Higher education has turned into a self-licking ice cream cone, meaning an institution that has lost its sense of purpose and instead is focused on self-perpetuation. For many reasons, we need to do away with college as we know it.
Broadly speaking, we need to replace two aspects of college. One is the process of obtaining knowledge and demonstrating what one has obtained. The other is the rest of the college experience—its extracurricular aspects.
Read the rest.
Some of you are disappointed that I am not all in on the fight against CRT in K-12. My thinking is that even winning that fight (in some jurisdictions) won’t change college campuses. Maybe K-12 is a battle worth fighting, but it won’t win the war. K-12 is only a branch of the problem, and cutting if off will not take care of the root of the problem. The root of the problem can be found on the college campus.
There are organized efforts to try to save college as an institution. In the essay, I instead suggest that we do away with it.
I work in an industry where examination has replaced in essence graduate school. But my industry is extremely math based, has very obvious objective criteria you can put on an exam, and is mostly just picking up the top few % of math ability in the population.
Even so people complain that the exams are too long and the material has almost no relationship to our careers (both true). Honestly, I think it’s little more than a giant ‘g’ and conscientiousness loaded filter. It’s nice to get paid to do it rather than pay to do it, but I doubt that can be applied to many non-STEM fields.
I would note that employers generally require us to have BAs even though technically you don’t need one to pass the exams (many of the early exams cover what you would get during a BA anyway).
Anyway, none of this really applies to most people. Let’s take a really simple example from some close friends. If you want to get a raise as a k-12 teacher, you want to get a masters degree. Does getting a masters degree teach you anything? No. Does it get you a raise? Yes. Does anyone care about anything other than the raise? No.
This is multiplied across many many industries, not all of whom employ government workers (I would note BTW that healthcare, while “private” is largely paid for by government, and the government loves criteria like “we bill $X/hour for someone with degree Y). Teachers and nurses outnumber my profession by thousands to one.
Long and short of it, if examinations could replace college for a majority of the population, wouldn’t it have happened by now. College costs six figures and four years of your live, why hasn’t someone picked up the $100 bill on the sidewalk? There must be a reason.
Currently, people can sort of avoid college. It ain’t easy, but you could have a career without going to a mainstream college and there are a few oddball conservative ones out there. They absolutely can’t avoid K-12. I have no clue how you plan to reform college education if the people arriving at college are steeped in racial hatred from kindergarten.
The reason is Griggs v. Duke. Aptitude testing for employment is illegal.
If that ruling were reversed tomorrow it wouldn’t affect that fact that my teacher and nurse friends get a raise for attaining traditional degrees. I doubt that the relevant bodies determining that would switch to an exam only format even if they were allowed.
Aptitude testing is *not* illegal provided it focusses on skills and behaviors actually needed on the job. The poison injected with Griggs v. Duke Power is the inability to use a generalized test — much easier to administer as you can just use an existing, standardized test — rather than one laboriously customized to the specific job requirements. *That’s* where college-degree-as-proxy came in.
I thought the main problem is that it created an easy path to sue businesses if their tests show disparate impact. Once such a suit is brought, the business has a long row to hoe to prove its innocence and that means big legal risks. Much simpler to launder ability testing through colleges.
” If you want to get a raise as a k-12 teacher, you want to get a masters degree. Does getting a masters degree teach you anything? No. Does it get you a raise? Yes. Does anyone care about anything other than the raise? No.”
This is mostly wrong. Teachers get raises almost every year, as do cops and other government workers.
The difference between teachers and the others is that teachers don’t get paid overtime and teachers can’t get promoted. Instead, they get paid for incremental education. Teacher payscales are called “step” (seniority) and “column” (education). They also get paid for master’s degrees, but it’s not required. Generally an MA gives a percentage increase on total salary, while education moves you over a column.
To incentivize teachers to return to school, most districts create an salary “hole”, where there’s no step raises for several years, so the only way to get more money is go back to school and get moved over a column. But if you start the job, as I did, with max education, you get a raise every year until you top out on seniority. This is why many teachers leave once they’ve hit 30 years.
Dude, I know how steps and grades work.
The point is doing getting useless credentials = $$$, so people do it.
If that’s the point then say it. You said something entirely different.
“The difference between teachers and others is that teachers don’t get paid overtime and teachers can’t get promoted.”
Well, that’s partially correct. Teachers don’t get paid overtime, but they do get three months off every year, which other government workers don’t get. It isn’t true that teachers can’t get promoted – most school administrators, from assistant principals to superintendents, are former teachers. If you want to get promoted, you can. That’s the way promotion works in every discipline – you do less of the line work and more of the management.
