults for the rest of this discussion.
A widely common mistake that adults make in relating to children is what I call “one-time learning.” It manifests itself often in the (sometimes angry, sometimes exasperated) question, “What did I just tell you?” The question can be asked about anything, ranging from multiplication facts to dirty clothes on the floor to catching a softball with two hands. The assumption is that the child has been informed—the knowledge has been put into the brain; therefore, he or she should be able to instantly grasp, retain, and act on what was just “learned.”
Such expectation, however, is patently absurd. Adults do not as adults, and did not as children, learn that way. Experienced teachers know that two requirements of good teaching are repetition and patience, for the variety of reasons mentioned in the third paragraph above. Some children are just not ready to learn what the adults seem to think they should be learning right now. And others are just not interested in learning that great wisdom of the adults. What the experiments of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley Schools (1, 2, 3) have demonstrated is that children, when left free to pursue their own interests, will in fact learn to read, do arithmetic, and even go on to college, but not on the schedule that adult educators think they should be on.
This last was made obvious to me recently in my duties as assistant coach of my daughter’s softball team. One of the coach’s jobs is to repeatedly shout to the girls to use two hands when catching the ball, which they seldom do. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed, without my chiding, one girl (eight years old) all of a sudden was catching with two hands. Subsequently, in a game, she even made a semi-spectacular two-handed catch of a pop fly. Lesson learned, by the adult? Children march to their own drummer when it comes to learning! Something clicked in the girl’s mind that I could not have predicted. One-time learning certainly did not produce the result.
On the other side of the coin, adults who treat children as small adults often fail to grant them the cognitive capacities and abilities that they in fact do have. Montessori demonstrated this abundantly by teaching children to read at age four and by teaching lower elementary children geometry, algebra, and history, among other subjects that the education establishment long ago relegated to much later ages. Children desperately want to grow up and become adults, but adults have to allow them to do so, at their own pace and when they are interested enough to learn the ways of the adult.
The bottom line of the issue of viewing children as small adults is that children need to be viewed as children, not more than they are and not less than they are. And each child has to be viewed as a unique individual with unique desires and abilities. Recognizing and responding to those uniquenesses is one of the traits that separates teachers from those who would appear to be dictators.
Postscript. The recent financial bailout lunacy in the United States has sufficiently tweaked my boredom with politics to make this comment. The simplest, concise explanation and solution to the lunacy can be read here by Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute. For more detailed and equally competent comments, read many of the last month’s posts on the Mises blog, but especially this recent one by George Reisman (also posted here).
Monday, September 08, 2008
The Two Liberalisms
Politics bores me. That’s why I have not written a blog on politics or on the upcoming election. Let this post suffice as my comment on today’s politics.
The Democrats’ loss in 2004 led to much soul-searching to define what the Democratic brand of liberalism should be or represent. Advice given focused on the usual concretes—guns, abortion, gay rights—the kinds of issues that would excite no one except conservatives. My advice is this. Reexamine the meaning of liberalism. Note its fundamental principles, especially as they evolved out of the Enlightenment. Then, in a radical departure from “politics as usual,” adopt those principles as vanguard for freedom worldwide.
The problem is that two liberalisms came out of the Enlightenment. The first was classical or market liberalism (today also called libertarianism). The second, developing in the latter part of the nineteenth century in England and the United States, is social liberalism, an amalgam of ideas ranging from mixed-economy features of part capitalism, part socialism, to Fabian or democratic socialism.
Market and social liberalism have the same genus, which means they share certain principles, and for advocates of market liberalism, this is an argument for possibly seeking common ground with some of their social counterparts. The common principles are these: emphasis on self-realization or self-actualization of the individual human mind as the essence of liberty, which translates to demands for the freedom of speech and press; strong value placed on reason, science, and technology as the source of modern material civilization; and the complete separation of church and state, with an emphasis on secular naturalism, including the naturalization of consciousness.
Where market and social liberalism differ is in their attitude toward business. Social liberalism holds that business, especially big business, is the new aristocracy that, through its positions of power and privilege, coerce the poor into remaining poor and generally disrupt the good taste of society. Hence, government might must be brought in to make right.
The history and theory of capitalism as understood by social liberals, of course, is patently false and has been demonstrated so by Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, among many others. And social liberals are mistaken to think that reason, science, and technology by themselves created modern material civilization. Without capitalism, at the end of the eighteenth century, reason, science, and technology would have remained, respectively, little more than a mental exercise, a curiosity, and a hobby. Instead, capitalism unleashed their creative and productive powers.
It is these errors of social liberals that market liberals must articulate in conversations. Reality exists in a continuum; so do people. Social liberals range in thought from those who are merely mistaken to those who are explicitly and rabidly socialist and are out to destroy business. It is the former with whom one can make common cause, because such social and market liberals share many of the same values, namely freedom of the individual human mind, reason, science, technology, separation of church and state, and naturalization of consciousness. It is a challenge to the market liberal, then, to convince the mistaken social liberal that true liberalism is the market or libertarian variety. If Democrats want to remain advocates of freedom, they should make their liberalism consistent and adopt market liberalism.
So what about religious conservatives and today’s Republicans? People exist in a continuum, so some conservatives do still understand capitalism and promote it correctly, but most pretend to advocate capitalism, while rushing to outdo the Democrats, and usually succeeding at the job, in expanding the welfare-warfare state.
Lew Rockwell, president of the Mises Institute, has this to say about conservatives:
This is a good statement about conservatism, but one question remains: why does conservatism hate the left? The answer is the secular naturalism of liberalism; from its beginnings in the Enlightenment, liberalism has always seen religion and the church as enemies of individual rights and freedom. The phrase “pinko-commie atheists,” with emphasis on the last word, summarizes the motivation of conservatism. It is intolerant of irreligion. That identifies conservatism as a movement that is pre-Enlightenment.
Conservatism is not a friend of capitalism, nor is it a philosophy of liberalism.
The fundamental problem with both social liberalism and religious conservatism is that both identify morality with altruism. Social liberals may force their children to give all proceeds from a lemonade-stand sale to charity, but the religious conservatives force their children to give ten percent or more of their allowance to the church. Both advocate as gospel self-sacrifice in their personal, social, and political lives.
Eliminating the premise that government might makes right requires first that the premise of self-sacrifice be challenged and replaced by the right, whether child or adult, peaceably and cooperatively to pursue ones’ own values.
The Democrats’ loss in 2004 led to much soul-searching to define what the Democratic brand of liberalism should be or represent. Advice given focused on the usual concretes—guns, abortion, gay rights—the kinds of issues that would excite no one except conservatives. My advice is this. Reexamine the meaning of liberalism. Note its fundamental principles, especially as they evolved out of the Enlightenment. Then, in a radical departure from “politics as usual,” adopt those principles as vanguard for freedom worldwide.
The problem is that two liberalisms came out of the Enlightenment. The first was classical or market liberalism (today also called libertarianism). The second, developing in the latter part of the nineteenth century in England and the United States, is social liberalism, an amalgam of ideas ranging from mixed-economy features of part capitalism, part socialism, to Fabian or democratic socialism.
Market and social liberalism have the same genus, which means they share certain principles, and for advocates of market liberalism, this is an argument for possibly seeking common ground with some of their social counterparts. The common principles are these: emphasis on self-realization or self-actualization of the individual human mind as the essence of liberty, which translates to demands for the freedom of speech and press; strong value placed on reason, science, and technology as the source of modern material civilization; and the complete separation of church and state, with an emphasis on secular naturalism, including the naturalization of consciousness.
Where market and social liberalism differ is in their attitude toward business. Social liberalism holds that business, especially big business, is the new aristocracy that, through its positions of power and privilege, coerce the poor into remaining poor and generally disrupt the good taste of society. Hence, government might must be brought in to make right.
The history and theory of capitalism as understood by social liberals, of course, is patently false and has been demonstrated so by Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, among many others. And social liberals are mistaken to think that reason, science, and technology by themselves created modern material civilization. Without capitalism, at the end of the eighteenth century, reason, science, and technology would have remained, respectively, little more than a mental exercise, a curiosity, and a hobby. Instead, capitalism unleashed their creative and productive powers.
It is these errors of social liberals that market liberals must articulate in conversations. Reality exists in a continuum; so do people. Social liberals range in thought from those who are merely mistaken to those who are explicitly and rabidly socialist and are out to destroy business. It is the former with whom one can make common cause, because such social and market liberals share many of the same values, namely freedom of the individual human mind, reason, science, technology, separation of church and state, and naturalization of consciousness. It is a challenge to the market liberal, then, to convince the mistaken social liberal that true liberalism is the market or libertarian variety. If Democrats want to remain advocates of freedom, they should make their liberalism consistent and adopt market liberalism.
So what about religious conservatives and today’s Republicans? People exist in a continuum, so some conservatives do still understand capitalism and promote it correctly, but most pretend to advocate capitalism, while rushing to outdo the Democrats, and usually succeeding at the job, in expanding the welfare-warfare state.
Lew Rockwell, president of the Mises Institute, has this to say about conservatives:
The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one soul to heresy.
This is a good statement about conservatism, but one question remains: why does conservatism hate the left? The answer is the secular naturalism of liberalism; from its beginnings in the Enlightenment, liberalism has always seen religion and the church as enemies of individual rights and freedom. The phrase “pinko-commie atheists,” with emphasis on the last word, summarizes the motivation of conservatism. It is intolerant of irreligion. That identifies conservatism as a movement that is pre-Enlightenment.
Conservatism is not a friend of capitalism, nor is it a philosophy of liberalism.
The fundamental problem with both social liberalism and religious conservatism is that both identify morality with altruism. Social liberals may force their children to give all proceeds from a lemonade-stand sale to charity, but the religious conservatives force their children to give ten percent or more of their allowance to the church. Both advocate as gospel self-sacrifice in their personal, social, and political lives.
