Re: Townhall.com – 2/10/2009 – “De-Programming Students” – Thomas Sowell

School indoctrination is nothing new.

I grew up during the era where we were taught that almost any ally of our country was “good” and a “friend” and any supporter of Soviet Communism was “bad” and an “enemy”. One day in class, just after hearing on the radio the night before that Juan Peron had just arrested virtually all of Argentina’s opposition newspaper editors for criticizing his rule, my teacher yet once again repeated that dumb “good/friend” statement. I raised my hand and asked her whether it was good to arrest journalists who disagreed with the government, and whether Peron was a great friend of Argentina’s free press. I earned no points with my teacher that day.

By the time children get to school (certainly by the time they learn to read) they should have been taught by their parents that not everything they read or are told in school is necessarily 100% true and belong to one of three “truth classes”: some things are true (or false) and rational dispute about these things should end once all the facts are known; some things are a matter of opinion for which debate can be endless but truth and falsity are not relevant attributes; and for some things it really doesn’t matter if they are true (or false) because if you do not behave as if they are true (or false) you will be punished. And children should have learned which kinds of things belong in which truth class. No student should be so unprepared for education that the student should not be able to question and even challenge professorial opinions (within the structure of the class) with questions and on exams. I and all my friends did.

Surprisingly, I found my high school education slightly on the “conservative” side and my college education miraculously unbiased even though I took several courses in government and philosophy, areas where you would expect professorial bias --- presumably because my university stressed intellectual process over opinion. My graduate degrees were in the hard sciences, where issues of political (and even scientific) bias are hardly relevant.  When I left industry for academia as a professor, I found my academic colleagues slightly on the liberal side. I guess that means in my experience, either education has little net bias or education has moved from slightly conservative to slightly liberal, either in time or as I progressed from elementary to graduate school. At any case, the conservative to liberal change, if it existed at all, was relatively minor.

But confronting educational bias builds the ability to think as others might --- a very desirable intellectual skill and is a skill too often inadequately developed. Winning people over to your side requires you to speak to their loves and fears, not your own, and effective negotiation requires you to understand what is the value to you and those you wish to win over, and seek to trade off something of no value to you but great value to the others for something that is of great value to you but no real value to the others. Looking thru the eyes of those who you disagree with is just as valuable as looking thru your own eyes, so long as you can tell the difference. Exposure to bias different from your own is good for you. I get the impression that Sowell sees education as a process of indoctrination instead of a process of developing reasoning and communication skills that enables the educated to formulate and communicate rational opinions.

When I see people complain about not including anti global warming study along side of pro global warming study or Creationism along side evolution, I an reminded of how many of those complainers are the ones who want to prohibit discussion of most birth control methods but allow discussion of “just say no” birth control. Bias exists at the left, the right, and in the center. We ought to learn to live with the biases of others to the same extent that we expect them to live with ours, and if nothing else, gain something from being forced to deal with biases, either ours or theirs.

Re: The Heritage Foundation – Issues – Education – 1/26/2009 – “Ten Reasons Why the “Economic Stimulus” Should Not Include Education Spending” – Dan Lips

There are lots of different “stimulus” proposals. I’d like to address just one set, “Postsecondary Education Programs”, and explain why Lips is wrong about several of the “Top Ten Reasons Why this Education Spending Plan Is the Wrong Approach”.

Reason 1. “Increasing federal spending on education will not improve the economy” I find it hard to believe that Lips can believe that improving the intellectual skills of the labor pool by producing more college educated workers will not help the economy. Federal student scholarship support has been a major reason why the number of college educated citizens is as high as it is, especially among the lower economic classes. Whatever Lips’ personal beliefs are about the efficiency of private vs government spending, surely even Lips must admit that there is far less private scholarship aid than needed to meet demand, or that college managed federal scholarship support is any less efficient than privately funded scholarship support.

Reason 2. “A federal bailout for state governments is irresponsible” Lips says “shifting the burden from states and localities to federal taxpayers is irresponsible, since funding public education is primarily a state and local, rather than federal, responsibility”. While I would agree with this view for pre-college education, college education has always had more than a local focus, that even state colleges have significant numbers of out-of-state students, that graduates of state colleges often move to other states where their education enriches the skill levels of their new home state’s employment pool, and that academic research benefits all states, not just the ones where the research is performed. The federal government has always (at least in my academic lifetime stretching back to 1960) been a major supporter of state universities, and that support extends back in time to the Morrill Acts Of 1862 and 1890 that established the Land Grant colleges and universities, the Hatch Act of 1887 establishing agricultural experimental stations, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 that established co-operative extensions. Certainly when I left industry to teach at a Jesuit university in 1980, much of the student support money available was federal. If Lips yearns for the pre 1860’s level of federal support for higher education, I suppose he is entitled to his yearnings. But to call federal support “irresponsible” is just irresponsible.

