The Breakdown of Higher Education
This new book by John M. Ellis certainly deals with a topic that’s timely – or actually, somewhat behind the times, because the damage the left has done to education has already been so great. Apparently, the last section of the book deals with suggested solutions, which sounds valuable.
Of course, it’s not just higher education that’s broken down. Lower schools are most definitely involved as well. It’s very late and getting later.
Tom Cotton has an interesting proposal, but it has no chance of passing in the current Congress:
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts. Schools that teach the 1619 Project would also be ineligible for federal professional-development grants.
Under the bill, the Secretaries of Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture would be required to prorate federal funding to schools that decide to teach the 1619 Project—determined by how much it costs to plan and teach that curriculum. Any federal funds intended for low-income students or special-needs students are not affected by this legislation.
“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage,” said Cotton.
“Censorship! Thought control! ” will be the cry of those who favor the 1619 Project’s adoption in our school systems. But at what point is the federal government required to support all the decisions of local school boards? Nothing in the bill prohibits the teaching of the mendacious 1619 Project’s alternative history (or for that matter, all the other leftist history that’s been taught in school systems for many years). It merely says that the federal government shouldn’t have to pay for it.
A radical idea, I know.
Although I don’t think there is any legitimate reason for not opening up the schools this fall, there is a part of me that wishes the public school system would never open again and we could just start over from scratch. It seems the children most in need of what decent schools could offer are trapped in a dysfunctional system that leaves them functionally illiterate. The amount of information that is now available to any curious person for free is far beyond what most people could have imagined a few years ago but few take advantage of it. I may be biased because I hated school and more or less stopped going when I was 11 but there must be a better way to prepare kids for the world than the current public school system.
John Ellis (Professor Emeritus of German at UC Santa Cruz) wrote an excellent book some years ago entitled Literature Lost:Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities), and he appeared last month on Mark Levin’s program, some of which is available on Fox Video. He belongs to a dying breed, the professor who has acquired wisdom and expertise in a legitimate field of academic inquiry and wishes to pass along his learning; one generation from now, his kind will almost certainly have gone extinct.
Speaking of radical ideas, we could acknowledge that the federal government has no business in education at all. The national government is supposed to be one of specific, limited, enumerated powers, with all the rest reserved to the states and/or the people. If you look at Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution (https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8), you will find nothing even remotely related to education. But starting in the 30’s, the Constitutional framework has been turned on its head by the Supreme Court. Here, as pretty much everywhere, the vehicle for the national government to regulate what they have no authority to do is the power of the purse.
If we had anything approaching the governmental structure that is set out in the Constitution, we would have so much less national government in our lives, and the stakes in our presidential elections would be reduced accordingly.
This clip of Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein on academic stagnation is very good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt7Olnm1oL4
Meh. There is one thing the federal government can do and that’s get out of the way of reformers at the state level. And ‘get out of the way’ means court-stripping bills so federal judges cannot get in the way.
Ideally, the flow of funds from the federal government to local authorities would consist of:
1. Small fee-for-service payments (e.g. renting office space).
2. Payment-in-lieu of taxes on federal property
3. Indemnities awarded by (one hopes) impartial tribunals for unintentional torts arising from regulatory decisions (provided the locality in question had joined and paid premiums to an actuarial pool).
4. Disaster relief (ideally aid to repair public works and haul away debris and not much else).
5. Grants to finance Indian resservations.
And that’s it
Ideally, aid to state and territorial government would be reduced in short order to
1. The finance of Medicaid
2. The finance of unemployment compensation.
3. The finance of maintenance of long-haul Interstates (ideally with toll revenue).
4. A general grant distributed according to formulae
5. The occasional aid of the sort granted localities (payment-in-lieu of taxes excepted).
And that’s it.
If we were sensible, federal grants to higher education, public and private, would be nil. Federal student aid would be limited to (1) federal employees and interns, as part of their training, (2) veterans benefits, (3) residents of the smaller insular dependencies, (4) military dependents, (5) the dependents of federal civilian employees posted abroad, (6) itinerant families (e.g. circus performers), and (7) reservation Indians.
As for the Department of Education, append the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the statistical collection services to the Labor Department; set up an independent regulatory agency (or an appendage of the Federal Trade Commission) to regulate the interstate transactions between student and institution; set up a resolution authority to wind down the current federal student aid program; distribute residual federal student aid programs to the military, the VA, Personnel Management, and a new department / agency which offers small-scale welfare programs. Terminate every other program of the Education Department and SHUT IT DOWN.