Eliminating the premise that government might makes right requires first that the premise of self-sacrifice be challenged and replaced by the right, whether child or adult, peaceably and cooperatively to pursue ones’ own values.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Ensuring That Disposition Trumps Situation
As I argue in a previous post, independent judgment, the ability and willingness to perceive facts as facts and to respond to them regardless of what situational factors—especially, other people’s approval— may dictate, should be a fundamental aim of parenting and teaching.
Independence means that one’s psychological disposition, i.e., one’s self-esteem, integrity, and courage, should be sufficiently strong to resist outside pressures for conformity. Instilling this trait in children and students is a large order for both parents and teachers to fill. And Philip Zimbardo’s 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil provides ample evidence that situations all too often trump disposition, leading too many people to conform to the requirements of the situation rather than to resist the external pressure and judge for themselves what the right course of action should be.
Zimbardo was principal investigator in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which had been scheduled to last for two weeks but was stopped after six days because of the frighteningly realistic submissiveness and depression of the “prisoners” and aggression and sadism of the “guards.” All participants were randomly assigned college students, tested to be “normal” on the psychological tests of the day.
The Lucifer Effect provides the most detailed chronicle to date of the events of that experiment. It also reviews the literature on the power of situation over disposition, including the Milgram obedience-to-authority experiments in which participants, at the request of an experimenter, repeatedly increased the voltage of electrical shocks to a subject. The book, in great detail, also discusses the unnerving similarities between the events and behaviors of the 2003 Abu Ghraib scandal (1, 2) and the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Zimbardo is a social psychologist, which means he emphasizes the power of situation over disposition, but it is obvious from the prison experiment and other examples of situational influence that some participants did strive to maintain their values and dignity. And Zimbardo acknowledges this, so in the final chapter of his book he does discuss techniques of resisting external pressures and provides examples of true heroes who did not allow situations to trump their dispositions. Alas, Zimbardo’s suggestions for resisting situational influence, such as “assert your identity and individuality,” do not go deep enough into the conscious and subconscious mind.
Now I am not claiming to have the solution to the problem of teaching disposition over situation, but the key to developing strong convictions and the willingness to act on them lies in our subconscious premises about ourselves, other people, and the world. An adolescent, for example, who believes deep down “I’m no good—I just want to get along with others” is ripe for influence from those others who say, “A few beers won’t affect your driving” or “This drug will help you loosen up. Come on. I want to help you.” And such an adolescent may appear on the surface to be healthy and even independent in a conventional sense. In later years, working in business, the situational pressure may become, “Tell ‘em the order’s on the truck; what the client doesn’t know won’t hurt ‘em!”
The appearance of ordinariness is a point much emphasized by Zimbardo in both prison cases and in all of his examples of situational influence. But it is the pressures of the situation—the outside influencers—that tap into the adolescent’s (or adult’s) premise of wanting to get along, thus crumbling any chances of resistance.
An alternative premise of self-worth and confidence to make one’s own decisions without caving to external pressure would lead to a different outcome. Such premises, or conclusions, about oneself, others, and the world are formed in our earliest years and reinforced frequently thereafter. The challenge for parents and teachers is how to encourage the formation of correct premises and how to uncover and correct false or harmful ones. This puts psychology, specifically psychological self-awareness and the art of introspection, at the center of education (1, 2, 3).
To ensure that disposition will triumph over situation, introspection as a scientific method for acquiring data of reality—inner reality—needs to be welcomed back after its one-hundred-year exile from science. Further, logic, the method by which we assess the mental processes used in perceiving the outer world, needs to be recognized as an introspective art. It also needs to be acknowledged as the method by which we assess the mental processes for perceiving our inner world. The conclusion “I’m no good” or “I want to get along with others at all costs” is a logical fallacy and should be corrected as much as the conclusion “The earth is flat.”
Disposition consists of conclusions we have made over the years and hold in our minds, usually subconsciously. If the conclusions are correct, that is, logical and free of fallacies, self-esteem, independence, integrity, and courage will develop. If the conclusions are not logical, but contain falsehoods and fallacies, then varying amounts of situational influence will take hold. And strange or harmful behavior may result, even though such a person outwardly may appear completely ordinary or normal.
Such is the power of the subconscious to influence conscious behavior. The successful parent and teacher will find a way to nurture better subconscious premises.
Independence means that one’s psychological disposition, i.e., one’s self-esteem, integrity, and courage, should be sufficiently strong to resist outside pressures for conformity. Instilling this trait in children and students is a large order for both parents and teachers to fill. And Philip Zimbardo’s 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil provides ample evidence that situations all too often trump disposition, leading too many people to conform to the requirements of the situation rather than to resist the external pressure and judge for themselves what the right course of action should be.
Zimbardo was principal investigator in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which had been scheduled to last for two weeks but was stopped after six days because of the frighteningly realistic submissiveness and depression of the “prisoners” and aggression and sadism of the “guards.” All participants were randomly assigned college students, tested to be “normal” on the psychological tests of the day.
The Lucifer Effect provides the most detailed chronicle to date of the events of that experiment. It also reviews the literature on the power of situation over disposition, including the Milgram obedience-to-authority experiments in which participants, at the request of an experimenter, repeatedly increased the voltage of electrical shocks to a subject. The book, in great detail, also discusses the unnerving similarities between the events and behaviors of the 2003 Abu Ghraib scandal (1, 2) and the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Zimbardo is a social psychologist, which means he emphasizes the power of situation over disposition, but it is obvious from the prison experiment and other examples of situational influence that some participants did strive to maintain their values and dignity. And Zimbardo acknowledges this, so in the final chapter of his book he does discuss techniques of resisting external pressures and provides examples of true heroes who did not allow situations to trump their dispositions. Alas, Zimbardo’s suggestions for resisting situational influence, such as “assert your identity and individuality,” do not go deep enough into the conscious and subconscious mind.
Now I am not claiming to have the solution to the problem of teaching disposition over situation, but the key to developing strong convictions and the willingness to act on them lies in our subconscious premises about ourselves, other people, and the world. An adolescent, for example, who believes deep down “I’m no good—I just want to get along with others” is ripe for influence from those others who say, “A few beers won’t affect your driving” or “This drug will help you loosen up. Come on. I want to help you.” And such an adolescent may appear on the surface to be healthy and even independent in a conventional sense. In later years, working in business, the situational pressure may become, “Tell ‘em the order’s on the truck; what the client doesn’t know won’t hurt ‘em!”
The appearance of ordinariness is a point much emphasized by Zimbardo in both prison cases and in all of his examples of situational influence. But it is the pressures of the situation—the outside influencers—that tap into the adolescent’s (or adult’s) premise of wanting to get along, thus crumbling any chances of resistance.
An alternative premise of self-worth and confidence to make one’s own decisions without caving to external pressure would lead to a different outcome. Such premises, or conclusions, about oneself, others, and the world are formed in our earliest years and reinforced frequently thereafter. The challenge for parents and teachers is how to encourage the formation of correct premises and how to uncover and correct false or harmful ones. This puts psychology, specifically psychological self-awareness and the art of introspection, at the center of education (1, 2, 3).
To ensure that disposition will triumph over situation, introspection as a scientific method for acquiring data of reality—inner reality—needs to be welcomed back after its one-hundred-year exile from science. Further, logic, the method by which we assess the mental processes used in perceiving the outer world, needs to be recognized as an introspective art. It also needs to be acknowledged as the method by which we assess the mental processes for perceiving our inner world. The conclusion “I’m no good” or “I want to get along with others at all costs” is a logical fallacy and should be corrected as much as the conclusion “The earth is flat.”
Disposition consists of conclusions we have made over the years and hold in our minds, usually subconsciously. If the conclusions are correct, that is, logical and free of fallacies, self-esteem, independence, integrity, and courage will develop. If the conclusions are not logical, but contain falsehoods and fallacies, then varying amounts of situational influence will take hold. And strange or harmful behavior may result, even though such a person outwardly may appear completely ordinary or normal.
Such is the power of the subconscious to influence conscious behavior. The successful parent and teacher will find a way to nurture better subconscious premises.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Peddlers of Ideas
Teachers are peddlers of knowledge and ideas.
Well, that’s what they would be in a free market in education and that’s how they should think of themselves in today’s government-run and government-controlled system.
In a free market in education teachers would be sales reps for their schools. Some might even be owner-entrepreneurs who hang out their shingles and then must recruit, i.e., sell, and service their paying customers by meeting the customers’ needs and wants. If they condescend, are rude to their customers, and repeatedly flunk them out, they will lose business. Their incomes will decrease; eventually, they may be out of a job and have to look for a new line of work. That’s how the free market operates.
In today’s semi-free private-education market, teachers at Wichita Collegiate, a K-12 private school described in Robert Love's How To Start Your Own School (chapter 7), frequently recommended dismissal of students for a variety of disciplinary and academic reasons, that is, until the board of trustees became concerned about losses of revenue resulting from the dismissals. The board told the teachers either to find new bodies to occupy their empty desks, take a reduction in salary, or innovate to find ways of reaching those students who were having problems. The last option is what most chose to do. Innovation—product development—is what the free market encourages. It is what today’s teachers, especially those in the public sector, focus on least, because there is no incentive to do so. The board of trustees at Wichita Collegiate eventually put the teachers in charge of recruitment to encourage them to stay in touch with their markets.
I realize that many teachers today would consider it demeaning to be called a “peddler.” I consider it a badge of honor. So what are the issues?
First, the essential distinguishing characteristics of peddling, selling, marketing, advertising, etc., are not lying, cheating, or manipulating in order to make a sale. Yes, some peddlers, sales people, marketers, and advertisers have been known to lie, cheat, and manipulate others. But so have some parents, teachers, journalists, and, oh yes, politicians. The essence of selling is persuasive communication, the process of influencing attitudes and behavior using techniques published nearly 2400 years ago in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (book I, chapter 2). Those techniques are the appeal to emotion (to what is valuable or important to the prospect), the offer of proof (of why a particular claim is made, i.e., reasoning, evidence), and an appeal to the credibility of the communicator (to the character and knowledge of the speaker). Lying, cheating, and manipulating do not show up in these techniques.