Teachers get paid a yearly salary, just like other government workers. They have an hourly rate. And they don’t get overtime.
School administration is an entirely different job needing an entirely different credential. It’s not a promotion, although it is true that many teachers become administrators. Going from teacher to admin isn’t a promotion. It’s a job change.
Other government workers have the I, II,III, Senior designation in some form or another. Teachers do not. So if you’re a cop, you have a bunch of ways to get promoted, a bunch of opportunities for overtime. Teachers have none of these. That’s not a complaint. It’s just an explanation. They needed some way to give teachers more money within the ranks, and they chose education.
Because if you’re in the education business, you tend to believe that more education makes you a better person–morally, if nothing else 🙂
+1
I think law and business schools should be folded into the four-year curriculum, and grad schools done away with.
Other countries do things like that, and it’s not a bad system, but it wouldn’t do anything about the CRT problem. A lot of the absurd foundational texts were written and promulgated by professors in the American legal academy, and would have come out regardless of how it is positioned in the overall structure of higher education.
I agree.
I am surprised that more “right-wing” colleges and universities have not been formed, or aligned with training and tech schools. Four years and out, lean and mean colleges low-cost, with a salable degree.
I hate to see the right-left division in everything, but alternatives are few.
A spooky side show is the growing love affair between the national security state and the left wing-Democratic Party-media blob.
Up until the Great Awokening, it was pretty easy for a normal middle class person to go to a university, ignore the “studies” courses, and get their engineering or business degree with a minimal of indoctrination. I did that myself.
I think the whole point of “Silence is Violence” is to take away the option of simply ignoring the Woke.
You can’t build a university overnight. The best universities have been around hundreds of years. Those around shorter time periods are usually State Us that had the backing of the government.
At least personally, I can’t think of a college started in the last twenty years that would be considered particularly good that isn’t a tiny niche.
Would you send your kid to a school that was just founded, with no track record, that charges $40k/year in tuition/room and board? That’s what most of the “right wing” small liberal arts colleges I see are like.
There is considerable indication that the college turmoil is being driven by students who arrive from K-12 already deeply ideologized, and that colleges as consumerist institutions respond to this pressure. So it may be that you can’t fix the college level problem without addressing the K-12 problem.
This sounds right to me. It’s sort-of chicken-and-egg, though. K-12 teaching practices come from teachers’ colleges.
Regulating K-12 is something that can be done in the very short term: almost immediately. Indeed, it has already started in several states, hence the lefty freakout.
Ending college, on the other, is obviously a very *long* term project, and frankly, it’s a “regime change complete problem”.
If you changed the regime and could do what you wanted, you wouldn’t stop there. Reform proposals aren’t worth entertaining if they are in the gap between the policy orbitals associated with “quantized political energy levels”. Either you lack sovereign control over the regime, and thus can’t get it done, or you have control, and would do a heck of a lot more or completely different things.
“Ending college” a good example of a “between orbitals” proposal. The trouble is, these days, practically every good reform is in the same spot. That’s how you know you’re in deep, deep trouble.
My guess is its harder to regulate K-12 than simply passing legislation. If each classroom isn’t thoroughly monitored, plenty of leftist indoctrination can occur so long as the teacher in charge of the classroom wishes to do it.
For example, I recall that while I was in Middle School, one of my teachers polemicized against the School Board in advance of an impending strike. Many of the teachers basically said ignore the scabs, none of their assignments will count towards your grades. Now obviously none of this was acceptable to the administration in control of the schools, yet it still occurred.
The goal is to protect teachers that don’t want to indoctrinate from being forced to indoctrinate under threat of penalty and removal.
I thought a big part of the problem is a significant number of K-12 teachers are true believers.
Protecting the non-woke is helpful, but if even 20% of K-12 teachers are woke, that pretty much ensures that most kids will be exposed to wokeness over their 13 years in school.
Justin,
There are two things I want:
1) To set a curriculum that isn’t woke indoctrination (9X% of teachers will follow the curriculum 9X% of the time)
2) To ensure that teachers that won’t give in to the latest woke demands aren’t punished/fired. And I don’t just mean after a ten year long bankrupting court battle. In my district the school board is pulling out all the legal stops to fire a guy who doesn’t want to call girls boys and boys girls.
Those are good things to want. I worry that it isn’t enough.
I have no idea regarding how many woke teachers there are, and of them how many will shrug and just follow the curriculum if CRT is banned.