I left academia over what it was becoming, which is little more than diploma mills and vocational training. The flagship state universities and the Harvards will have it happen last.
In every state, the higher education system is the largest state employer, with teaching staff being only a tiny fraction of the total. Higher education nowadays makes sense only when viewed as a jobs program. K-12 has long served that function. Every year I get this glossy publication from my local school district and you can see how many people work there who have nothing to do with teaching.
I left academia over what it was becoming, which is little more than diploma mills and vocational training.
There’s nothing wrong with vocational training. The problem is pseudo-vocational training. (See teacher-training, social work, and library administration).
@Art Deco:There’s nothing wrong with vocational training.
Not with vocational training as such. But universities are supposed to offer education. They are not supposed to offer vocational training in place of education and slapping a bachelor’s degree on the result, or charge students four years’ university tuition for what could have been had for two years’ trade school tuition.
If a university wishes to offer vocational training in place of education, let them stop calling themselves universities.
Curtis Yarvin = The Great Mencius Moldbug on the Universities becoming the State Church:
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-paul-graham
OT, but anything new by Angelo Codevilla should be of interest to readers of this blog:
https://americanmind.org/essays/the-covid-coup/
@Frederick:
Bingo. Vocational Training, let alone disciplines such as Engineering, Medicine, anything IT-related, do not belong in a University. There should be flow of people and ideas back and forth between whatever institutions *do* train practitioners ad perform research in these fields and Real Universities, but the two types of institutions should be identifiably separate.
Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University describes something close to the Platonic Form of one.
Would also add that a big problem in the Anglosphere is lack of appreciation and respect for solid respectable vocational trades. Germans and Japanese get this much more right. No mistake that they manufacture most of the stuff that is not crap in this world.
Most of the population would be happier in vocational trades. Fewer than now would be happier in the Professions, and fewest of all need, deserve, or are capable of benefiting from the ideal university education. A proper grounding in the Trivium, Classics, and Humanism in general might well have made me more dangerously obnoxious than less so…:P so I don’t necessarily speak from a position of Olympian detachment here. Point is we’re doing it all wrong.
To take one profession; plumber.
It takes skill to do the job. You also have to be able to diagnose issues. But if you’re going to be self-employed, you also have to know how to run a business. You have to be at least somewhat of a people person.
Lots of plumbers are subcontractors in at least part of their work. They have to satisfy the general by showing up on time, completing the work on time, and cleaning up after themselves. They have to be available at least from time to time to help a general with a contingency. Otherwise somebody else gets the jobs. This sort of thing might be taught, or taught at, students in a vocational setting, but not everybody who’s good with a pipe wrench is going to get it.
The cheerful plumber who has a place up north, as we say in Michigan, is good craftsman, a good businessman, and good with people.
Several years ago, we had ordered a new toilet for our powder room on account of the old one leaking. Didn’t come in. Family Christmas party shortly. The plumber we call without hesitation for anything got us a loaner. Top that.
Talking with the HVAC guy some time back. He said he and his daughter ride both western and dressage. I was impressed, thinking about the expense. Of which I knew little until my granddaughters began competing in western, dressage, and English. I wonder if he ever regretted not going to college.
The guy clearing our septic tank remarked that he drove wreckers on weekends. We chatted about driving trucks and the occasional difficulties with trailers. He said that when his family go on vacation, they have a thirty-five foot travel trailer and he has to plan ahead about various items.
For the other education, there’s always your library card.
^^^— This.
I’ve had Loaner Cars, but a Loaner Toilet must require membership of a far more exclusive club!
Re Library Card: I recommend you don’t go look too closely at your local blue-haired, bepierced and tatted Book Burners LARPing it as Librarians 😀
Good solid foundational education in the basics needed for going it alone *and* getting along with people + maybe vocational training + a healthy dose of auto-didacticism is a Good Thing.
Problem with Autodidacts is that you get the occasional Austrian Corporal. Problem with Universities is that you get the more frequent Pol Pot. No perfect solutions in this vale of tears.
It used to be, and not all that long ago, engineers and architects could work, then take the exams, and get their licenses that way. In some states, this is still a possibility, but in a lot of States, it isn’t.
Where I work, we get kids fresh out of undergraduate architecture programs who don’t know Revit, much of anything about codes, and frankly, not much about construction systems and assemblies. You can always tell drawings someone very junior had worked on. So what did they spend for years working on?