Second, catering to needs and wants does not mean giving students easy A’s, zero homework, and the freedom to do whatever they please. (All three of these—absence of grades, actually, for the first one—may be appropriate in certain types of teaching or schools or at certain age levels.) Needs are requirements for the improvement of one’s life; wants are optional tastes or preferences. There are some basic needs in education, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, but thereafter which is need and which is want for any one person depends on that person’s goals in life. The quadratic equation probably would be a need for someone who wants to become an engineer, but not for someone who wants to become a photographer or musician. If a teacher/sales rep in a free market wants to teach an esoteric course on medieval literature, then he/she will have to hustle hard to find the tiny segment that really wants to learn that subject. All other prospects will vote with their feet and take their business elsewhere.
Does this mean there will be no core curriculum in a free market in education? Quite possibly. Catering to needs and wants creates wide varieties of offerings, in addition to innovation that leads to continual improvement. The concept of core curriculum is a product of education czars who think they know what is best for everyone. The government today does not run the clothing industry, but if it did, the “core curriculum” in clothing would probably be the Mao tunic. Instead, our free market in clothing performs extremely well in getting our bodies covered and it does so in a bountiful assortment of styles, colors, and prices.
Catering to needs and wants is the challenging task of, first, identifying the needs and wants of one’s customers, then carefully crafting products that will meet those needs and wants. The teacher who does this successfully year after year is a peddler par excellence and deserves praise, just as the entrepreneur who does the same year after year deserves praise. Peddlers of knowledge and ideas care about their customers. Tenured teachers who talk rudely to their paying customers, make little or no effort to reach slower students, and, at the college level, draw the blinds of their office windows so students cannot tell whether they are in, during posted office hours, do not care much for their students. They certainly are not peddlers of ideas.
Well, that’s what they would be in a free market in education and that’s how they should think of themselves in today’s government-run and government-controlled system.
In a free market in education teachers would be sales reps for their schools. Some might even be owner-entrepreneurs who hang out their shingles and then must recruit, i.e., sell, and service their paying customers by meeting the customers’ needs and wants. If they condescend, are rude to their customers, and repeatedly flunk them out, they will lose business. Their incomes will decrease; eventually, they may be out of a job and have to look for a new line of work. That’s how the free market operates.
In today’s semi-free private-education market, teachers at Wichita Collegiate, a K-12 private school described in Robert Love's How To Start Your Own School (chapter 7), frequently recommended dismissal of students for a variety of disciplinary and academic reasons, that is, until the board of trustees became concerned about losses of revenue resulting from the dismissals. The board told the teachers either to find new bodies to occupy their empty desks, take a reduction in salary, or innovate to find ways of reaching those students who were having problems. The last option is what most chose to do. Innovation—product development—is what the free market encourages. It is what today’s teachers, especially those in the public sector, focus on least, because there is no incentive to do so. The board of trustees at Wichita Collegiate eventually put the teachers in charge of recruitment to encourage them to stay in touch with their markets.
I realize that many teachers today would consider it demeaning to be called a “peddler.” I consider it a badge of honor. So what are the issues?
First, the essential distinguishing characteristics of peddling, selling, marketing, advertising, etc., are not lying, cheating, or manipulating in order to make a sale. Yes, some peddlers, sales people, marketers, and advertisers have been known to lie, cheat, and manipulate others. But so have some parents, teachers, journalists, and, oh yes, politicians. The essence of selling is persuasive communication, the process of influencing attitudes and behavior using techniques published nearly 2400 years ago in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (book I, chapter 2). Those techniques are the appeal to emotion (to what is valuable or important to the prospect), the offer of proof (of why a particular claim is made, i.e., reasoning, evidence), and an appeal to the credibility of the communicator (to the character and knowledge of the speaker). Lying, cheating, and manipulating do not show up in these techniques.
Second, catering to needs and wants does not mean giving students easy A’s, zero homework, and the freedom to do whatever they please. (All three of these—absence of grades, actually, for the first one—may be appropriate in certain types of teaching or schools or at certain age levels.) Needs are requirements for the improvement of one’s life; wants are optional tastes or preferences. There are some basic needs in education, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, but thereafter which is need and which is want for any one person depends on that person’s goals in life. The quadratic equation probably would be a need for someone who wants to become an engineer, but not for someone who wants to become a photographer or musician. If a teacher/sales rep in a free market wants to teach an esoteric course on medieval literature, then he/she will have to hustle hard to find the tiny segment that really wants to learn that subject. All other prospects will vote with their feet and take their business elsewhere.
Does this mean there will be no core curriculum in a free market in education? Quite possibly. Catering to needs and wants creates wide varieties of offerings, in addition to innovation that leads to continual improvement. The concept of core curriculum is a product of education czars who think they know what is best for everyone. The government today does not run the clothing industry, but if it did, the “core curriculum” in clothing would probably be the Mao tunic. Instead, our free market in clothing performs extremely well in getting our bodies covered and it does so in a bountiful assortment of styles, colors, and prices.
Catering to needs and wants is the challenging task of, first, identifying the needs and wants of one’s customers, then carefully crafting products that will meet those needs and wants. The teacher who does this successfully year after year is a peddler par excellence and deserves praise, just as the entrepreneur who does the same year after year deserves praise. Peddlers of knowledge and ideas care about their customers. Tenured teachers who talk rudely to their paying customers, make little or no effort to reach slower students, and, at the college level, draw the blinds of their office windows so students cannot tell whether they are in, during posted office hours, do not care much for their students. They certainly are not peddlers of ideas.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Caterpillars into Butterflies
I don’t know where I’ve been for the past several decades but I had never heard the expression “turning caterpillars into butterflies” used in relation to teaching. That is, until this spring when my daughter’s softball coaches used it several times to explain their goal of coaching twelve eight-and-under girls. Add to this the coaches’ commitment to “no child left behind”—meaning every girl on the team, no matter how young or inexperienced, would learn how to throw, catch, and bat or, if an older veteran, how to improve these skills—and you have a heck of a model of teaching. Winning certainly was not the only thing, and most of the girls did not seem to attach any significance to it, but winning did follow from the teaching.
So what does the metaphor mean for teaching? It is a biological process that turns caterpillars into butterflies, occurring naturally with proper nurture and a minimum of interference from predators and the elements. For teaching, this means that children are natural learners and therefore do not need to be forced to learn. They need guidance and motivation perhaps more importantly than any particular knowledge content; they need encouragement, not coercion, angry yelling, or contemptuous denigration. The goal of teaching is to build confidence in the child’s own ability to learn such that the child can continue to learn throughout life without need, or with only occasional need, of additional teaching. The butterfly knows how to fly and does not need additional “instruction” or development. A clipped wing, however, will destroy it.
Many years ago, when I was in high school, I played in an orchestra of extremely talented teenagers. (Almost all, I should say, were far more talented than I.) Several different conductors would direct us in weekly concerts. Only one knew how to get the butterflies to fly. He was a motivator of adolescents and young adults and was well liked. He would make exclamations like “Sound! I want to hear sound from you!” and “Brass, I can’t hear you!” Which to trumpeters, trombonists, and French horn players was a call to action. Not loud noise, but beautiful, controlled, and confidently self-assertive sound that made the difference between amateurishness and near professionalism.
The keyword here is “controlled,” for that is what skilled musicians exhibit—control of air stream and finger movement for wind instrument players and control of muscle movements for stringed instrument players and percussionists. Control is also what skilled athletes exhibit, in muscle movement of course, but also, as sports psychologists point out, in their thoughts about playing the game. The good motivator is the one who finds ways to make sure their students or musicians or athletes get their heads in the game and keep them there.
In contrast to the above orchestra motivator, one stern task master of a conductor succeeded in clipping the wings of the orchestral butterflies with one simple but true statement. He said, “Remember, the audience is applauding the composer as much as they are you, the performers.” Message: “don’t think you are so good.” The statement is true about audiences and, often, their standing ovations, but to say it to teenagers was utterly deflating to their developing egos. The conductor did not ask for sound and he did not get it. Was he predator or the elements? Take your pick. Demeaning comments kill confidence and a willingness to perform.
Patience is a requirement of good teaching and the passage of time is what is required for a caterpillar to pass through the chrysalis stage to turn into a butterfly. Let me conclude this post by bringing back my daughter’s softball coaches and describing their seemingly infinite patience with even the youngest, most inexperienced girl on the team, a girl who would tend to get down on herself and say “I can’t do it.” At one practice the assistant coach must have thrown thirty or forty balls to this girl for her to swing at, and with each swing she would fail to make contact. Periodically, the coach would stop to make an adjustment in her stance, then he would pitch more balls. On about the fortieth pitch . . . boom. A big pop fly went to shortstop. High fives, the coach insisted, were called for from all the other players; then he picked up the girl and said, “I don’t want to ever again hear you say that you can’t do it.”
A week or two later, the same girl made contact with the ball in a game that helped drive in winning runs. This caterpillar metamorphosed into a beautiful butterfly and that is the ultimate payoff of good teaching.
So what does the metaphor mean for teaching? It is a biological process that turns caterpillars into butterflies, occurring naturally with proper nurture and a minimum of interference from predators and the elements. For teaching, this means that children are natural learners and therefore do not need to be forced to learn. They need guidance and motivation perhaps more importantly than any particular knowledge content; they need encouragement, not coercion, angry yelling, or contemptuous denigration. The goal of teaching is to build confidence in the child’s own ability to learn such that the child can continue to learn throughout life without need, or with only occasional need, of additional teaching. The butterfly knows how to fly and does not need additional “instruction” or development. A clipped wing, however, will destroy it.
Many years ago, when I was in high school, I played in an orchestra of extremely talented teenagers. (Almost all, I should say, were far more talented than I.) Several different conductors would direct us in weekly concerts. Only one knew how to get the butterflies to fly. He was a motivator of adolescents and young adults and was well liked. He would make exclamations like “Sound! I want to hear sound from you!” and “Brass, I can’t hear you!” Which to trumpeters, trombonists, and French horn players was a call to action. Not loud noise, but beautiful, controlled, and confidently self-assertive sound that made the difference between amateurishness and near professionalism.
