Standards & Bias for Progress
Would Improve Education & Research
Vasos Panagiotopoulos
Marvel that skills taught in turn-of-century grade schools were
learnt in 1940s high schools and are now taught in colleges; Instead of
increasing education =value=, we have increased only the amount, rather we
have =inflated= it. Derek Price once estimated that everyone would have a
doctorate by 2080; but would those doctorates have more value than a 1920s
high school diploma? Bill McGill has complained that too many universities
grant graduate degrees they are not qualified to give. This inflation has
served the feudal guild of educators quite well. But we should be reminded it
is the same educators who are disproportionately left of the general
population. And that these educators earn the lowest college entrance scores.
Rather than adapt to the times with more efficiency, educators pass on their
costs to the government and make students protest every little aid cut.
Instead, we should emulate the Kennedy Moon program with a triple-fifteen
goal:in fifteen years,fifteen percent of all new doctorates will be earned by
fifteen-year-olds. In this way, we would concern ourselves more with the
outcomes rather than incomes of our education system. Test-based standards,
being based on ability, are truer to traditional American values of equal
opportunity, than standards of equal payment for unequal results.
The anti-inflation mechanism (sort of an educator's Federal Reserve)
has long been the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, in competition
with the ACT in Iowa. Their tests, along with the formerly defunct state
Regents exams, provided some objective standard of measurement. Similar
examinations are given for various state licences which could indicate a
self-taught proficiency; However, state licence exams may not be taken by
anyone, as there are degree and apprenticeship requirements. (Only in
Nebraska may one take the bar exam without going to law school, but as
recently as a quarter century ago you could do so in New York.) Engineers
must have four years certified experience before taking the second
professional exam, the first taken near graduation. While retaining
apprenticeship, we should eliminate the restraints leading to apprenticeship,
allowing =anyone= to take a proficiency exam instead of allowing professions
(some limit enrollment to control gluts) lawful conspiracy in restraint of
trade (cf Brown 91CV3274, 1984NCAA 468US85-98, 1978PE 435US679-692). Our
country, crippled by a health-cost crisis, can ill-afford monopolistic
limitations such as on a possible Medical Baccalaureate, combining physical
therapy, nursing and chiropracty. On the other hand, national standards must
not be allowed to be debased by those with political motivations. The
multi-constituent sensitive Federal Reserve (cf Bickel, Morality of Consent
as to the depth of intent of such systems) succeeded where two Banks of the
US failed, yet Jimmy Carter and G William Miller were able to dangerously
approach hyperinflation. This is why there must continue to be competing
standards (like ACT and ETS) and these must be free from political
manipulation, while their actions must depend on views held by overwhelming
majorities of secondary and collegiate educators.
Even some public colleges used to require passing the specialised
Graduate Record Exam in order to obtain the baccalaureate. Such a system
would allow many poor people to educate themselves, without throwing money at
watered-down limited public systems. And it would provide corrective
competition for those pseudacademies that substitute basketweaving, and
phoney abstractions like "social studies", for the culturally assimilating
"Dead European Males". And if even at Ivy universities, professors are so
engrossed in federal research that they give mixed-matched old exams (for
which there is a black market), maybe the advance graduate and professional
levels should also be standardised. (One admissions officer didn't know a
student of the same school had lower grades because he took accelerated
honors courses.) While educators are arguing instead for an college entrance
open essay (in which they may measure political correctness?), former Bennett
aide Chester Finn seeks re-introducing standard nationwide testing in the
lower levels. The eliminating of any objective testing mechanism in the name
of diversity and academic freedom results in a system in which anyone can
claim some bizarre, highly specialised, Tower-of-Babel expertise that no one
else is capable of measuring, evaluating or contesting. (This reminds us of
the pride Mrs. Ciasescu placed in her supposed engineering doctorate.) N M
Butler reminded us to distinguish between "educated" and "instructed"! We
have the educator's cabal even enforcing its views on theological seminaries:
a theology professor fearful of losing employment during an internal battle
would never dare offend outside academia for that is where alternative
employment may be found; therefore we have a watering down of that seminary's
teachings and discipline to conform with political correctness.
In many European universities, the education process has already
degenerated to only examinations because there is not enough room in the
classes for all the students. And as Sykes shows in Prof_Scam (as did Barzun
in "PhD Octopus" in Teacher_In_America), today's professoriate is more
interested in grants and bizarreness than in teaching (hence superfluous?)
students. Many university students report that those who attend fewer classes
get better grades because they stay home and study: Then why make them pay
for the faculty? Paraphrasing Barzun: Junk education and junk research to go
with junk bonds and junk mail? Barzun reminds us that William James (PhD
Octopus) and Woodrwow Wilson opposed the introduction of the German PhD
(Rathsdistinction of W von Humboldt) system as a union card for teaching.
