those who pretend you need them, round 2
[reply to steven yates, re posts one, two, and three.]
i thought what prompted my hostile reaction was obvious: mr. mcdonald is the problem he’s kvetching about! he made a career at an abattoir for young minds, and then stands in front of them and decries the natural result.
no, there is no argument with his opening statement. i would go much deeper, and did. the problem of colleges and universities is not that thought police and idiots abound; the problem is the very structure of colleges and universities. the essential premise is that nursemaids are needed for education. well when does one abandon, or in this case break free of, the hounding nursemaid and her virtuous attentions? i argue that it should be around the same time that we are weaned from the breast.
[btw, i will address my claims of "unsound, pointless, and contradictory footings", which you correctly cite as unsupported. they are peripheral to my main problems with the paper, and in the comment section of this post.]
society is obsessed with ensuring that children receive the same “basic education”, to the point that children who may have excelled without such bottle feeding are spiritually destroyed. this is not my pet delusion; it’s demonstrated repeatedly throughout the country. the false premise of a “well rounded” education is nothing but the solicitous ramblings of sordid control freaks — as far from the art of praxeology as can be. curiously, praxeology tends to be ignored in education even by its more fervent supporters.
a good metaphor for contemporary education is that of a goose being prepped for pâté. oh, that may be important information being shoved down the goose’s throat, but unlike food with a real goose, it’s rendered useless in its delivery. information is not food that may be processed involuntarily; it requires participation — usually enthusiastic participation — to be converted into knowledge. mcdonald acknowledges in his speech explicitly and, i’m sorry to say, unapologetically, that the enthusiasm has been murdered. he and his compatriots, right, left, and center, are the culprits.
the core premise of “higher education” is false. education must be moved from a push mode into a pull mode. what’s holding it back is the subconscious realization by hordes of academicians that they are worse than unnecessary; they are undesirable. however, they are in control, so there will be no voluntary retreat. rather, they must be beaten into submission and put out into the free-market unemployment pool, from which some will regroup and enter productive occupations (in actual education or elsewhere). those that don’t may, at best, write books explaining why their ouster was a tragedy. most will probably try to regain their footholds through the usual method (force).
children should control their educations from the earliest age. yes, they need help and counselling along that path. guidance? i don’t think so. children must be free to compete, learn from their best examples, fight for the resources that prove the best, and utterly exclude areas that are now deemed so crucial by the vulgar horde (“educators”). the biggest disaster in education today is that the people who need the least amount of adult assistance are the first to be bashed in the head by the machine. who often rises to the top? the rule followers and do-nothings.
general claims of “well rounded” and “complete” educations are laughable. force-feeding what could have been a sparkling mind is sad. it helps to destroy not only the mind, but general respect for the subject matter as well. children and adults learn better when appetite meets subject. that must be given time. to assert that everybody must learn a little about everything is absurd. it’s especially disheartening when coming from those who understand the benefits division of labor offers. how much more “well rounded” would a person be when left to chart his path through life’s challenges? i am not talking about intentions, but results.
none of this is to say that we can’t learn from others. hardly. but that learning should be sought, not inflicted. look at the mises institute. what is it keeping models like the mises institute from replacing dead institutions? the sheepskin. society is more comfortable with sham credentials than knowledge. so here we are. it has even infected your view of the internet, steven. you replied that “most Internet-based education is purely vocational”. perhaps most formal internet “education” is, but again we’re back to the sheepskin quandry. anybody thirsty for knowledge could spend 20 years devouring the unprecedented resources of wikipedia.org and mises.org alone. both have challenging forums, with the phenomenal wikipedia allowing you instantly (from your first visit) to try your hand as a faculty member!
if physical books are more your style, they are at their lowest real prices ever with ebay.com and its sister half.com. the opportunities for true education are staggering. but what do we get? a dirge from a deservedly dying prison. and it’s passed around as if it’s worthy of a chorus. these “bastions” of “higher education” are nothing but frauds, who deliver education only by accident. to hell with them. anybody who wants an education can grab one by the balls if he’s not consumed by the pathetic need for a badge.
what should mcdonald have done? he should have worked to discredit badges. he should have stopped acting like education is accomplished through sitting on asses listening to some blowhard go off. he should have left academia. what does he do on his way out? gives a final performance of exactly what is wrong with not only education, but society: plenty of form, dressing a vacuum of substance.