My concern is that a public school is a single point of failure. Let’s say you have a high school of 1,000 kids from working class families who can’t afford alternative options. If the political battle is lost, even temporarily, all of those kids get exposed to potentially years of woke indoctrination (complemented by woke social media, woke advertising, woke TV shows, woke movies, etc). And we know that there are going to be lots of states and localities which can’t protect (or don’t want to protect) themselves from CRT.
Ideally, there is no public school at all, though pragmatically we keep a ‘public option’ to help sell the project to moderates who would prefer to keep sending their kids to their local school or have emotional attachments to their alma mater, etc.
If you can transfer actual dollars to families so that they can provide for their own kids education, that will create a political bloc of victims with sob stories if you ever try to take it away.
I worry that the right’s approach to this sort of thing is too defensive, too reactionary. The left is always on the offense, going big with its crazy ideas, and the right keeps parrying until the left lands a few blows, ending the contest.
I agree with what you say, but you didn’t say enough.
Other purposes of college.
For elite schools, social networking is the key. The classwork at Harvard is low, and no one cares. Harvard is a finishing school for the ruling class. The idea is to network, so they hire each other when they graduate. Or earlier. Bill Gates made contacts at Harvard and dropped out to create Microsoft and get rich. Zuckleberg made contacts and dropped out of Harvard to create Facebook and get rich. Contacts and getting rich are the game.
Another issue is marriage. Assortative mating. The members of a class want to meet and marry members of the same class, when they are young and single but looking for partners. It is harder to meet people, especially your own class, when you out on your own.
You didn’t mention the screening and signaling hypothesis. College has a function of selection (admissions), screening (I can work hard), and signalling (I am among The Chosen). I recognize that this is fading with “diversity” choices and brainwashing.
But there is another type of screening and selection. By explicitly excluding young people who aren’t “woke,” colleges offer a set of choices to institutions who only want to hire the woke. This is especially true for education majors and divinity schools and increasingly law schools.
What about Western Governor’s University? They are accredited, but they are geared toward getting people both a degree and valuable industry certifications/licenses as soon as possible and at a low cost relative to other universities. I think that having no campus, and hence no campus life, is a plus in terms of avoiding the nonsense.
I went to Catholic schools from K to 9, where at least 40 percent of each day was devoted to teaching us traditional Catholic theology, rituals and Catechism. Many of my friends went on to graduate from Catholic high schools.
After finishing our Catholic educations, not one of my friends or I remained in the Church. Most of us came to ridicule and actively dislike the Catholic church, and considered that time of our schooling devoted to religion as a tragic waste of time.
In fact, the Church, after training the largest cohort of Catholic school students in history during the baby boom, went on to see the most precipitous decline in Church membership in 2,000 years.
What I’m getting at is: What makes anyone think that children inculcated with CRT will accept it as the truth, anymore than me and my friends from Catholic school accepted Church teachings? We figured out early on that most of what they were telling us was BS, and made up our own minds.
Quite so. CRT is a fairy tale that I expect kids would grow out of.
The difference as far as I can tell is that outside of direct Catholic teachings at school the entire rest of the culture was sending the opposite signals.
By contrast, if kids are taught Woke in school they will also be taught it every single other aspect of their lives as well.
Precisely. It was running with the cultural tide to deride Catholicism. It is conforming with that tide to adopt woke attitudes.
This is an excellent question! Unfortunately, “We figured out early on that most of what they were telling us was BS, and made up our own minds,” is a delusion, and not actually how people settle on beliefs. CRT is filled to the gills with BS, but that’s not stopping anybody.
Indeed, to the extent you think Catholic doctrine is BS, CRT’s BS is of a much worse form. It is *much* better to ask people to swear fealty to the unfalsifiable invisible than it is to demand their loyalty oaths to the visibly false, which – in addition to inevitably butting against reality in deeply antisocial ways – just serves to humiliate people, show them who’s boss, and constantly rand obnoxiously rub their noses in the imposition, which is where all the intense and bitter resentment is coming from. This is the exact functioning that Dalrymple wrote about in regard to communist societies, (see “Utopias Elsewhere”).
Catholic education does perfectly well when Catholicism is the highest status religion in one’s social reference group. That’s can happen when it’s the dominant, uncontested faith is a society aligned with power, or even when its persecuted by the powers that be but remains the main focal point of community commonality and solidarity is contrast to such oppression, as happened in some Eastern European countries.
But it *doesn’t stand a chance* in a society in which its completely clear that nobody in the elites and top tiers of status takes it seriously and, quite the contrary, think genuine Catholicism to be positively backward and repugnantly immoral. Parents can try as hard as they want to give their kids a proper upbringing and steel them against a hostile world, but when they kick those fledglings out of the nest and release them into the world they will discover that the acid of that influence is strong enough to dissolve anything in an instant.
