Lack of Generalities is General

This article at once struck a chord with me and stunned me with its lack of conceptual depth. Its title? "Lack of Curiosity is Curious".

On the one hand, the article describes the appalling lack of curiosity on the part of many college students in the United States today.

Over dinner a few weeks ago, the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions.

Naumoff began describing the legend of the literary wild man. One student offered that he had a teacher who was just as crazy. Naumoff asked the professor's name. The student said he didn't know. Naumoff then asked this oblivious scholar, "Do you know my name?"

After a long pause, the young man replied, "No."

The article goes on a bit more before quoting some bloke's characterization of what seems an alarming trend: "It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."

This much is true, almost to the point of being a commonplace. The following is also a somewhat common observation.

In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to master any particular discipline -- e.g. computers, life insurance, medicine -- has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become specialists, people who know more and more about less and less [bold added].

It certainly seems this way. But the big question is: Why?

It is in answering this question that the article misses the mark widely, all the while exhibiting symptoms of the very problem that causes both (1) an educational system that produces students who resemble idiot savants: crammed with facts from some sliver of a discipline, and yet unable to reason their way out of a wet paper bag, and (2) journalists so steeped in the leftist dogmas of the day that they apparently fail to see the need to look for explanations beyond the fashionable mantras of the day.

The problem is that the American education system systematically thwarts the development of the conceptual faculties of its charges.

So.... What factor does Peder Zane, the author of this article, blame for the appalling state of the American university? Capitalism. What else could a product of our edumacashun system have possibly imagined?

Add to this two other factors: the mind-set that puts work at the center of American life and the deep fear spawned by the rise of globalization and other free market approaches that have turned job security into an anachronism. In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training. In the parlance of journalism, they want news they can use.

This explanation sounds good on the surface. Indeed, many students seek vocational training, and few appreciate the value of a good liberal arts education. And certainly, when a particular job rather than even a career or, what should properly be the focus of an education, one's intellect, is the focus of an "education", it will indeed be fact-filled and time-sensitive, and thus at the mercy of the next technological innovation that renders it obsolete.

But if there is so much vocational training going on, and job security is an anachronism, doesn't it make sense to ask what we're doing with all these schools anyway? Why not just replace all this expensive nonsense with on the job training? Why not ask what an education is supposed to accomplish?

In the October 1984 issue of The Objectivist Forum, Leonard Peikoff answers this question eloquently.

Man's knowledge begins on the perceptual level, with the use of the five senses .... This much we share with the animals. But what makes us human is the conceptual level, on which we exercise our capacity to abstract, to grasp common denominators, to classify, to organize our perceptual field. The conceptual level is based on the perceptual, but there are profound differences between the two -- in other words, between perceiving and thinking. ...

[A couple of examples out (of many) of the difference are: ] The perceptual level is concerned only with concretes. For example: a man goes for a casual stroll on the beach -- let's make it a drunken stroll so as to numb the higher faculties and isolate the animal element -- and he sees a number of concrete entities: those birds chattering over there, this wave crashing to shore, that boulder rolling downhill. He observes, moves on, sees a bit more, forgets the earlier. On a conceptual level, however, we function very differently; we integrate concretes by means of abstractions, and thereby immensely expand the amount of material we can deal with. The animal or drunk merely looks at a few birds, then forgets them; a functioning man can retain an unlimited number, by integrating them all into the concept "bird", and can then proceed deliberately to study the nature of birds, their anatomy, habits, and so forth.

The drunk on the walk is aware of a vast multiplicity of things -- waves, rocks, you name it; he lurches past a chaos made of countless entities with no ability to make connections among them. On the conceptual level, however, we do not accept such chaos; we turn a multiplicity into a unity -- by finding the common denominators that run through all the seemingly unconnected concretes; and we thereby make them intelligible. We discover the Law of Gravity, for example, and grasp that by a single principle we can understand the falling boulder and the rising tide and many other phenomena.

...

To sum up: perception as such, the sheer animal capacity, consists merely of staring at concretes, at a multiplicity of them, in no order, with no context, no proof, no understanding -- and all you can know by this means is whatever you are staring at, as long as you are staring. Conception, however -- the human faculty, the level of thought -- involves the formation of abstractions that reduce the multiplicity to an intelligible unity; this process requires a definite order, a specific context at each stage, and the methodical use of logic.

... An education that trains a child's mind would be one that teaches him to make connections, to generalize, to see wider issues and principles involved in any topic. It would achieve this feat by presenting the material to him in a calculated, conceptually proper order, with the necessary context, and with the proof that validates each stage. This would be an education that teaches a child to think. [bold added] (2-3)

Peikoff then sketches for us how to utterly fail to provide an education in the very next paragraph.

The complete opposite of this -- the most perverse aberration imaginable -- would be to take conceptual-level material and present it to the students by the method of perception. This would mean, in essence: taking the students through history, literature, science, and the other subjects on the exact model of that casual, unthinking, drunken walk on the beach. The effect would be to exile the student to a no-man's land of cognition, which is neither perception nor conception. What it is, in fact, is the destruction of the minds of the students and of their motivation to learn. [bold added] (4-5)

This is exactly what our educational system has been doing for a very long time and the problem is growing worse. By the time our students reach college, all most of them are fit for or care about is vocational courses.

During the time that most children should be preparing for college, to many of them are being subjected to a "progressive" education.