The keyword here is “controlled,” for that is what skilled musicians exhibit—control of air stream and finger movement for wind instrument players and control of muscle movements for stringed instrument players and percussionists. Control is also what skilled athletes exhibit, in muscle movement of course, but also, as sports psychologists point out, in their thoughts about playing the game. The good motivator is the one who finds ways to make sure their students or musicians or athletes get their heads in the game and keep them there.
In contrast to the above orchestra motivator, one stern task master of a conductor succeeded in clipping the wings of the orchestral butterflies with one simple but true statement. He said, “Remember, the audience is applauding the composer as much as they are you, the performers.” Message: “don’t think you are so good.” The statement is true about audiences and, often, their standing ovations, but to say it to teenagers was utterly deflating to their developing egos. The conductor did not ask for sound and he did not get it. Was he predator or the elements? Take your pick. Demeaning comments kill confidence and a willingness to perform.
Patience is a requirement of good teaching and the passage of time is what is required for a caterpillar to pass through the chrysalis stage to turn into a butterfly. Let me conclude this post by bringing back my daughter’s softball coaches and describing their seemingly infinite patience with even the youngest, most inexperienced girl on the team, a girl who would tend to get down on herself and say “I can’t do it.” At one practice the assistant coach must have thrown thirty or forty balls to this girl for her to swing at, and with each swing she would fail to make contact. Periodically, the coach would stop to make an adjustment in her stance, then he would pitch more balls. On about the fortieth pitch . . . boom. A big pop fly went to shortstop. High fives, the coach insisted, were called for from all the other players; then he picked up the girl and said, “I don’t want to ever again hear you say that you can’t do it.”
A week or two later, the same girl made contact with the ball in a game that helped drive in winning runs. This caterpillar metamorphosed into a beautiful butterfly and that is the ultimate payoff of good teaching.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Rules vs. Principles
In chapter 4 of Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I wrote: “Rules are commands to act or not act a certain way. Obedience may be rewarded; disobedience is certainly punished.” The context was the regulation of child and student behavior and my point was that “rules have no place in a theory of nurture.” Rules call for obedience to authority. Principles, on the other hand, teach abstract thought and lay the foundation for independence.
This is not to say that rules to protect young children from harm or to help them respect the rights of others are not ever a good idea. Young children, including those up to the age of adolescence, have not yet acquired the skill of abstract reasoning. Guidance from adults cannot always be made in the form of rational argument, nor is the young child likely to understand such reasoning. A screamed “Stop!” when a three-year-old is about to run into the street is appropriate, as is the command “Don’t step off the curb until I get there to take your hand.” The latter is a rule, but when the added explanation “Cars can do bad things to little children” is provided, the groundwork for reasoned thought is being laid. Repeated explanations on similar occasions lead to understanding and eventual grasp of the principle of observation and self-protection. Absence of the added explanation, or worse, punishment for something the young child cannot possibly know or understand sends only one message: “Obey.”
Elementary-aged children, roughly from six to twelve, pose an interesting challenge for adults. Logical thinking is noticeable in children of this age but it is concrete thinking, the “period of concrete operations,” as Piaget calls it. Broad abstractions, formed and retained over time, are difficult and rare. Yet elementary-aged children exhibit a highly active and rambunctious behavior that is often not to the liking of adults. The easiest solution is a barrage of rules, such as “Don’t run,” “No talking in class,” “No eating after 7PM,” etc. Such rules, to be effective, must be enforced with stern consequences, ranging from confinement to withdrawal of possessions or privileges to spanking; if the rules are not enforced, or meekly enforced, they will be ignored and children will run amok and have what some would say is a lowered respect for the adult. Lowered fear of the adult would be a more correct description.
Teaching principles means giving children a full explanation, for example, of why running is not advisable on the patio: they might stumble and hurt themselves or others, who have just as much right to be there as they do, and the running might interrupt or destroy the other children’s enjoyment. Such explanations require more words than a simple rule and there is no guarantee that the children will grasp and remember what was just said and implement a change of behavior to become the perfect angels that adults want them to become. Repetition of the explanation is required; so also is repetition required to enforce rules, unless the coercive consequences of breaking rules are so stern that the children get the message immediately. But then, what price has been paid in the psychological development of such coerced children?
Rules presuppose coercion. Principles presuppose teaching. A lot of it. But teaching principles requires patience, understanding, and, especially, fast thinking (of the right thing to say) that many adults—parents and teachers—do not have when trying to regulate and influence the behavior of elementary-aged children. Distractions and demands too often preclude the use of these three traits.
The middle ground between rules imposed from above and principles taught repeatedly (and exasperatingly) might be the democratic meeting in which children make and enforce their own rules. This is the solution adopted by the Summerhill School in England and Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. (See Go Fish!)
A variation of this advocated by Jane Nelsen, author of Positive Discipline and Positive Discipline in the Classroom, is the family and class meeting. The purpose of such meetings is to brainstorm for solutions to problems and agree on the solutions either by vote or consensus. To be effective, the adults must reduce themselves to equal participants, rather than act as lecturers or moralizers.
Having children take responsibility for their own behavior through discussion, brainstorming, and democratic voting or consensus frees adults from having to play cop and peacemaker and enables them to spend more time being the long-term thinkers and leaders that the children need. Until the perfect handbook is written and published on how to teach children to become perfect angels, this technique will probably have to do.
This is not to say that rules to protect young children from harm or to help them respect the rights of others are not ever a good idea. Young children, including those up to the age of adolescence, have not yet acquired the skill of abstract reasoning. Guidance from adults cannot always be made in the form of rational argument, nor is the young child likely to understand such reasoning. A screamed “Stop!” when a three-year-old is about to run into the street is appropriate, as is the command “Don’t step off the curb until I get there to take your hand.” The latter is a rule, but when the added explanation “Cars can do bad things to little children” is provided, the groundwork for reasoned thought is being laid. Repeated explanations on similar occasions lead to understanding and eventual grasp of the principle of observation and self-protection. Absence of the added explanation, or worse, punishment for something the young child cannot possibly know or understand sends only one message: “Obey.”
Elementary-aged children, roughly from six to twelve, pose an interesting challenge for adults. Logical thinking is noticeable in children of this age but it is concrete thinking, the “period of concrete operations,” as Piaget calls it. Broad abstractions, formed and retained over time, are difficult and rare. Yet elementary-aged children exhibit a highly active and rambunctious behavior that is often not to the liking of adults. The easiest solution is a barrage of rules, such as “Don’t run,” “No talking in class,” “No eating after 7PM,” etc. Such rules, to be effective, must be enforced with stern consequences, ranging from confinement to withdrawal of possessions or privileges to spanking; if the rules are not enforced, or meekly enforced, they will be ignored and children will run amok and have what some would say is a lowered respect for the adult. Lowered fear of the adult would be a more correct description.
Teaching principles means giving children a full explanation, for example, of why running is not advisable on the patio: they might stumble and hurt themselves or others, who have just as much right to be there as they do, and the running might interrupt or destroy the other children’s enjoyment. Such explanations require more words than a simple rule and there is no guarantee that the children will grasp and remember what was just said and implement a change of behavior to become the perfect angels that adults want them to become. Repetition of the explanation is required; so also is repetition required to enforce rules, unless the coercive consequences of breaking rules are so stern that the children get the message immediately. But then, what price has been paid in the psychological development of such coerced children?
Rules presuppose coercion. Principles presuppose teaching. A lot of it. But teaching principles requires patience, understanding, and, especially, fast thinking (of the right thing to say) that many adults—parents and teachers—do not have when trying to regulate and influence the behavior of elementary-aged children. Distractions and demands too often preclude the use of these three traits.
The middle ground between rules imposed from above and principles taught repeatedly (and exasperatingly) might be the democratic meeting in which children make and enforce their own rules. This is the solution adopted by the Summerhill School in England and Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. (See Go Fish!)
A variation of this advocated by Jane Nelsen, author of Positive Discipline and Positive Discipline in the Classroom, is the family and class meeting. The purpose of such meetings is to brainstorm for solutions to problems and agree on the solutions either by vote or consensus. To be effective, the adults must reduce themselves to equal participants, rather than act as lecturers or moralizers.
Having children take responsibility for their own behavior through discussion, brainstorming, and democratic voting or consensus frees adults from having to play cop and peacemaker and enables them to spend more time being the long-term thinkers and leaders that the children need. Until the perfect handbook is written and published on how to teach children to become perfect angels, this technique will probably have to do.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Because the Stakes Are So Small
In academia there is an adage that says disputes among professors are bitter precisely because the stakes are so small. The statement has been attributed to various people, including Henry Kissinger and Woodrow Wilson. In print the more general conception is known as Issawi’s law of social motion, specifically: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue. That is why academic politics are so bitter.” I question the generalization that high-stakes issues lack intense feeling, but the more significant point is what exactly is the nature of the stakes that the adage refers to and whose stakes are we talking about?
Much has been written by academics about why the disputes are so bitter and the answer generally is the golden handcuffs of tenure. Working in a profession that lacks tangible rewards, professors crave status and recognition, but they are cooped up like rats or chickens with the same coworkers for decades. “Married without the possibility of divorce,” says one commentator, “angry faculty members exhaust themselves in petty battles over ancient personal resentments that pretend to be principles.” [1]
The protection of tenure and academic freedom, says another, gives some professors “license to behave with little regard for civility or collegiality.” [2] In business, this writer points out, one can move on to another company, thus minimizing the irritation of disagreements with fellow workers, but in academia, where the ease of going elsewhere becomes more difficult with the number of years beyond tenure, the distress of every resentment and annoyance grows until it erupts into volcanic acrimony. To outsiders a dispute over who gets a new $100 office chair may seem small, hence the expression, but to the participants in the dispute the stakes loom large. Why?
The disputes are not often over tangibles, such as new office chairs. They may be over class scheduling, the elimination of a favorite course, or, more seriously, who gets hired, promoted, or tenured. This last brings up comparisons of competence. The willingness to hire, promote, or tenure someone who is better than oneself—for example, in teaching, service, or scholarship—requires a strong, self-sufficient ego.