In this sense, Vermuele, Ahmari and fellow travelers in the “New Right” (but see also T. S. Eliot’s “The Idea of a Christian Society”) are perfectly correct that only an integralist regime (along implicitly Westphalian lines) has any chance of restoring Catholic theology to a place of sufficient prominence such that its teachings could provide a respected set of answers and guide for life and policy.
Short of that, however, and Catholic parents can’t hope to have much lasting influence after the ’emancipation’ of their kids, especially for the smart fraction who has the opportunity to join the deracinated progressive elites, so long as they covert.
That’s even if the Catholic Church and its American schools had stayed true to the Church’s traditional teachings, which is, alas, far from the case. And at this point, in the worst of those schools, those parents are just throwing money down a pit to hell.
I disagree re the integralists. Will Durant noted that Catholicism was thriving more in the US in the 20th century than in Catholic Europe, even where Catholicism was still supported by the state. He argued that religious monopolies tended to become decadent, and America’s religious tolerance was conducive to more robust religiosity. It’s hard to test empirically, but everything I’ve read and heard suggests that Falangism, for example, was a catastrophe for Catholicism in Spain. Religiosity collapsed immediately after the Franco died because so much resentment had built up beneath the surface of the stultifying political Catholicism.
Meanwhile, the countries in Europe where Christianity is doing best are those that 30 years ago had repressive atheist regimes. In a secularizing culture, using the state to try to reimpose religiosity is probably counterproductive. You need cultural currents to be at your back as well, but then if you have those, you don’t need the state.
Catholicism seems to do best where it’s an ethnic marker. Poles against the Soviets. Irish against the English. The various American urban Catholic ethnics against the protestant establishment.
In America of the Catholic immigration wave you would find these self contain “little Italy, etc” where the church, businesses, residents, and importantly catholic school were their own kind of tiny integralist regime within the boarder society. Kind of like a less orthodox version of the Hasidic today.
Right. It got a boost from serving a solidarity-bolstering function as an aspect of oppositional identity.*
And look what happens to it the minute it no longer serves that function: it implodes with astonishing speed, practically overnight. Ireland is a good example, which is Poland a decade or two from now, as most devout Poles will concede in anguish and despair.
*It’s popular for intellectuals to denigrate ‘tribalism’ lately. But, you know, modern humans thrived in tribes (and maybe “tribe-mentality civilizations” too) for tens of thousands of years. Maybe what we need is not less tribalism, but more and *better* tribalism.
“I disagree re the integralists.”
Ironically, we all definitely live in an actual, living, breathing integralist society. Si Quæris Integralism, Circumspice! It’s just that our system is integrating the faith of Progressivism instead of Catholicism.
The big picture is that you can’t avoid integralism because *all* societies are inherently integralist to *something* (the de facto state religion, the true unwritten constitution), whether they say so, admit it, are aware of it, or not. Even if they deny it, it’s delusion and they are deceiving themselves.
So the question comes down to *what* should be the source of the basic set of decision rules that provides a general guide for answers to most of the major questions in life. If a society settles on something both crazy and unstable in that it tends to keep rapidly mutating and evolving in the direction of increased insanity without limiting principle, then it is in big trouble.
As for falangism, it wasn’t bad for Catholicism, just kept the anti-Catholic forces at bay for a few decades. The Spanish atheist communists were virulently (and violently) anti-Catholic long before falangism existed, indeed, why it came into existence. This was similar to the unleashing of anti-clerical bloodlust in the French Revolution (remember, religion has been fading a long time). Point being, had the commies won, Spanish Catholicism would have collapsed much earlier.
Also, it’s worth remembering that history has not been written by the falangists, but by their lefty opponents, who even today still hold a grudge like you can’t believe for losing the Spanish Civil War.
The Catholic Church controlled education (and indoctrinated people far beyond the education system) for nearly 2,000 years, and for nearly 2,00 years produced generation after generation of Catholics. If the natural state of affairs were for kids to react against what they’re taught in schools, Catholicism would’ve collapsed in the 4th century. Kids only started reacting against their Catholic indoctrination when Catholicism had already started waning. Unfortunately, the old Jesuit saying, ‘give me the child and I’ll give you the man,’ seems pretty apt.
Good point. Propaganda can be successful or it can be unsuccessful or it can even provoke backlash and rebellion. One example of unsuccessful propaganda does not mean that other propaganda won’t be successful.