Reason 5. “History shows that increasing college subsi¬dies have not solved the real problem of higher education affordability”.  History has shown that no single solution ever solved the problem of higher education affordability. The cost of higher education keeps rising faster than inflation for many reasons, among them: increasing demand for higher education and more slowly increasing supply (high cost of creating or expanding current facilities and difficulty attracting competent professors limits supply) results in higher free market prices; the technological needs that institutions of higher education face (library resources, computer facilities, scientific apparatus) are expensive; and finally, the scope of knowledge that higher education must support grows faster than the population, so provide study in all disciplines means increasing faculty faster than students. Quality has its costs, and if academic institutions are to provide high quality educational opportunities in all disciplines, per student costs are likely to increase faster than the general rate of inflation.  

Re: Townhall.com – 12/02/2008 – “Freedom and the Left” – Thomas Sowell

Sowell says of educational institutions that require community service as a curricular requirement “The arrogance of commandeering young people's time, instead of leaving them and their parents free to decide for themselves how to use that time, is exceeded only by the arrogance of imposing your own notions as to what is or is not a service to the community.” Doesn’t Sowell realize that it is the job of educators to define what educational experiences are required of their students, and if educators are to be considered arrogant for doing their job, so be it. And doesn’t Sowell realize that a university’s choice of the service it may require of its students reflects primarily the value of that service to the student’s academic/intellectual development and to other intra-university issues and not to the value of that service to the community outside the university.

The relationship of the university with its students (and/or the parents of its students) is a contractual one. The university provides an educational program that the student (or parent) buys into with tuition. If the student fails to meet his/her obligations under the contract, the university can hold the student in breach and expel him/her without a degree. If the university fails its obligation to provide the educational opportunities it has promised or if the student decides he/she no longer wants to participate in the opportunities offered in the educational program, the student is free to walk away from the program. Regardless of the reason for pre-graduation departure, the student keeps all the academic credits he/she has earned under the contract. If the student completes the academic program requirements, the university is obligated to award the promised degree. Tuition and degree progress are benchmarked by academic time periods (usually semesters, trimesters, or quarters) and/or specific courses taken. Nobody is forced to do anything --- everything is by agreement.

I object to Sowell’s model of a university degree where the students (or the students’ parents) dictate the content of academic programs --- this may be a reasonable model for pay-on-demand tutoring but not for a university degree program. Universities are pretty good at providing educational degree programs and doing basic research and not that good at anything else. What Sowell wants universities to provide is some sort of training that would make students and parents happy. Rather than change the universities, students and parents who don’t want a university education should go elsewhere, leaving universities to provide the service that they are good at providing to those who want and/or need that service.

It may be that parents, working independently from one another, could somehow run a university better than teams of professional academic administrators and educators, but I know of no evidence supporting that conclusion. If parents feel that way, let them establish their own schools administered under that model.

It may be that commerce based on a consensus of customers that excludes the opinions of suppliers could work better than free market transactions between customers and suppliers, but I know of no evidence supporting that conclusion. If Sowell is really a believer in the free market system, he should drop his Communistic-like “dictatorship of the customers” model of commerce and adopt one where both buyers and sellers participate in determining what goods or services get put on the market. There is plenty of demand for university education as it is and there is plenty of room to establish alternative schools following a model that Sowell and those who agree with him might desire.

I take strong issue with Sowell’s views of on-campus ROTC educational programs. Academics other than anti-war types have problems with ROTC programs on campus. At Seattle U (where I was on faculty) I participated in an academic review of the ROTC program. The greatest problem I had with our ROTC program was that it was ultimately controlled by non-university military personnel who determine curricula and staffing, a situation that is allowed in no other program, and that the ROTC program was loaded up with non-academic “training”. While I supported the ROTC program in its academic review, I would have much preferred a purely academic program in military science (history, strategy, tactics, logistics, etc) under the control of university administrators and university employed academics (presumably mostly retired military) meeting standard academic requirements such as PhD degrees in Military Science or related subjects. The program I would have preferred probably would not meet ROTC’s military training goals, but I think universities are designed to educate, not train, and the training the military has inserted into ROTC (in my opinion) does not really belong in a university program.