The principles and practices of progressive education gained wide acceptance in American school systems during the first half of the 20th cent.; similar pedagogical innovations were instituted in many of the schools of Europe. From its inception, however, the movement elicited rather sharp criticism from a variety of different sources, particularly for its failure to emphasize systematic study of the academic disciplines.

For example, most children are still taught to read by the "whole language" method rather than learning the principles of phonics.

The controversy over how to teach reading is not a narrow, technical dispute. It is a broad, philosophic disagreement, with crucial educational implications. The phonics proponents maintain that human knowledge is gained objectively, by perceiving the facts of reality and by abstracting from those facts. These proponents, therefore, teach the child directly and systematically the basic facts--the sounds that make up every word--from which the abstract knowledge of how to read can be learned.

Supporters of whole language, by contrast, believe that the acquisition of knowledge is a subjective process. Influenced by John Dewey and his philosophy of Progressive education, they believe that the child must be encouraged to follow his feelings irrespective of the facts, and to have his arbitrary "opinions" regarded as valid. On this premise, the child is told to treat the "whole word" as a primary, and to draw his conclusions without the necessity of learning the underlying facts. He is taught this--in spite of the overwhelming evidence, in theory and in practice, that phonics instruction works and whole language does not.

In learning to speak, a child has already performed a tremendous cognitive feat. To read, he must now grasp the connection between the black marks he sees on paper--which to him are like hieroglyphs--and the spoken words he already understands. Systematic phonics instruction teaches a child to break the code of written language.

Reading is, of course, just one example of the many disciplines that can and should be taught on a conceptual level, but are instead taught as if they are collections of random concretes.

Worse still, children are not only thwarted from developing the ability to conceptualize, among the disjoint "facts" they are taught are assorted bits of political propaganda and, as a substitute for the hard-earned confidence in themselves that can only come with mastering their lessons (and thus learning how to think), students are encouraged to feel high "self-esteem".

They thus come into college ignorant, unable to think rationally, unaware that there is a problem, and therefore resistant to the remediation they need. The following is from an article written six years before "Lack of Curiosity is Curious". Not the stark similarity.

[I]gnorance is no longer tempered with humility. Rather, after years of psychotherapy disguised as pedagogy, ignorance is now buoyed by self-esteem - which, in turn, makes students more resistant to remediation since they don't believe there's a problem. This resistance to remediation, indeed, is part and parcel of a wholly misplaced intellectual confidence that is the most serious obstacle to their higher education. For the last seventeen years, I've taught freshman courses at CUNY and SUNY colleges in the city; the majority of my students have been products of the public schools. I am saddened, therefore, to report that more and more of these students are arriving in my classes with the impression that their opinions, regardless of their acquaintance with a particular subject, are instantly valid - indeed, as valid as anyone's. Pertinent knowledge, to them, is not required to render judgement.

Want to scare yourself? Sit down with a half-dozen recent public high school graduates and ask them what they believe. Most are utterly convinced, for example, that President Kennedy was murdered by a vast government conspiracy. It doesn't matter to them that they cannot name the presidents before or after Kennedy. Or the three branches of government. Or even the alleged gunman's killer. Most are convinced, also, that AIDS was engineered by the CIA ... even though they cannot state what either acronym stands for.

Wow!

But many colleges offer remedial instruction, right? Yes, but that is not what college is for. Walter Williams notes that (1) wholesale admission of unprepared students into higher education is hurting it and (2) government interference in the educational sector is only worsening things.

Several devastating consequences result when colleges admit unprepared students. First, it lets high schools off the hook by allowing them to continue to confer fraudulent diplomas. Second, it leads to a dumbing down of the academic curricula and the creation of Mickey Mouse courses for students who can't make it in more challenging courses. Academic departments or professors who don't dumb down their classes and participate in grade inflation risk declining enrollment and administrative threats to their budgets. Finally, hiring faculty to staff remedial courses inflates college costs to parents and taxpayers.

The nation's primary and secondary education is a national disgrace; will we allow our undergraduate education to become so as well? If we continue down our present course, the answer is an unambiguous yes. To change course, we need to start examining the incentive structure that college administrators face.

To a large extent, college budgets are determined by enrollment size. More students mean higher budgets and therefore incentive to admit students unprepared for college. Colleges should not admit students requiring remedial education. That's not to say youngsters shouldn't receive remedial education, but let them get it elsewhere -- maybe at the high school that awarded them a fraudulent diploma.

Furthermore, federal student loan programs remove cost as a deterrent for many marginal students, exacerbating the problem. (Interestingly, they are themselves becoming an entrenched special interest group!)

So while J. Peder Zane shouts "Capitalism!" in answer to the question of why our students are so badly educated today, I beg to differ with him. I'm not sure he would be able to follow me, but I contend that the problem is that too many of our students are entering college not only conceptually crippled (which exacerbates and compounds whatever deficiencies they may have in factual material), understandably bored with school, and -- given their context -- rightly contemptuous of learning any more than they absolutely believe they must.

This is why so many students know so little and care even less, and this is why the innovations of capitalism threaten to leave them behind. These innovations require men to adapt to take full advantage of them. But the victims of our modern educational system have been trained like animals. In attempting to live without thinking, these victims are left to the mercy of the law of the survival of the fittest, for it is as if they are trying to live by instinct, like animals, rather than with the use of reason, like men.

-- CAV