Imagine going to a doctor’s office and the receptionist
telling you “The doctor cannot see you until you pass a test showing that you
are in good health.” It is of course
absurd on its face, but like with most obvious things, it is worth pointing out
why. It is absurd because it is a
vicious circle or “catch 22” –reasoning taking the form “to have A you must
have B, but you cannot have B without having A.”
Yet, the absurdity of this vicious circle fallacy all but
disappears when it comes to education.
You cannot be admitted to a university unless you pass a test showing
that you have “scholastic aptitude” which in plain English means that you are
already educated. That college entrance
exams are not seen as a “catch 22” absurdity can mean only one thing –that the
role of universities is to provide not education but something else that
requires education. That “something” is
credentials or a glorified letter of recommendation saying that the bearer is
worth admitting to a club that excludes mot other people.
The idea that the main social function of universities is
dispensation of credentials on which social inequalities are built is, of
course, not new. It has been well
documented in research (see for example Randall Collins, “The Credential
Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification”). Less clear is the idea that colleges do not
provide education, but rather use it as a material to create their final
product – credentials- for which they take credit and charge a hefty price.
To use the medical analogy again, the role of the school is
not that of a doctor but that of a midwife.
The role of the doctor is to take a patient who lost his natural state –
health – and return him to that natural state.
By contrast, the role of the midwife is to merely assist what she can
already do naturally – give birth. In
fact, if the patient could not give birth naturally, this situation would call
for a doctor rather than a midwife.
Likewise, universities merely assist people who have “scholastic
aptitude,” that is, who are already educated in finding a path that leads them
to socially prestigious or desirable jobs.
To perform this function, they need to make sure that their students already
have education, because they need it but they cannot create it themselves, just
like midwives cannot bring sick patients back to health. This is also what fundamentally sets apart
universities and similar institutions of “higher” education, from primary and
secondary educational institutions, which actually help their students to
acquire education rather than leeching on the education they already have to
sell their products. This is evidenced,
among other, by the fact that primary and secondary education institutions do
not require “aptitude” tests as an admission requirement, like most
universities do.
Virtually all people, save those with congenital brain
defects, are naturally born with a “scholastic aptitude” that is, the capacity
to learn, examine facts, communicate, and think. This capacity is first manifested by learning
a language, by far, the most complex and intricate system of thought invented
by humans. Learning a language is by far
the biggest and most fundamental human task without which no further education would
be possible. Yet virtually all people accomplish
this task mostly on their own, without help from any “educational institutions,”
at least initially. However, the
learning of a language is a very lengthy process that is contingent on the
development of cognitive capacities that for humans take about 16 years.
This is where the primary and secondary educational
institutions fit in. Human language is
an extensive and complex creation. Acquisition
of it requires constant practice and by that virtue, a lot of time and a fair
amount of help from fellow humans. Here
is where the primary and secondary educational institutions come in. Their role is to act as a midwife in the
language acquisition process. They fulfill
that role by setting aside a block of time dedicated primarily for practicing
cognitive tasks necessary for language acquisition, by creating a safe space
that shelters the students from outside interruptions, and by providing role
models (teachers) for students to emulate.
The distinction between primary and secondary institutions
in this context is mostly arbitrary, rooted in institutional administration and
competition that schools faces with societal demands for child labor. Historically, primary institutions were for
all children while secondary institutions only for those children who did not
face urgent demand for their labor. But
form a cognitive point of view the services provided by both types of schools
were closely tied to the development of cognitive capacities in the human
child, which reached the full potential in the late adolescence. The service these institutions provide aim at
aiding a natural development process with something that learners may not be
able to get on their own – opportunity and safe and enriching environment. This is why these institutions generally
eschew any “admission tests” and rely mainly on diagnostic testing aiming
potential deficiencies in acquiring necessary skills.
Any cognitive differences that emerge during this process
are due largely to external circumstances that affect the student
learning. This predominantly takes the
form of parental influence that makes all the difference in the world – sometimes
by providing nurturing learning environment, but by far more often, by royally screwing
up children in one way or another, e.g. by abandon and neglect or by turning
them into hypercompetitive psychopaths. Parents
are often child’s worst enemy as far education is concerned. Social environment
is another factor. If most people around
you are teachers, doctors or engineers you want to learn to be like them. If otoh most are petty crooks, hookers and
drug dealers, you do not need any education be one of those.