Anecdotally, I went to public, non-religious school, and a Catholic after-school program. The Catholic school didn’t seem to try very hard to convince anyone of religion, the teachers didn’t seem very passionate, and didn’t seem to care when students weren’t convinced. Most classmates developed into non-religious adults.
In public school, I remember the teachers were passionate about leftist views on race of the time. Martin Luther King was the central hero of the K-12 experience. And they hammered it in with repetition every year. Most literature we read in every year of school was stories of focused on black-white race relations, most public assemblies were focused on race relations, etc. I believe that propaganda was very effective. Most of my classmates developed into adults that are irrationally religious about left-wing politics.
Colleges are the state churches of the ruling progressive regime. They will stand or fall with that regime.
“The root of the problem can be found on the college campus.”
Nope. This is not the root, but still out on a bough of the poisoned tree. That’s an amplifying megaphone, but not the voice.
That perspective still hasn’t fully internalized and incorporated the insight that one is dealing with a moralistic religion here, and thus that solution falls short of the mark because it lacks Spiritual Sovereignty.
It’s not enough to negatively lower the status of woke college with nothing to go in its place; you need to positively create something that comes to be perceived as *cooler* than woke college, and which can serve the broad elite, not just narrow elite.
The question is why are all the colleges preaching American Woke Progressivism as opposed to any other message, which they certainly have done in different times, and do in different places. The answer is that it’s not something about the colleges or structure of higher education itself, but which religion is coolest, and thus attracts the members of the academy – inherently clerisy – as its missionaries.
You don’t manage the problem of a dominant, high-status, bad religion just by closing its churches and dissolution of its monasteries, and *with nothing at all to replace them*. Though, it wouldn’t hurt. And you can’t dispense with religion entirely as every state has one to bolster its claims of legitimacy and the basis of the general moral order enforced by the law. That’s the fatal conceit at the heart of liberalism.
Instead, you have to replace them with monasteries of your own, teaching a better religion, while keeping the other one down and suppressed by whatever means minimally necessary to prevent it from posing a threat.
The Russians, Chinese, and Islamic countries seem to be showing signs they are aware of all this and feeling around in the dark and grasping in their own ways for workable alternative approaches that don’t involve completely closing themselves off the outside world, or, at the very least, just outlasting America’s latest nervous breakdown in the hope that whatever comes after is significantly diminished in virulence or dangerousness.
It’s when one starts thinking seriously along these lines about how to solve this issue that one gets to the true root of the problem.
Agreed. But there’s a giant hole in your analysis. Why is woke now the “religion [which] is coolest, and thus attracts the members of the academy – inherently clerisy – as its missionaries.”? Especially since you say in your July 11, 2021 at 1:25 pm comment that it is “visibly false … in addition to inevitably butting against reality in deeply antisocial ways”.
Another good question.
To start, the way people settle on beliefs is mainly social, not practical or empirical. Life is like one gigantic, continuously re-iterated Asch Conformity Experiment that for most people just presses the mute button on their lying eyes when their observations contradict these social pressures.
For the most part, beliefs are cool strictly on the basis of the status of the people who signal their belief in them. So the fact that absolutist egalitarianism – the thread of American ideology that eventually gave rise to contemporary wokeness – is visibly false and antisocial does not do much at all to undermine its coolness factor. The brain is a great rationalization engine and will go along with any commonly accepted excuse to get to the socially desirable answer. People only turn on their defense shields of harsh scrutiny for claims made by bad people in the out-group.
There are, after all, few things more obvious as matters of personal experience than the tight relationship between the perceived intensity of policing and the occurrence of violent crime. And yet high status academics and journalists can simply announce that the glass which fell over did not make the table wet, and most people will believe it, and continue to profess it themselves, even after they literally get mugged by reality.
This is all amazingly flexible, but it isn’t *infinitely* plastic. There *are* limits to this in terms of certain natural impulses of human psychology, what kind of stories we like, what triggers our emotions, and how instinctive attitudes shift with perceptions of increased levels of wealth and status. Unfortunately, the constraints probably work to the detriment of accurate “ugly truth” claims more than seductively false ones. It’s easy to get people mad at and blame other groups of people for their problems. It’s hard to get them to face reality.
As for why *this particular* set of beliefs is cool, that’s a long story, but the big picture is that like the evolution of a species, it’s a matter of path dependency and historical contingency. Without some authority like a church magisterium to maintain stable control over certain ideological notions, they will tend to vary, compete, and face selection pressure for influence and power, which is not at all the same thing as being selected for correspondence to reality.