The following statement by former General Electric chief executive officer, Jack Welch, and his wife, Suzy Welch, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, is one not shared by many academics:
Instead, rationalization upon rationalization, if not outright hostility, will be flung into the discussion to justify why such a person is not qualified. The rigors of scholarly logic disappear where personnel and other administrative decisions are concerned. Protecting one’s turf—and frail ego—becomes paramount. A frail ego with low self-esteem cannot tolerate the prospect of a better colleague gaining (perceived) position and power. The stakes, psychologically speaking, have become huge. This does not take into consideration the fact that the stakes for the person being considered for employment, promotion, or tenure are equally huge. The adage about academic life is ambiguous in this respect.
Not every academic, of course, suffers such a low level of self-esteem, but enough seem to populate campuses around the world to justify the expression. The disputes of the academic world have no tangible effect on tenured professors. To outsiders, therefore, the privileged professors are still tenured and still have their jobs; so what if they have to teach a different schedule or work beside colleagues who are better than they? It is impossible for an outsider to think anything other than that the stakes are small. Psychologically, however, the privileged ones find it intolerable to have anyone change their comfortable schedules or to have someone new come in and expose their shortcomings. Envy, jealousy, and resentment move to the forefront, while rationality goes out the window.
So if one has sufficient self-esteem not to get upset over a schedule change or over colleagues who are better than they, how does such a person cope with those who fling the rationalizations and hostility and, more generally, throw tantrums in department meetings? Ms. Mentor, a.k.a. Emily Toth, columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, encourages young and old professors alike to view the events of academia from a literary perspective, as a play, as it were, albeit with “atrociously bad actors”:
It is this perspective, I admit, that I need to work on!
Much has been written by academics about why the disputes are so bitter and the answer generally is the golden handcuffs of tenure. Working in a profession that lacks tangible rewards, professors crave status and recognition, but they are cooped up like rats or chickens with the same coworkers for decades. “Married without the possibility of divorce,” says one commentator, “angry faculty members exhaust themselves in petty battles over ancient personal resentments that pretend to be principles.” [1]
The protection of tenure and academic freedom, says another, gives some professors “license to behave with little regard for civility or collegiality.” [2] In business, this writer points out, one can move on to another company, thus minimizing the irritation of disagreements with fellow workers, but in academia, where the ease of going elsewhere becomes more difficult with the number of years beyond tenure, the distress of every resentment and annoyance grows until it erupts into volcanic acrimony. To outsiders a dispute over who gets a new $100 office chair may seem small, hence the expression, but to the participants in the dispute the stakes loom large. Why?
The disputes are not often over tangibles, such as new office chairs. They may be over class scheduling, the elimination of a favorite course, or, more seriously, who gets hired, promoted, or tenured. This last brings up comparisons of competence. The willingness to hire, promote, or tenure someone who is better than oneself—for example, in teaching, service, or scholarship—requires a strong, self-sufficient ego.
The following statement by former General Electric chief executive officer, Jack Welch, and his wife, Suzy Welch, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, is one not shared by many academics:
Seek out people who are better, smarter, and in every way more talented than you are. They'll push the organization to new heights of performance. And we guarantee your career will follow. [3]
Instead, rationalization upon rationalization, if not outright hostility, will be flung into the discussion to justify why such a person is not qualified. The rigors of scholarly logic disappear where personnel and other administrative decisions are concerned. Protecting one’s turf—and frail ego—becomes paramount. A frail ego with low self-esteem cannot tolerate the prospect of a better colleague gaining (perceived) position and power. The stakes, psychologically speaking, have become huge. This does not take into consideration the fact that the stakes for the person being considered for employment, promotion, or tenure are equally huge. The adage about academic life is ambiguous in this respect.
Not every academic, of course, suffers such a low level of self-esteem, but enough seem to populate campuses around the world to justify the expression. The disputes of the academic world have no tangible effect on tenured professors. To outsiders, therefore, the privileged professors are still tenured and still have their jobs; so what if they have to teach a different schedule or work beside colleagues who are better than they? It is impossible for an outsider to think anything other than that the stakes are small. Psychologically, however, the privileged ones find it intolerable to have anyone change their comfortable schedules or to have someone new come in and expose their shortcomings. Envy, jealousy, and resentment move to the forefront, while rationality goes out the window.
So if one has sufficient self-esteem not to get upset over a schedule change or over colleagues who are better than they, how does such a person cope with those who fling the rationalizations and hostility and, more generally, throw tantrums in department meetings? Ms. Mentor, a.k.a. Emily Toth, columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, encourages young and old professors alike to view the events of academia from a literary perspective, as a play, as it were, albeit with “atrociously bad actors”:
There are serfs; there are dragons; there are definitely bats in belfries. Ideally, you find teaching exciting and mind-stretching (if you don’t, you should leave the profession). But sometimes the longitudinal study of your colleagues—Oliver Awkward, Sara Surreptitious, Barnaby Bluster—is the most entertaining, and the longest-lasting show of your life.
Ms. Mentor urges you not to miss a minute of it. [4]
It is this perspective, I admit, that I need to work on!
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Dewey in Context
During his years at Columbia University, Dewey came under the influence of Aristotelian scholar F. J. E. Woodbridge, major figure in the early twentieth century school of realism and naturalism. When Dewey was asked by students how he should be classified, he replied, “That is easy. With the revival of Greek Philosophy.”*
Intrinsicism is Ayn Rand’s term for the doctrine that essences and values inhere intrinsically—eternally and immutably—in concretes, and that the mind is a passive mirror or spectator of these essences and values. The doctrine originated in Greek thought and has plagued philosophy ever since. Both Dewey and Rand reject it. Reality, for Dewey, is the Darwinian world of evolutionary change, not the Greek or medieval world of immutable, eternal forms or essences (or biological species) that exist intrinsically in reality. Knowledge—forms, essences, concepts—are constructions of the mind based on the human animal’s participations in, or interactions or transactions with, the world in which he or she lives. When Dewey speaks of the “spectator theory,” he means the doctrine of intrinsicism.
With this background in mind, I would like to demonstrate in this post how two quotations of Dewey in The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff take on a different meaning when put into full context. On page 124 of the paperback edition, Peikoff states that, according to Dewey, we cannot know facts “antecedent” to the mind, that it is not a function of the mind to know facts, and that the mind is not a “spectator.” Knowledge in particular, quoting Dewey, is not “a disclosure of reality, of reality prior to and independent of knowing. . . .” (from The Quest for Certainty, p. 35).
These statements and quotation sound quite subjectivist, but the full context is the so-called problem of value created by physical science’s failure to find anything resembling value-in-itself or intrinsic value. Here is the context; the original quotation is italicized:
. . . There are two rival systems that must have their respective claims adjusted. The crisis in contemporary culture, the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division of authority. Scientific inquiry seems to tell one thing, and traditional beliefs about ends and ideals that have authority over conduct tell something quite different. The problem of reconciliation arises and persists for one reason only. As long as the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of reality, of reality prior to and independent of knowing, and that knowing is independent of a purpose to control the quality of experienced objects, the failure of natural science to disclose significant values in its objects will come as a shock. Those seriously concerned with the validity and authority of value will have a problem on their hands. As long as the notion persists that values are authentic and valid only on condition that they are properties of Being independent of human action, as long as it is supposed that their right to regulate action is dependent upon their being independent of action, so long there will be needed schemes to prove that values are, in spite of the findings of science, genuine and known qualifications of reality in itself. For men will not easily surrender all regulative guidance in action. If they are forbidden to find standards in the course of experience they will seek them somewhere else, if not in revelation, then in the deliverance of a reason that is above experience.
Rephrasing Dewey in terms of the doctrine of intrinsicism: “As long as the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of [intrinsic essences], of [intrinsic essences] prior to and independent of knowing, . . . the failure of natural science to disclose significant [intrinsic] values in its objects will come as a shock.” It should be noted here also that Dewey uses the term “value” as presupposing a “to whom and for what purpose,” as does Ayn Rand.
The next quotation in The Ominous Parallels immediately follows the previous one: “The business of thought is not to conform to or reproduce the characters already possessed by objects” (from The Quest for Certainty, p. 110).
This quotation arises in the context of the premise that all knowledge is experimental or operational in origin. “The test of ideas, of thinking generally, is found in the consequences of the acts to which the ideas lead, that is in the new arrangements of things which are brought into existence. Such is the unequivocal evidence as to the worth of ideas which is derived from observing their position and role in experimental knowing” (pp. 109-10). In other words, all knowledge and thought is for the sake of action. Photographs of intrinsic essences, however, since intrinsic essences do not exist, provide no guidance for action. The full context reads, with the original quotation again italicized (pp. 110-11):
In the previous chapter, we saw that experimental method, in reducing objects to data, divests experienced things of their qualities, but that this removal, judged from the standpoint of the whole operation of which it is one part, is a condition of the control which enables us to endow the objects of experience with other qualities which we want them to have. In like fashion, thought, our conceptions and ideas, are designations of operations to be performed or already performed. Consequently their value is determined by the outcome of these operations. They are sound if the operations they direct give us the results which are required. The authority of thought depends upon what it leads us to through directing the performance of operations. The business of thought is not to conform to or reproduce the characters already possessed by objects but to judge them as potentialities of what they become through an indicated operation. This principle holds from the simplest case to the most elaborate. To judge that this object is sweet, that is, to refer the idea or meaning ‘sweet’ to it without actually experiencing sweetness, is to predict that when it is tasted—that is, subjected to a specified operation—a certain consequence will ensue. Similarly, to think of the world in terms of mathematical formulae of space, time and motion is not to have a picture of the independent and fixed essence of the universe. It is to describe experienceable objects as material upon which certain operations are performed.