That changes rather dramatically in the tertiary educational
institutions aka universities. Unlike
other types of schools, universities provide services to adults who, form a
biological point of view, have fully formed cognitive capacities. Therefore, the type of education these
institutions provide serve a rather different function – the acquisition of
highly specialized jargon used by esoteric groups and cults. Initially, universities served organized
religion by training its clergy in in the arcane sophistries of theological speculation. Later, they became finishing schools for the children
of aristocracy and wealthy businessmen, teaching them proper manners and forms
of talk before they assumed the role of managing their family estates.
However, in the 19th century that role changed
and universities were expected to educate their students in the arcana of
scientific knowledge. This change came
with the emergence of professions, such as medicine or engineering, whose claim
to jurisdiction over certain types of economic activity rested on possessing a
certain type of scientific knowledge.
What set the professional apart from the medieval guilds was that skills
possessed by guild members were transmitted from other members of that guild,
and thus were specific to that guild, whereas knowledge claimed by the professions
was universal and independent of profession membership (cf. Andrew Abbott, “The
System of Professions”). While the guild
system of knowledge transmission was very effective in maintaining the guild monopoly
for that knowledge, it also had inherently limited capacity of transmitting that
knowledge to areas beyond the guild control.
This was a fatal weakness in the area of capitalist expansion to wide
geographical areas. The universal knowledge
claimed by the professions, by contrast, was easily transferable across
different areas, but to be truly universal, this knowledge had to be produced
outside the system of professions.
In this context, universities assumed the role of transmission
and production of such scientific role. In
the United States, this new function was introduced by the Johns Hopkins University
in 1876 that, unlike the New England finishing schools for business aristocracy
and clergy, integrated education and scientific research based on the German
model. But this model was quickly adopted
by other institutions, as the demand for scientific knowledge fueled by the
development of professions grew. Alas,
the university produced scientific knowledge faced one problem from the
professional practice point of view. It
was universal, and thus open the entry to the professions to anyone who possessed
it. The professions initially solved
this problem by following the guild example, by creating a credential system, administered
by professional associations and later by the state, as a requirement for
practicing a profession.
Universities developed their own credentialing system as well,
in form of admission tests. The problem
they faced in this task was that those tests could not simply test general
knowledge, because they would not sufficiently discriminate between those
select few deemed worthy admitting to an exclusive club, and the rest who could
also master the required general knowledge.
This problem was solved by the introduction of “scholastic aptitude”
tests. The ingenuity or perhaps turpitude
of that solution was that while on surface it appeared to be an objective test
of knowledge and cognitive skills, it reality it was anything but that. To perform its discriminatory function, the “scholastic
aptitude” had to produce the so-called “curve” (aka the “normal distribution”
or “Bell curve”) in which the vast majority of test takes occupy the central part
of the curve, and a small number of takers are in the either end of that
curve. Those test takers on the “high”
end of the curve are deemed to have the “right scholastic aptitude” that makes
them eligible for admission to a club from which everyone else is
excluded.
This is the genius part of this solution. The turpitude part, like in sausage, lies in
how this this thing is made. The test is
constructed in such a way that it must always produce a “curve” – if it does
not – it is modified until it does. In practice
this means that the test consist of a relatively easy questions that most takers
can answer, which is necessary to produce the middle part of the curve, it also
introduces artificial stress in the form of short and rigidly controlled timing
that makes answering all questions very difficult. Those who can cope with this artificial
stress can answer more questions and thus fall on the “high” end of the
curve. However, this is contingent on
two factors – practice and knowing a few tricks and shortcuts how to answer
certain questions without actually solving their underlying problems –which in
turn require a lot of preparation, for which the test takers have to pay. A lot.
However, the “scholastic aptitude” test is not the only scam
that universities practice. A much
bigger scam is what is going on for the four or so years after the select few
have been admitted to these exclusive clubs.
The education these institutions provide, and for which they charge $50k
or so dollars per year, can be easily acquired by most adults at evening classes
at local community colleges or on line at a small fraction of the college
tuition. Most of what is going on those
campuses are “finishing school activities” – learning proper manners and forms
of speech and getting the right social connections. That is all that there is to this so called “higher
education.”
In a nutshell, the main function of universities in modern society
is reproduction and legitimation of social inequality. While these institutions provide some
education, in that role they act more like a midwife by helping students to
educate themselves. The prices they charge
for this service, at least in the US, are an outright scam. So if someone is trying to bribe a wrong
person to get admitted to this fraudulent system, this is really trying to beat
the system at its own game, by selling shit to a shyster.