The Reformation, the immediate schisms into different sects, the Protestant colonization of the vastness of the North America frontier, and relatively early independence from European dominance set the ball rolling with particular “seed values”, as it were. There’s a reason why the beliefs of the early American Quakers are eerily similar to many held in high status today. The impact of democratic elections on the evolution of those ideas should not be underestimated, as it created a competitive market for emotionally compelling political formulae that interacted with religions and eventually displaced them.
As a matter of pure intellectual abstractions of arbitrary principles untethered from reality, all political and moral ideologies start out as really crazy and inhuman if you were to take the implications of their internal logics completely seriously.
But the constellation of principles that make up a value system are *not* supposed to be treated like axioms in some mathematical proof. That is a constructed intellectualization for which one would be foolish to try to map to the reality of human nature and the general requirements of peace, harmony, order, and flourishing. This is why True Believers in such systems tend to be so dangerous, because their ethical reasoning has so much fidelity to the unreal that it’s to the expense of the real.
So what people do is conveniently not pay much attention to all those principled mandates. They set a kind of reasonable threshold on what they are required to do and what is acceptable conduct, based on cultural inertia and personal interest. “I am supposed to give *some* of my money away to charity, but I do not have to give nearly *all* of my money away until I too need charity.”
They pay attention to the ones they can handle, and they tend to not even be aware of the ones they can’t, so long as it seems like everybody else and especially high status people ignore them too. These are “unprincipled exceptions” and survive so long as they remain matters of political and economic expediency.
But the trouble is, without a magisterium to shut these guys up, this just opens the door to someone trying to gain status by signaling superior righteousness (a deep human instinct), by pointing out the fact that, if people thought about it, they would see that everyone is living in violation of their purported principles, and that this unprincipled exception must be rectified and eradicated forthwith.
These are like low-handing ideological fruit, and, depending on circumstances and historical happenstance and rising levels of wealth that can subsidize all kinds of delusion, one apple gets plucked after another in sequence of ripeness, until the system becomes increasingly perfect, which is to say, increasingly detached from human reality, crazy, insane, harmful, etc.
So, what started out at the seed values for American ideals centuries prior has ended up where it is today, and the priests of the religion have and will always be the highest status elite public intellectuals, who fill the niche of a priestly caste telling us what the true faith requires from us.
Handle, thanks for your answer. Near the beginning, you say, “For the most part, beliefs are cool strictly on the basis of the status of the people who signal their belief in them.” But that raises the question, “why are these people high status?” and does not answer the question, “why do these high status people hold the beliefs they do?”, in his case wokeness that is “visibly false … in addition to inevitably butting against reality in deeply antisocial ways”.
There is a static quality to your analysis, or perhaps (I don’t mean this to sound as bad as it will) a deus ex machina quality. Poof!, high status people believe this and all the Asch conformists adopt it. But why do they believe it? Why do people think of them as high status and worthy of emulating?
Why don’t their beliefs make people think they don’t deserve high status? No doubt I am partly a prisoner of my own experience, where in “the sixties” my friends and I thought a lot of supposedly expert, high status people were full of s**t, so we didn’t take them seriously.
There is only one chance to change this- parents have to stop paying for it, from kindergarten up. I am sorry, Arnold- this solution necessarily has to start from the bottom- that is the only way you reform the top. We have to raise a generation of children and their parents who are capable of escaping the college plantation.
I was an organic chemist who worked in drug discovery for 20 years before I retired. I did the whole rigamarole- kindergarten- PhD. I can train a bright 18 year old high school graduate to do the work masters level chemists do in about 6 months (I have actually done this for 20 year-old college students doing internships), and train them to do what I did in about 2 years, all the while they were getting paid to do the benchwork involved.
Now, chemistry is a bit different in that you don’t have to go into debt to get the advanced degrees- but you still get to waste a great amount of time before getting to build an actual career while making a lot more money, and I wish I had been given that option or forced my way into it rather than spend 11 years in college-post-doctoral study. However, having been marinated in the K-12 mindset, it never occurred to me to do anything other than college and grad school.
Arnold, did you ever hear of the word “and”? Fixing the CRT problem at the college level is a longer-term project, the effects of which — in the K-12 teaching profession — will persist long after colleges stop with CRT indoctrination. We need to do *both*.
–“There are organized efforts to try to save college as an institution. In the essay, I instead suggest that we do away with it.”–
I’d go farther than that, and try to do away with much (if not all) of K-12 public education entirely.
Replace direct spending public schools with vouchers, but the vouchers have a special kick to them. You can use the voucher to pay tuition to any public or private school of your choice. If you’re married, you can opt to homeschool and simply convert the voucher into cash so long as one parent agrees to stay home with the children. This will prevent any school from becoming too nuts, as parents will become customers who can easily opt to send their children elsewhere. It will also eliminate the ability of a national organization like the NEA to set the educational agenda – people can always opt out to a school which doesn’t have NEA teachers or teach their own kids.
