Monday, April 29, 2019

The myth of higher education


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.