“Design”
What they need to do is take a class in Revit and some other software, a class on codes, and a couple of classes on constructions assemblies and systems. This could be two years at a community college. Then work for an architect, where they’d learn more about architecture and design than they do in college architecture programs.
zaphod. For some reason, maybe it’s obvious, I almost am ashamed to admit that some of my college education got me started on various kinds of issues I follow.
Before I retired and moved, I used our small town library pretty frequently. One of the assistants was married to a guy who wrote, occasionally, even in National Review. She was interesting and helpful. So when I asked her how come the library stocked the “Nation” and not National Review, she shrugged, more or less in the direction of the head librarian.
Then we had a Thing happen and the famed Aubrey intellect was not at all relevant, but some of my misspent youth turned out to be handy. People went the extra mile for me from time to time and they weren’t trying to “direct” my path. Still, you have to self-direct, which is different from auto-didact.
There is a fading, mostly unconscious, presumption that college gives you the broad view of issues, even in your major, and you can pick your own direction within the subject. If we dismiss that presumption, college is like somebody else is running your library card.
But universities are supposed to offer education. They are not supposed to offer vocational training in place of education and slapping a bachelor’s degree on the result, or charge students four years’ university tuition for what could have been had for two years’ trade school tuition.
The time wasted on collecting distribution credits is an imposition on everyone, not just those in vocational majors. I know of no institution other than St. Johns (which does not have specialized departments) which has a serious core curriculum. It’s just padding and should go away. One of the few voices who suggested that specialized two-year courses were to be preferred to the baccalaureate degree in our time was Allan Bloom.
Where I work, we get kids fresh out of undergraduate architecture programs who don’t know Revit, much of anything about codes, and frankly, not much about construction systems and assemblies. You can always tell drawings someone very junior had worked on. So what did they spend for years working on? “Design”
And from an aesthetic standpoint, postwar architecture is cr!p. It’s almost as if higher education ruins everything it touches.
If a university wishes to offer vocational training in place of education, let them stop calling themselves universities.
If you’re looking for the medieval trivium and quadrivium, you’re not going to find it anywhere.
I don’t think the term is inappropriate for research institutions. However, teaching institutions should be debarred from mislabeling themselves in this way. There are about 250 research institutions (a few of whom eschew the term ‘university’) and these should be the only ones calling themselves universities.
I wouldn’t lose any sleep over the prevalence of occupational training in tertiary schooling. I would over the prevalence of cr!p occupational training. Again, teacher-training, social work, and library administration are the obtrusive targets. Another is the 84-credit law degree.
I left academia over what it was becoming, which is little more than diploma mills
If it didnt become that, then it would have been a great conspiracy of men against women… if women didnt take over academia and politicize it to the far left for communism, it would be a fascist institution against womenkind…
now the men as a group dont care so much
look how they dont even stand up for their own country any more
mostly cause it isnt their own, and they have no reason to
Wait till the real fighting begins, hard to convince them to save what didnt want them, calls them horrid names, and in general hates them
I don’t see the point of any federal spending on public schools. In fact, I favor universal vouchers, and if the public schools wither away in competition with voucher-funded private schools, so much the better. Glorified overpriced child-care centers that funnel money to the Democratic Party through ossified teachers’ unions, when they’re not engaged in out-and-out BS indoctrination.
Art Deco: “As for the Department of Education, append the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the statistical collection services to the Labor Department; […] Terminate every other program of the Education Department and SHUT IT DOWN.”
This. Although I’d suggest shutting down the Department of Labor as well and moving (some of) its functions to Commerce.
“Again, teacher-training, social work, and library administration are the obtrusive targets.”
Eh, watch it. Ex-associate professor of “library administration” here. Seriously, can’t disagree. Librarianship involves some practical skills that people do still depend on and appreciate, but those could be acquired on the job and without the ideological baggage. History of information management (an interesting topic, actually)? Read about it on your own. IT chops? Get those at a community college, technical college, or college of engineering. One of our best system administrators–and best writers–has a two-year technical degree from a local community college in a very poor part of a very poor state. Librarianship today may be an obsolete career path, although I would argue that the special-collections-and-archives track still has mileage left. Politically, it is a left-wing swamp.
Speaking about higher education, I think those who are going the premedical route should be on a track system that’s two to three years for undergraduate. Many non-traditional students who apply to medical school are given advice to complete a postbacc pathway which can take anywhere between two to three years if they work full-time during studying. This would save a year or two for the premedical student. Hypothetically he’d enter medical school at 20/21, enter residency at 24/25 where he can be done at around 29/30 depending if he takes the longest residency (general surgery).