For single parents, as they’ll be expected to work in support of the family while children are at school, they will not have this option, though there will be a voucher provided for all children under 17, so those who need child care can have it. If a school or day care costs less than the amount of the voucher, the parent and government split the savings equally.
hahahaha.
Good one.
Amazing how people can think these are serious proposals.
Do you have another proposal to try to break children free from the grip of widespread leftist indoctrination?
The above is a completely sane proposal, with a massive carrot for would-be supporters: you get something like $14k per kid in your pocket to choose how to educate them.
In the past decade or so, large parts of the country has decided to accept far more odd-ball ideas than ‘hey, how about parents make the decision as to what sort of education is appropriate for their children.’
Every single proposal from Kling boils down to:
Voice Hard
Exit Easy
But Exit is like musical chairs. It can only be used by a niche. Inevitably, society is run on Voice.
Moreover, exit to where? Leftist indoctrination is being pushed to most every public school student (and quite a few private ones as well). Even leaving the country probably isn’t much of an option given massive American cultural influence over much of the world. I suppose we can always follow Snowden to Russia.
–“Maybe K-12 is a battle worth fighting, but it won’t win the war.”–
Maybe it’s not sufficient to win the war, but there is real value in taking territory & strategic resources even if they are far from the enemy’s capital.
While CRT is bad at any age, it is clearly worse if people are exposed to it as young children, as they’ll just come to think of that worldview as the default normal. Indeed, if children are exposed to CRT during K-12, they’ll hardly need any university indoctrination.
As at least one other commenter has noted, Kling’s lack of interest in fighting CRT in K-12 overlooks that kids indoctrinated with this garbage in grade school will not even need further indoctrination in college. While both fights should be fought, the K-12 fight is considerably more important. It is difficult to resist concluding that Kling (like most genteel libertarians and free-marketeers) finds just too painful and embarrassing to take the same side in any political fight as “nationalists” (i.e., people with old fashioned patriotic feeling) and social conservatives.
Needless to say (and some here have already said it), Kling’s idea of doing away with college is a fantasy (like his “exit over voice” daydream). Employers and the professions have no problem with woke-ism, usually actively support it, and have no interest in accommodating new credentialing alternatives.
And, as usual, Kling demonstrates his instinct for the peripheral by misdiagnosing college as “the root of the problem.” The woke ideology has already thoroughly penetrated the national managerial/professional/technocratic culture outside the academic world, even though people of middle age and up went through college before CRT and woke-ism became dominant. The root of the problem is that the elite culture in this country will, sooner or later, adopt whatever social ideology becomes dominant in academia, and will react with a tribalistic wagon-circling reflex against any resistance offered by the dilapidated and ineffectual “right.”
I work in the court system of a deep blue state, in which Republicans have become irrelevant. That court system is now busy indicting itself for “systemic racism,” even though the judges and the legal professions are overwhelmingly progressive Democrats (and have been for years), with a few innocuous, milquetoast RINOs thrown in. The same is true of major corporate law firms and their corporate clients. The people pushing this nonsense are not recent college graduates, they seem to be responding to an irresistible cultural imperative, which is already deeply internalized.
Perhaps if Enlightenment values ever recover somewhere on the planet, a future Gibbon will explain how and why the most highly developed, richest and most powerful civilization in human history went insane, beginning at its highest levels. But if such a work is ever produced, none of us reading this blog will be around to read it.
I work at a giant mega corporation in the most evil and profit seeking fo sectors to ever exist. Every single employee at my company has till September to attend a woke struggle session based on White Fragility. We are reminded that “we are supposed to be uncomfortable” and “silence is violence”.
In answer to an above commentator, has an employer ever requested you go to a Catholic struggle session to affirm the latest papal bull?
“We are reminded that “we are supposed to be uncomfortable” and “silence is violence”.”
May I suggest loud howls of despair when your indoctrinator makes some especially telling point, perhaps alternated with some weeping; afterwards go see a doctor for some ‘mental health’ time off to recover (in particular if your workload is bad). A few weeks may be sufficient but who knows? Mental health is important.
“Perhaps if Enlightenment values ever recover somewhere on the planet, a future Gibbon will explain how and why the most highly developed, richest and most powerful civilization in human history went insane, beginning at its highest levels. But if such a work is ever produced, none of us reading this blog will be around to read it.”
+1 thank you!
“And, as usual, Kling demonstrates his instinct for the peripheral by misdiagnosing college as “the root of the problem.””