Because they need workhorse help for grant-supported research and because
they hate dealing with time-consuming inquisitive students, faculty often
intentionally admit much more pliant students from less democratic cultures,
giving the false impression that these students are somehow always more
qualified. Moreover, these students from less democratic cultures are often
openly hostile to American-style non-rote teaching methods and give
professors who use such methods poor evaluations. One also wonders about the
standards that devalue American students unaware of European geography
without equally devaluing European students who say "Colombia and Carolina
must be near each other since they are both in SOUTH America." In 1916, the
American Association of University Professors set up two committees: one on
academic freedom and tenure, and one on academic obligations; the latter only
met twice before vanishing. It was in the imitation of the Hopkins-Chicago
German model that faculty gradually thought themselves so privileged to be
beyond reproach, despite there being no precedent or academic freedom grounds
for such diservice to students. European turmoils resulted in fleeing
academics coming to the USA, but rather than accept our superior
AngloHellenistic concept of the generalist, they changed us to the corrupt,
ScythoScandoMongolic hyperspecialist system so highly specialised that no
peers exist for peer review to be possible. (Most attempts to build massive
bureacracies, even by Andrew Jackson and Peter the Great and the Vatican,
grew out of awe for the Chinese Censorate [Lenin wanted to operate the entire
planet like the post office], yet in private e-mail with "Yankee Confucius"
Wm Th de Bary, I discovered the Censorate was not necessarily Confucian and
perhaps not even Chinese in origin.)
As for the triple-fifteen: The progress of a society is not measured,
as Charles Handy wrongly claims, by keeping individuals in school for ever
greater fractions of their productive lifespans - but by quickly being able
to provide them with the advanced skills needed in our society. Yuppie
parents are demanding higher quality education to the extent that one report
even had a toddler with a very advanced vocabluary who still didn't know the
words to explain why she was crying. We should note the advances of Lozanov,
Barzakov and Christofoli as well as Tomlinson-Keasey's [9/90 J Edu Psy]
debunking the supposed damages of academic acceleration. JFK gave
credibility to academic acceleration by inviting Evelyn Wood to teach his
staff speedreading - today's leaders must similarly lead by example. We can
also not tolerate the schoolmarmish sophistry that despises technology and
social advancement. While the Luddites decry television, we are now hearing
that children raised on remembering the continuing thread of television
serials have expanded memory abilities.
Likewise math-illiterate educators have been allowed to reduce math
to lawyerly mysterious rituals rather than the flexible skills necessary in
our advanced technological society. Somehow, the schools in the USA produce
horrible math students on average. In the extreme, we do produce some of the
best mathematicians in the world, especially applied mathematicians. Part of
the problem is the way institutions have been created to teach
mathematics. Those who teach mathematics are primarily teachers and do not
firmly grasp the subject matter. In fact, they present it too much like a
social science. too much in terms of bizarre abstractions like "least common
denominators" (as if the course requirements were written by lawyers and
legislators rather than mathematical practitioners) when it would suffice to
teach simple cross-multiplication and instead give the students greater
practice. But this is because in the USA, we offer very nice incentives to
mathematical practitioners in engineering firms, in securities firms and in
computing firms. So in poorer countries, it costs relatively little to train
a mathematician (no labs, only blackboards, but some computers, as well) so
they may be in abundant supply, but they can't find very many jobs outside of
teaching. In the USA, very few real mathematicians teach. If the rules of
teaching unions allowed industrial practitioners to teach between jobs and in
lean years, we could drastically improve the situation. Also, we could
provide extra employment for teachers in industry. especially in years when
such skills are in short supply. If regular schoolteachers also helped
retrain workers, they would be able to see their own shortcomings, because
some of these workers might even be their former students. If schoolteachers
realised most of their distorted ideological prejudices (they do not even
believe industry makes as heavy use of mathematics as it does in both
scientific as well as economic applications) do not apply, they would better
train and motivate their students.
What is outrageous is that academicians like Charles Handy, Tom
Peters, and Peter Drucker, rather than being ashamed of the decrepitness of
the university feudal system, demand, in works such as =Age= of =Unreason=,
that it be extended to the workplace; the university is one of the last
surviving bastions of feudalism, and the Reagan Revolution which brought down
the Kremilin walls must finally be allowed to demolish the tenured
professoriate's paranoid delusions of grandeur that seeks the public pay them
tribute in the form of grants! Moreover, why do ghetto kids need summer
vacations when they could be entering school sooner and graduating earlier so
that their parents wouldn't have to yank them out of school to work without
graduating? UCD Sociologist Bennet M Berg [NYT 02NOV69 pM63] even suggested
campus unrest was the product of artificial postponement of maturity. In
1987, Reagan sought to privatise the National Institutes of Health so
scientists might afford to stay; might we not unify all such institutes (NIH,
NSF, NEA, NEH, NIST, NASA, NWS, NOAA, DoE-NL, EPA, USFA..) into one
quasi-private block-granted National Research Chamber (instead of Bob
Walker's Dept of Science) that would also disburse moneys privately donated.