The bearing of this conclusion upon the relation of knowledge and action speaks for itself. Knowledge which is merely a reduplication in ideas of what exists already in the world may afford us the satisfaction of a photograph, but that is all. To form ideas whose worth is to be judged by what exists independently of them is not a function that (even if the test could be applied, which seems impossible) goes on within nature or makes any difference there. Ideas that are plans of operations to be performed are integral factors in actions which change the face of the world. . . .
Rephrasing: “The business of thought is not to conform to or reproduce the [intrinsic essences or properties] already possessed by objects but to judge [the objects] as potentialities [to serve the purposes of my professional or personal life] through an indicated operation.”
Dewey did not like the term “pragmatism” and did not use it to refer to his philosophy. He preferred “instrumentalism,” in the sense that thought is an instrument of action. Dewey, indeed, was no Objectivist, nor was he a capitalist, but he does have interesting ideas. Admirers of Ayn Rand who carefully read Dewey as an Aristotelian should be repaid for the effort.
* Walter B. Veazie, “John Dewey and the Revival of Greek Philosophy,” University of Colorado Studies, Series in Philosophy, no. 2, 1961, p. 3. Raymond Boisvert has analyzed Dewey’s metaphysics and concluded that it is Aristotelian.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Postmodernism and the Next Failure of Socialism
Socialism, and more broadly collectivism, as Ayn Rand pointed out, died as a moral ideal in 1945. As a practical ideal, socialism died with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet socialism and the principle that government might is required to make right is still with us. How can that be?
Answer: epistemological errors of Enlightenment thinkers, specifically their failure to identify the true nature of consciousness and thereby describe reason’s method of knowing reality, allowed irrationalism and collectivism to take root and grow into today’s spectacle of a virulently absolutist and nihilistic postmodernism.
Stephen Hicks’ 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault chronicles this process with brilliant simplicity. Beginning with an overview of the contrast between modernism and postmodernism, that is, the Enlightenment’s pro-reason, pro-individualist, pro-capitalist philosophies and the postmodernists’ rejection of those views, Hicks essentializes the ideas of the major players in this evolution.
Cashing in on the errors of the Enlightenment, Kant and Hegel were among the first (Rousseau preceded them in opposing fundamental Enlightenment values) to narrow the effectiveness of reason—in order to make room for faith and religion—and to devalue the autonomy of the individual. As the nineteenth century progressed, subsequent philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, declared reality a subjective, contradictory creation known only through feeling or instinct and the individual’s identity a function of group membership. Contempt for reason was their conclusion. Heidegger in the twentieth century elevated morbid, anxious feelings to the role of guides to knowledge and declared war against the entire Western tradition based on the law of non-contradiction. When logical positivism and linguistic analysis failed to correct the Enlightenment’s errors, the path was cleared for the postmodernists—among them Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and Rorty—to take over.
When reason and reality are gone and feelings, especially those of anxiety, dread, and alienation, guide action, and when the group defines the individual, “group balkanization,” as Hicks observes, “and conflict must necessarily result.” A “nasty political correctness”—arising ironically in an age of relativism—became the tactic for accomplishing political goals (p. 82). And those goals are all of a socialist hue. The problem for the postmodernists, though, is that socialism has suffered a number of setbacks. The proletariat has not rebelled spontaneously, nor has capitalism collapsed. Indeed, Hicks cites six dramatic failures of socialism that have led to various reincarnations. The postmodern variety resulted most particularly from Khrushchev’s revelations of 1956. The postmodernists moved socialism away from its traditional emphasis on need, wealth, and science and technology to the form we see today: egalitarianism, the notion that wealth is bad and environmentalism good (that is, the shift from “red” to “green”), and from universalism to multiculturalism.
Epistemological trends of the past 200 years, plus the failures of socialism, have culminated in the virulent absolutism of political correctness. Socialists have always advocated the coercion of government might to achieve their goals, but the postmodernists today are academics who realize that past revolutions have failed and capitalism has not collapsed. As a result, they are left with the only weapons they know how to use, namely words. Thus, they use words—not facts or overt force—as their means of swaying others and the words express hostility at Enlightenment values and despair about the present and future.
Cynical and envy-ridden, as Hicks points out in his grippingly eloquent conclusion, the postmodernists are the Iagos to the Enlightenment’s Othellos. The postmodernists’ goal is no longer revolution; their goal, like Iago’s, is to inject doubt into modernity’s values and “let that doubt work like a slow poison” (p. 200).
I must emphasize that this brief post cannot do justice to the clarity and persuasive power with which Hicks’ 200-page book exposes the insidious deviousness of postmodernism. Some reviewers have said the book is scary, but I find it inspiring and encouraging, if for no other reason than the fact that Hicks makes the reader want to go out on a limb to predict the next failure of socialism. The more significant reason for being encouraged is the negativity of postmodernism; negative programs never last.
But allow me to make that prediction. Ayn Rand said that collectivism had to fail precisely at its height because its claims to intellectuality and idealism were both frauds. I think the same point must eventually be applied to the environmental movement—those “reds” who have become “greens”—especially the global warming crowd. And it seems like everyone is going green today. However, when a Harvard psychologist writing in the New York Times Magazine acknowledges that the numbers about curbing carbon emissions “don’t add up” and science staffer John Tierney on the same newspaper makes fun of the exaggerated predictions routinely made today in the name of environmental “science,” establishment media would seem to be moving in the direction of more openness to facts and less blind acceptance of the red/green litany.
The antidote to postmodernism is better ideas and those ideas are making their way through our culture. Will I see postmodernism overthrown in my lifetime? Perhaps not, but my daughter might.
Answer: epistemological errors of Enlightenment thinkers, specifically their failure to identify the true nature of consciousness and thereby describe reason’s method of knowing reality, allowed irrationalism and collectivism to take root and grow into today’s spectacle of a virulently absolutist and nihilistic postmodernism.
Stephen Hicks’ 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault chronicles this process with brilliant simplicity. Beginning with an overview of the contrast between modernism and postmodernism, that is, the Enlightenment’s pro-reason, pro-individualist, pro-capitalist philosophies and the postmodernists’ rejection of those views, Hicks essentializes the ideas of the major players in this evolution.
Cashing in on the errors of the Enlightenment, Kant and Hegel were among the first (Rousseau preceded them in opposing fundamental Enlightenment values) to narrow the effectiveness of reason—in order to make room for faith and religion—and to devalue the autonomy of the individual. As the nineteenth century progressed, subsequent philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, declared reality a subjective, contradictory creation known only through feeling or instinct and the individual’s identity a function of group membership. Contempt for reason was their conclusion. Heidegger in the twentieth century elevated morbid, anxious feelings to the role of guides to knowledge and declared war against the entire Western tradition based on the law of non-contradiction. When logical positivism and linguistic analysis failed to correct the Enlightenment’s errors, the path was cleared for the postmodernists—among them Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and Rorty—to take over.
When reason and reality are gone and feelings, especially those of anxiety, dread, and alienation, guide action, and when the group defines the individual, “group balkanization,” as Hicks observes, “and conflict must necessarily result.” A “nasty political correctness”—arising ironically in an age of relativism—became the tactic for accomplishing political goals (p. 82). And those goals are all of a socialist hue. The problem for the postmodernists, though, is that socialism has suffered a number of setbacks. The proletariat has not rebelled spontaneously, nor has capitalism collapsed. Indeed, Hicks cites six dramatic failures of socialism that have led to various reincarnations. The postmodern variety resulted most particularly from Khrushchev’s revelations of 1956. The postmodernists moved socialism away from its traditional emphasis on need, wealth, and science and technology to the form we see today: egalitarianism, the notion that wealth is bad and environmentalism good (that is, the shift from “red” to “green”), and from universalism to multiculturalism.
Epistemological trends of the past 200 years, plus the failures of socialism, have culminated in the virulent absolutism of political correctness. Socialists have always advocated the coercion of government might to achieve their goals, but the postmodernists today are academics who realize that past revolutions have failed and capitalism has not collapsed. As a result, they are left with the only weapons they know how to use, namely words. Thus, they use words—not facts or overt force—as their means of swaying others and the words express hostility at Enlightenment values and despair about the present and future.
Cynical and envy-ridden, as Hicks points out in his grippingly eloquent conclusion, the postmodernists are the Iagos to the Enlightenment’s Othellos. The postmodernists’ goal is no longer revolution; their goal, like Iago’s, is to inject doubt into modernity’s values and “let that doubt work like a slow poison” (p. 200).
I must emphasize that this brief post cannot do justice to the clarity and persuasive power with which Hicks’ 200-page book exposes the insidious deviousness of postmodernism. Some reviewers have said the book is scary, but I find it inspiring and encouraging, if for no other reason than the fact that Hicks makes the reader want to go out on a limb to predict the next failure of socialism. The more significant reason for being encouraged is the negativity of postmodernism; negative programs never last.
But allow me to make that prediction. Ayn Rand said that collectivism had to fail precisely at its height because its claims to intellectuality and idealism were both frauds. I think the same point must eventually be applied to the environmental movement—those “reds” who have become “greens”—especially the global warming crowd. And it seems like everyone is going green today. However, when a Harvard psychologist writing in the New York Times Magazine acknowledges that the numbers about curbing carbon emissions “don’t add up” and science staffer John Tierney on the same newspaper makes fun of the exaggerated predictions routinely made today in the name of environmental “science,” establishment media would seem to be moving in the direction of more openness to facts and less blind acceptance of the red/green litany.
The antidote to postmodernism is better ideas and those ideas are making their way through our culture. Will I see postmodernism overthrown in my lifetime? Perhaps not, but my daughter might.
Friday, January 25, 2008
On Judging the Quality of Today’s Students
A favorite pastime of today’s teachers, especially college professors, is the trashing of their students.
“My students are terrible,” is the common complaint. “They can’t write, they can’t calculate, and they can’t think. They are woefully ignorant! They just don’t measure up to the standards of the good old days when I was a student.” And those “good old days,” depending on the age of the critic, could be the 1940s, the ‘60s, or the ‘80s. Exaggeration aside, the complaint is that students today are not receiving the education that their predecessors did.