July 23rd, 2004 at 06:47
mcdonald sets me on edge from the first page, which his disingenuous claim that “i could try to tell you how all this came about, but the narrative would be a dreary one; and besides, you probably already know.” that’s rhetorical baloney. it’s not like he was speaking to a gathering of austrian economists. if they know that much, he should sit down.
despite my general disgust with his speech, it has valuable points. it’s important, as he says, to never assume one has arrived at the top of the mountain of learning. but what is the prevailing attitude of academia? that they are the pinnacle of learning. more structural problems, despite the occasional freak who knows better.
he first lost me entirely with this: “Rather, I am saying that we need to distinguish between what is absolute–God alone–and what is relative.” if god were “absolute”, there wouldn’t be any discussion of faith (another concept with gaping holes and contradictions as usually expressed). it’s fatuous to follow a suggestion to “open your mind and keep it open” with a direction to distinguish god as absolute. maybe god is absolute, but you won’t find proof of it on this earth. and yes, as the son of a fundamentalist evangelical preacher, i’m aware of how offensive such a proposition is to many. but just by taking a quick glance around i’d say i’m solid claiming that we don’t know god is absolute. if the burden of proof is on those who would assert “god is absolute”, they have failed. well, enough on that ball of worms.
he moves into the orwell segment. mostly good stuff. however, one can’t make a reasonable claim that “incompatible metaphors” are “a sure sign that the speaker or writer is not interested in what he is saying”. that’s ludicrous. if orwell said that, mcdonald should at least have the sense to not repeat it. that statement is so indicative of the stodgy university mind set that it makes me want to scream. here, after just lauding newly invented metaphors, he’s bitching about people who take metaphors into the margin.
then he criticizes a speaker for saying “collapsed like a deck of cards”. now, it may be that “house of cards” was intended. granted. but what if the speaker really meant “collapsed like a deck of cards”, using a picture out of his mind, similar to a skilled dealer collapsing a deck after fanning it out? who knows? mcdonald has now shifted from disparaging people who use tired metaphors, to disparaging those who don’t get tired metaphors “right”. this is common behavior, yet it hasn’t stopped surprising me. how many times have you heard somebody skew a common expression and be instantly “corrected”, even though the meaning was equal to the common version? that sort of knee-jerk quest for conformity is the heart of academia. though subtle, the indications in mcdonald’s paper shouldn’t be tossed as meaningless. in context, i think they’re informative.
re science, he claims that the scientific method “isolates problems and solves them: it cannot take the broad view, for anything beyond that the immediately testable, measurable, and provable is by definition unscientific.” c’mon, steven! that’s a crackpot talking. none of that is true. and the preceding segment with “The reason we cannot solve our social problems is precisely the reason we can put a man on the moon.”? this is the guy harping about precision and honesty in language? from what follows for his explanation, it would be the grandest generosity to credit him with even heading in the general direction of rothbard.
continuing, he slights one of the most beautiful concepts of human interaction there is. trying to make a point about how caring for another means we consider what they want for themselves rather than what we want, he says that we “recognize their full humanity by turning the Golden Rule inside out”! huh? “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” covers it just fine. it doesn’t need his bullshit rewrite, complete with “recognize their full humanity” hogwash that would make george orwell fall off the toilet seat. oh, so you would prefer that people get you a gift that you would select for yourself? then follow the golden rule as written. he’s offering inanity as bold insight.
and more from the orwell department: “To that extent, you are perceiving with perceptual apparatuses not your own and acting on the basis of the dictates of alien perceptual machinery.”
right. uh huh. know what i say to people who write like that after spewing orwell? “fuck you.”
his distinction between the history cliches (repeats itself, blah blah blah) and his answer (“escape the provincialism of the present”) is a void. he just wanted to work in his analogy of visiting other places, and spout more flowery crap. i tell ya what, i don’t care what books the guy’s written, or who he’s jetted of to mexico with, this piece is rot. one can rightly criticize the cliches re history analysis, but he’s ending up at the same conclusions himself. the difference is that he said it the way he wanted to say it, and the two propositions he’s slighting get stuck with: “both of which are more or less scientific and neither of which is valid”. it’s amorphous nose-picking and booger eating.
i’ll bet this guy has done some preaching. i grew up listening to this stuff by the pile. deliver the message in a flowery, self-assured, fake-iconoclastic manner (busting through the theories of the commoners), and most people will be at your feet. ask ‘em 30 minutes later what you said, and it’ll be all grins and laps. they don’t remember. it’s scary how easily you can sell things to a receptive audience, often one composed of people who know better when not in a group.
he lauds reading, but without cautioning that at some point you must put down the books. reading can be destructive when taken to extremes. some people live nowhere but in books. it’s much closer to TV than many people will bother to admit. his claim that by reading crime and punishment you can feel “the guilty torment that would follow” killing an old lady is just more of the same tripe that infests his speech. do you really believe that, steven? do you believe what he’s saying? answer that, and maybe you’ll see where i’m coming from.
and the almost final kicker: when it meets the artifice of his close, scientists have now been redeemed so that they no longer deal in the absolute that must be proved immediately; they, “as we know, deal in probabilities rather than, as was once thought, in absolute laws.”
he ends with a slam against those who favor evolution — but with an open mind, of course, saying that if the theory of evolution has any validity, the probability of man’s existence is “approximately as likely as the spontaneous transformation of every atom in this room into an atom of plutonium.” therefore, let’s rejoice! we got here!
that requires comment?
October 9th, 2010 at 21:35
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