In the guise of GrammRudmanism, these intitutes now target their grants;
however, porkbarrelling congresscritters have micromanagingly legislated the
targets so narrowly that only their favorite reciepients may obtain the
awards.
Graduate programs look down at students who don't take a hairshirt
approach and then encourage these students to protest every little government
cut. Recently, academicians were heard thumbing their noses at venture
capitalists, arguing they would no longer need them because federal funding
was planned to drastically increase. At the same time, universities resist
any commercial discipline in their work habits precisely because if these
students got wif of how much their professors were making from consulting and
licensing, they would rebel. This is why universities want systems based on
grants, licensing and consulting and not on venturing and collaboration - as
someone in the 1970s once said about India "It's not that capitalism doesn't
exist, but you have to buy capitalism, which you can't do if you are poor."
A culture of paranoia predominates in the post-Manhattan-Project scientific
world where no researcher shares even the slightest data or information with
his colleagues or institution. A student would learn more from working in an
identical project in industry than for a professor or by taking a course in
the subject - because faculty are so paranoid and possessive about their
knowledge. Ultimately, the grubmint deserves responsibility because its
system of grants helped create this racketeering monstrosity. And this is the
incubator which keeps leftism festering even as communism throughout the
world has collapsed.
For example, every so often the NSF and its cousins announce that we
are in a dangerous shortage of PhDs and the spigot of graduate students
reopens to slave in the labs only to be dropped at will for not groveling
sufficiently. Moreover, professors detest American-born graduate students
because American students actually expect professors to answer their
questions and curiosities, while foreign students behave like frightened
rabbits, who laugh at "Americans". The result is that American students feel
an inferiority about being American and become transformed into lifelong
America-haters. And a lot of funding programs have been designed to obtain
results which conform to the same ideology which propogates such grants - for
example, one researcher questioning global warming was told that without the
resultant alarmism, grants in that field would not be forthcoming. And
universities themselves extract substantial fees for each grant, often using
the results of such fees for lobbying. Lobbyists have even extracted fees for
getting SBIR grants, where the lobbyist has been paid by being listed as an
(absentee) officer of the firms. Isn't it ironic that the universities who
do the very best in the nation with regards to licencing revenes (but
maintian Vietnam-era bans on faculty "commercialism") are the same
universities whose presidents resigned nearly a decade ago due to federal
grant irregularities? What is especially pernicious about these grants
addicts is that they turn to international agencies and eventually foreign
governments, rather than private industry, to support their habit. The
solution would be to follow 1987 Reagan proposals for privatising the NIH and
combine them with the blueprints for the Bobby Inman Sematech research
consortium or the Rand Corporation and have privatised formerly-government
foundations become research consortia that allows firms to collaborate in
funding research and buying results. Moreover, grants should become
increasingly conditional on matching private funding. For example, a
professor just hired might be able to get all his funding from the
government, but there should be a graduated scale requiring the professor to
obtain two thirds of funding from private sources by the time tenure is
attained and almost all funding privately by the time full professorship is
attained.
Lastly, it is obscene to hear professors condemn supposed corporate
short-termism and greedily high salaries when they insist that university
investments (even internal venture capital) provide maximum annualised
returns and that they seek ever-higher salaries for themselves, their
administrators and their lobbyists: instead of behaving like paranoid
dictators acusing supposed "immorality" for the failure of their hare-brained
schemes - instead of "teaching" ethics - they should teach by example, for
the sad state of societal ethics today is primarily the fault of the
professors' hypocritical example. We can ill-afford to allow faculty who
reserve the right to be both absent-minded and stubbord to continue
pretending to teach our future leaders justice and competitiveness. If the
misuse of grants was as subject to regulatory nitpicking as is the trading of
securities, academia might suddenly shift its views rightward; especially now
that academia treats funds raised on the stockmarket as carelessly as they
treat grants.
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Vasos Panagiotopoulos is an NYC conservative activist and businessman. A
Columbia alumnus and former NY Federal Reserve analyst, he was listed in
Marquis' Who's Who in Finance & Industry. His columns used to appear in the
1990 NYC Tribune.