The facts, however, are a little more difficult to discern. Consider first of all that teachers have always complained about their students—“shop talk” style not unlike the complaints of sales representatives about their customers or employees about their bosses. Harvard Business School faculty in the 1950s complained about the math skills of their liberal-arts trained graduate students and a Harvard report in 1894 complained about grade inflation (quoted in Kohn).
I, too, have expressed complaints about my students’ skills, especially the handling of decimals, but my A students do know where the decimal point goes and the others have a variety of reasons why they don’t know or don’t care to demonstrate that they do know. Interest or desire, after all, is a major factor in determining what people learn. Some, perhaps many, students just may not be interested in the subject of the complaining teachers’ courses.
In my “good old days” of elementary school in the 1950s, it was common to have Jesuitical style contests at the chalkboard to see who could solve arithmetic problems the fastest. I was usually in the top three, but in a class of thirty-five students that leaves thirty-two who did not handle the math as well. Similarly for spelling. So what? Well, almost all of those thirty-two students at the time likely did not go on to college and some may not have graduated from high school; today, most of their counterparts are sitting in college classes.* Whatever one thinks of the normal curve as it applies to intelligence (or motivation), the lower ends of the curve are now in college and probably affecting test scores and grades (not that I think much of either) and demonstrating lesser knowledge and skill than I had back in those good old days.
This phenomenon could explain declining SAT scores (not that I think much of the SAT—it’s no longer referred to as an aptitude test and it predicts little about college success), as well as the lack of broad scale grade inflation that everyone assumes to exist. If grade inflation exists, it probably has occurred at the more elite institutions, the greater influx of weaker students in less prestigious schools keeping the grade point averages level or even declining (1). As education and social critic Alfie Kohn has said, “No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A's for the same work that used to receive B's or C's. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim” (2).
What about the change in curricula? Curricula change all the time. Teaching and understanding of the Greek language in ancient Roman schools declined in the latter part of the Empire (and, no doubt, teachers of Greek back then complained that their students didn’t know anything!). In the early nineteenth century US, the university core curriculum consisted of math, Latin and Greek language and literature, and a strong dose of protestant Christianity. Science and history did not appear until the last third of the nineteenth century. And western civilization courses did not appear until the 1920s. (Term projects, the attempt to give students some individual choice and initiative in education, are products of the progressives.)
I would, of course, like my students to be better informed about American and world history, but then again, I took two American history courses in junior and senior high school and at least one course on world history, but I only remember what I learned in college—when I was much more interested in the topic. And, oh yes, I was also taught, among other myths, that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. When I finally saw the Potomac as a young adult, I concluded, “Man, the Kansas City A’s sure could have used GW’s arm!”
And then there’s the “cacophony of teaching” that Lawrence Cremin (pp. 51-83) talked about in 1990. Teaching is everywhere, not just in the classroom. More so today with the Internet. That Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the early 1960s (p. 35) was seen on television by more people in one night than had seen it since it was first performed in 1600 should make English teachers everywhere praise television, not just condemn it.
Bottom line: it’s not easy to compare today’s students with their grandparents, especially when most of the grandparents did not attend college (or have television or the Internet) and may have quit high school to go straight into a blue-collar job. (And most of my students’ grandparents attended school, if at all, in Mexico, China, or Vietnam.) It is also important for teachers to introspect about their own motivations for complaining about students. Are teachers just patting themselves on the back for being smarter than their students?** Or are they genuinely concerned about teaching and, if so, why don’t they focus on the minds they are presented with and work to stretch them as far as the minds are capable. In the course of a year, one or two of the minds just might get turned on to the subject or method of the teacher and become eager to learn more.
After all, was it not one or two teachers that turned on the present teachers to become teachers? That’s how it happened for me. Inspiration, interest, motivation, method. Those are the fundamentals of a good teacher, not any particular subject matter. Get the light turned on in the student first. The subject matter will follow.
* Only 1.6% of the US population aged 15-24 was enrolled in college in 1900, 12% in 1950, and 38% in 2000 (1, 2). Other calculations indicate that 69% of high school graduates began college studies right after high school in 2005, whereas only 49% did in 1980—the implication being that the percentages were correspondingly smaller in earlier years.
** Teachers are motivated to learn. That’s why they become teachers. They love their subjects and tend to expect everyone else to love it the same as they do (an unrealistic expectation). And, because of their motivation, most were good students, perhaps very good students, but the normal curve again, in motivation—never mind intelligence, means that many of today’s students are not going to give a hoot about what the teacher is teaching. I think the critics delude themselves if they think their classmates in the good old days learned the multiplication tables or correct spelling or history, etc., as well as they did.
“My students are terrible,” is the common complaint. “They can’t write, they can’t calculate, and they can’t think. They are woefully ignorant! They just don’t measure up to the standards of the good old days when I was a student.” And those “good old days,” depending on the age of the critic, could be the 1940s, the ‘60s, or the ‘80s. Exaggeration aside, the complaint is that students today are not receiving the education that their predecessors did.
The facts, however, are a little more difficult to discern. Consider first of all that teachers have always complained about their students—“shop talk” style not unlike the complaints of sales representatives about their customers or employees about their bosses. Harvard Business School faculty in the 1950s complained about the math skills of their liberal-arts trained graduate students and a Harvard report in 1894 complained about grade inflation (quoted in Kohn).
I, too, have expressed complaints about my students’ skills, especially the handling of decimals, but my A students do know where the decimal point goes and the others have a variety of reasons why they don’t know or don’t care to demonstrate that they do know. Interest or desire, after all, is a major factor in determining what people learn. Some, perhaps many, students just may not be interested in the subject of the complaining teachers’ courses.
In my “good old days” of elementary school in the 1950s, it was common to have Jesuitical style contests at the chalkboard to see who could solve arithmetic problems the fastest. I was usually in the top three, but in a class of thirty-five students that leaves thirty-two who did not handle the math as well. Similarly for spelling. So what? Well, almost all of those thirty-two students at the time likely did not go on to college and some may not have graduated from high school; today, most of their counterparts are sitting in college classes.* Whatever one thinks of the normal curve as it applies to intelligence (or motivation), the lower ends of the curve are now in college and probably affecting test scores and grades (not that I think much of either) and demonstrating lesser knowledge and skill than I had back in those good old days.
This phenomenon could explain declining SAT scores (not that I think much of the SAT—it’s no longer referred to as an aptitude test and it predicts little about college success), as well as the lack of broad scale grade inflation that everyone assumes to exist. If grade inflation exists, it probably has occurred at the more elite institutions, the greater influx of weaker students in less prestigious schools keeping the grade point averages level or even declining (1). As education and social critic Alfie Kohn has said, “No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A's for the same work that used to receive B's or C's. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim” (2).
What about the change in curricula? Curricula change all the time. Teaching and understanding of the Greek language in ancient Roman schools declined in the latter part of the Empire (and, no doubt, teachers of Greek back then complained that their students didn’t know anything!). In the early nineteenth century US, the university core curriculum consisted of math, Latin and Greek language and literature, and a strong dose of protestant Christianity. Science and history did not appear until the last third of the nineteenth century. And western civilization courses did not appear until the 1920s. (Term projects, the attempt to give students some individual choice and initiative in education, are products of the progressives.)
I would, of course, like my students to be better informed about American and world history, but then again, I took two American history courses in junior and senior high school and at least one course on world history, but I only remember what I learned in college—when I was much more interested in the topic. And, oh yes, I was also taught, among other myths, that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. When I finally saw the Potomac as a young adult, I concluded, “Man, the Kansas City A’s sure could have used GW’s arm!”
And then there’s the “cacophony of teaching” that Lawrence Cremin (pp. 51-83) talked about in 1990. Teaching is everywhere, not just in the classroom. More so today with the Internet. That Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the early 1960s (p. 35) was seen on television by more people in one night than had seen it since it was first performed in 1600 should make English teachers everywhere praise television, not just condemn it.
Bottom line: it’s not easy to compare today’s students with their grandparents, especially when most of the grandparents did not attend college (or have television or the Internet) and may have quit high school to go straight into a blue-collar job. (And most of my students’ grandparents attended school, if at all, in Mexico, China, or Vietnam.) It is also important for teachers to introspect about their own motivations for complaining about students. Are teachers just patting themselves on the back for being smarter than their students?** Or are they genuinely concerned about teaching and, if so, why don’t they focus on the minds they are presented with and work to stretch them as far as the minds are capable. In the course of a year, one or two of the minds just might get turned on to the subject or method of the teacher and become eager to learn more.
After all, was it not one or two teachers that turned on the present teachers to become teachers? That’s how it happened for me. Inspiration, interest, motivation, method. Those are the fundamentals of a good teacher, not any particular subject matter. Get the light turned on in the student first. The subject matter will follow.
* Only 1.6% of the US population aged 15-24 was enrolled in college in 1900, 12% in 1950, and 38% in 2000 (1, 2). Other calculations indicate that 69% of high school graduates began college studies right after high school in 2005, whereas only 49% did in 1980—the implication being that the percentages were correspondingly smaller in earlier years.
** Teachers are motivated to learn. That’s why they become teachers. They love their subjects and tend to expect everyone else to love it the same as they do (an unrealistic expectation). And, because of their motivation, most were good students, perhaps very good students, but the normal curve again, in motivation—never mind intelligence, means that many of today’s students are not going to give a hoot about what the teacher is teaching. I think the critics delude themselves if they think their classmates in the good old days learned the multiplication tables or correct spelling or history, etc., as well as they did.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Sound or Independent Judgment?
In contrast, independent judgment, which presupposes sensible decision making, is not often cited as a valued goal of either education or adulthood, yet this is the personality and character trait that should be exhibited by all citizens of a fully free society. Independent judgment, and its practical consequence, independent action, should be a fundamental aim of both parenting and education. What is independent judgment and why is it not encouraged by parents and teachers?
Independence is the more common term that parents and teachers use to describe what they think children should achieve as adults, but this usually means the ability to pay one’s own bills, by providing one’s own food, shelter, and clothing without parental help. The mental act of asserting something as fact and doing so entirely on one’s own is independent judgment. The willingness to act on what one has judged to be right, in the face of disapproval and opposition, is independent action. True independence is the ability and willingness to see and say that the emperor has no clothes.
In history, both Socrates and Galileo exhibited this true independence, both to their detriment. Socrates (1, 2) could have bowed to the will of the majority and stopped upsetting the Athenian elite, but he chose not to and was put to death for his independence. Galileo (1, 2) did capitulate to the Inquisition, but nonetheless was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life. In literature, Henrik Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People (1, 2) stood steadfastly to his judgment while one by one losing nearly all who were supposedly his friends. Independent judgment and action are not well tolerated by those who are not themselves independent.
Some advocates of sensible decision making may argue that Socrates, Galileo, and Stockmann, by stirring up the hornet’s nests in which they were trying to work, were not being reasonable. But there are two issues here: are the advocates of sensible decision making saying that these three men should have given up their judgments in order to conform to the majority? or are they saying that independent judgment does not require sacrifices when under duress? The principle of self-defense indeed does say that it is morally equivalent to fight or flee when threatened with force. Rejecting self-sacrifice as a noble ideal, as I do, Socrates probably should have escaped to live in exile. Ibsen’s Stockmann remained to fight partly because he assumed that many of his so-called friends were on his side but mainly because fighting was the right thing to do. Giving in as a pretense, which is what Galileo did, is a third option. Abject conformity or sacrificing one’s independent judgment was not considered by any of these men.
The problem with sound judgment as a goal of education is that it often becomes interpreted as conformity or conventionality. A free society requires rebels—people like Socrates, Galileo, and Stockmann whose independence leads them to see and say what the majority cannot. People with independent judgment are the innovators and entrepreneurs who move economies and societies forward. They rock boats, not necessarily on purpose, but because they see things others do not. The challenge is, can independent judgment be taught? and can every person possess such a trait? My answers are: indirectly and yes.
Independent judgment is first and foremost the correct perception of reality that is not influenced or contaminated by the perceptions of others. Misinformation is not a goal of education, so teaching facts is a start, but encouraging children and students to pursue their own goals and ideas without commands, criticism, and ridicule is better. This will enable them to develop the conviction that they can do anything they set their minds to—regardless of what others say or do. Freedom and nurture in the learning process, not coercion or neglect, are two requirements for instilling an independent and confident spirit in the child and student.
So can everyone in adulthood possess this childlike independent and confident spirit that says “the emperor has no clothes”? Why not? That many adults today do not possess such a spirit indicates only that something is terribly wrong with our educational system such that it kills the spirit.
By about the fifth grade, according to John Holt (p. 263).
Monday, November 26, 2007
"It's Just Being Turned into a Business"
This lament is often heard today about medicine and education, among other fields. Business, however, is the last thing medicine and education have been turned into. Bureaus of the government would be a more accurate description. Why the confusion between bureaucracy and business?
The simplest answer is that most people do not understand the difference between the two. A bureaucracy, as Ludwig von Mises points out, is an organization dominated by methods of managing the affairs of government, whereas a business is dominated by the goal of making a profit through customer satisfaction.
Bureaucracy, or rather, bureaucratic management, is a set of rules and a budget handed down from a higher authority to guide the running of a government department, such as the police, the courts, or the military. A business may have guidelines, usually called policies, and each department within the organization may have a budget, but the ultimate yardstick by which business activity is evaluated is profit-making by producing need- and want-satisfying products. When market conditions change, meaning customer needs and wants have changed, policies and budgets must be adapted lest the company fail to keep up with the competition and go out of business. Bureaucracy has no such ultimate yardstick. That is why the rules and budgets of government offices often ossify leading to the familiar refrain of the bureaucrat: "Rules are rules, fella; I don't make 'em, I just enforce 'em."
When bureaucratic rules, in the form of laws and regulations of business, intrude on the marketplace, businesses that are regulated will take on the characteristics of bureaucracies. This is because the laws and regulations of our mixed economy deflect attention away from profit-making through customer satisfaction to compliance with the rules of the bureaucracy. And the rules almost never coincide with what is best for the market. Ossification sets in and a "rules are rules" mentality eventually takes over. To the extent that a business is regulated by the government, to that extent it will be bureaucratic. Small businesses, except for local zoning ordinances and licensing requirements, usually escape regulation, that is, until they grow in size to a certain number of employees or level of sales; more rules, then, kick in.
Bureaucracy does not mean a large, hierarchically structured organization, such as General Motors or the Department of Justice. This is the popular misconception given by the media and management professors. General Motors is a private business that is highly regulated by the government; bureaucratic intrusions into the profit-making, customer-satisfying operation of the company are what make GM today seem so bureaucratic, not its size or structure. The Department of Justice makes no pretense at being a private business; it was founded as a bureaucracy.
The postal service, on the other hand, does pretend to be a business by mimicking the operations of private enterprise, such as subtracting costs from revenues and conducting market research surveys. But the post office is so thoroughly regulated and controlled by the government—it is a quasi-governmental agency under the executive branch—that it is a joke to consider it anything other than a bureaucracy. Public schools and state universities are government entities, making them bureaucracies by definition; private schools are highly regulated by the education czars and so are nearly as bureaucratic. Almost all operators of both types of school abhor the prospect of making a profit or of having to satisfy paying customers.
Yet occasionally the trustees of these institutions will demand that expenses be accounted for or that pay be tied to merit. This is when the screams of faculty are heard to say that education is just being turned into a business. More accurately, the demands are the bureaucracy trying to mimic business accountability by imposing additional rules on the system. The result is a stilted, heavy-handed decree of arbitrary edicts administered by a "rules are rules" mentality. (And pay tied to merit becomes a political popularity contest.) Add to this the fact that education today, which once was controlled at the local and state level, is rapidly becoming nationalized by the US Department of Education and you have education as a bureau of the national government.
The same attempts at mimicking business accountability can be seen in medicine with the cartel-imposed cost constraints of the insurance industry and Medicare. Medicine is hardly a free market today, nor was it prior to the current health-maintenance-organization/Medicare era. In the early twentieth century, the licensing monopoly of the American Medical Association drastically reduced the number of medical schools and hospitals and continues to keep that number low (1, 2, 3). The mess that we have now is just one bureaucratic monstrosity piled on top of the previous model. Calls for cost containment and accountability are not the calls of free enterprise. They are the panicked cries of bureaucrats who have no clue what they are doing.
But they do have their rules and the rules must be enforced.
The simplest answer is that most people do not understand the difference between the two. A bureaucracy, as Ludwig von Mises points out, is an organization dominated by methods of managing the affairs of government, whereas a business is dominated by the goal of making a profit through customer satisfaction.
Bureaucracy, or rather, bureaucratic management, is a set of rules and a budget handed down from a higher authority to guide the running of a government department, such as the police, the courts, or the military. A business may have guidelines, usually called policies, and each department within the organization may have a budget, but the ultimate yardstick by which business activity is evaluated is profit-making by producing need- and want-satisfying products. When market conditions change, meaning customer needs and wants have changed, policies and budgets must be adapted lest the company fail to keep up with the competition and go out of business. Bureaucracy has no such ultimate yardstick. That is why the rules and budgets of government offices often ossify leading to the familiar refrain of the bureaucrat: "Rules are rules, fella; I don't make 'em, I just enforce 'em."
When bureaucratic rules, in the form of laws and regulations of business, intrude on the marketplace, businesses that are regulated will take on the characteristics of bureaucracies. This is because the laws and regulations of our mixed economy deflect attention away from profit-making through customer satisfaction to compliance with the rules of the bureaucracy. And the rules almost never coincide with what is best for the market. Ossification sets in and a "rules are rules" mentality eventually takes over. To the extent that a business is regulated by the government, to that extent it will be bureaucratic. Small businesses, except for local zoning ordinances and licensing requirements, usually escape regulation, that is, until they grow in size to a certain number of employees or level of sales; more rules, then, kick in.
Bureaucracy does not mean a large, hierarchically structured organization, such as General Motors or the Department of Justice. This is the popular misconception given by the media and management professors. General Motors is a private business that is highly regulated by the government; bureaucratic intrusions into the profit-making, customer-satisfying operation of the company are what make GM today seem so bureaucratic, not its size or structure. The Department of Justice makes no pretense at being a private business; it was founded as a bureaucracy.
The postal service, on the other hand, does pretend to be a business by mimicking the operations of private enterprise, such as subtracting costs from revenues and conducting market research surveys. But the post office is so thoroughly regulated and controlled by the government—it is a quasi-governmental agency under the executive branch—that it is a joke to consider it anything other than a bureaucracy. Public schools and state universities are government entities, making them bureaucracies by definition; private schools are highly regulated by the education czars and so are nearly as bureaucratic. Almost all operators of both types of school abhor the prospect of making a profit or of having to satisfy paying customers.
Yet occasionally the trustees of these institutions will demand that expenses be accounted for or that pay be tied to merit. This is when the screams of faculty are heard to say that education is just being turned into a business. More accurately, the demands are the bureaucracy trying to mimic business accountability by imposing additional rules on the system. The result is a stilted, heavy-handed decree of arbitrary edicts administered by a "rules are rules" mentality. (And pay tied to merit becomes a political popularity contest.) Add to this the fact that education today, which once was controlled at the local and state level, is rapidly becoming nationalized by the US Department of Education and you have education as a bureau of the national government.
The same attempts at mimicking business accountability can be seen in medicine with the cartel-imposed cost constraints of the insurance industry and Medicare. Medicine is hardly a free market today, nor was it prior to the current health-maintenance-organization/Medicare era. In the early twentieth century, the licensing monopoly of the American Medical Association drastically reduced the number of medical schools and hospitals and continues to keep that number low (1, 2, 3). The mess that we have now is just one bureaucratic monstrosity piled on top of the previous model. Calls for cost containment and accountability are not the calls of free enterprise. They are the panicked cries of bureaucrats who have no clue what they are doing.
But they do have their rules and the rules must be enforced.
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