You then say: “The root of the problem is that the elite culture in this country will, sooner or later, adopt whatever social ideology becomes dominant in academia.”
Academia being… colleges?
It seems you’re just eager to disagree even when you agree.
The root of the problem is not that colleges are currently teaching this garbage to 19 year olds, the problem is that 50 year olds who run things right now, and went to college 30 years ago (when woke-ism was not dominant), have adopted it. Kling is talking about changing what is taught to 19 year olds (who are already pre-indoctrinated in grade school anyway). Aside from being impractical (there is no route to displacing college), that is not where the damage is being done now.
Well, heh, ‘Enlightenment’ was really more of a marketing term, you see.
I have that problem with a lot of capitalized historical terms beginning with “the”, Renaissance and Holocaust being the two that spring to mind.
Reforming college education is the ultimate Hail Mary pass. Good luck to you and the rest of the losertarians!
Arnold, I’m obviously a big fan, but I’ll go ahead and continue to disagree with you on k-12 vs. college.
Here is what you said a week or so ago:
“All in all, it would not surprise me if the anti-CRT movement manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Let’s just settle this with a bet. Rufo > Kling. I’m all in. Please state your terms.
Rufo (and the rest of us) will continue to post Ws and the Hail Mary libertarians will continue to post their Ls.
https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/want-to-save-america-dont-act-like
https://christopherrufo.com/victories/
Rufo’s video especially is really good if you have to send someone a 20 min summary of what he believes and what the call to action is. Easily better than anything anyone else has produced on the topic.
At this point, I just want fresh $100 bill from Arnold (autographed of course). It will feed my hungry family for at least the next month. Easiest money we’ve ever earned.
Also, I’m kinda getting sick of all of the naysayers. So far, they’ve got literally nothing interesting to add to the conversation. Nothing more than a bunch of mood affiliation and fake moral purity.
Arnold, please post the funds with your terms or stop complaining already.
I will never promise you that it will pretty…it won’t be…politics never is. But, will it be undemocratic?
I could give you some problems with Rufo’s approach in my county (they should be more focused on the logistics of turning board seats and less on grandstanding events, not that I object to such demonstrations in any way), but they would all be tactics and none of them would be ideological. If Arnold’s concerns were purely tactics I could consider them empirically one by one, but I have zero patience for ideological hang ups in a knife fight.
In baseball terms I’d say Rufo provides lots of “value above replacement” in this fight.
asdf
Based on your previous posts, I’m assuming that you are in Loudoun county.
Certainly, I agree that things could be approached differently and more effectively over there. Some of the antics are likely to backfire.
But, you go to war with the army you have and not the one that you wished you had. The libertarians keep missing this message time and time again.
They aren’t missing anything. When Rufo says that Courage is the fundamental issue here, he’s right. Libertarians just don’t have it. I don’t even think it’s all politics, a lot of their “socially liberal” attitudes have a real childlike attitude to them (the obsession with pot, the inability to form a health relationship with the other sex).
It’s one thing to say that you would try a different tactic or that you have multiple priorities that need to be balanced. I don’t have a problem saying they should spend less time at protests and more getting signatures. It’s another to demonize people actually trying to make the world a better place to rationalize your own cowardice.
I think the real issue here for libertarians is that legislating what schools can teach feels really bad for liberty. That is true, but it is overwhelmed by the diminishment of liberty arising from state run monopoly schooling in general. Short term, attempting to legislate out such a cancerous anti-freedom ideology as CRT or Successor Ideologies is probably a good idea, with always an eye towards the ending of the state monopoly and moving towards freer schools and taxation that allows for exit.
(I wrong more about this here https://dochammer.substack.com/p/why-libertarians-are-so-awkward-with after Arnold’s last post on the matter.)
Reforming colleges fall into the same category: a long term strategic goal, largely necessitating removing compulsory governmental funding. Arguably it is even longer term than K-12, as K-12 feeds colleges in a more hit or miss fashion. The filter between 12th grade and college is pretty open, whereas the filter between college and employment is pretty tight. Colleges are looking for customers from schools, while employers are looking for employees from colleges. The value and prestige of coming from a certain college and in a specific field is much greater than coming from the majority of K-12 systems. (Note: I know, most students at the top 3-5 universities come from a handful of particular prep schools. The percentage of college graduates from those 3-5 universities is much higher than the percentage of high school graduates from those prep schools, however. Past the elite colleges, the prestige of a particular high schools seems to be dwarfed by the other application points.) I think businesses are going to be very slow to just drop all associations with the name recognition of the bigger colleges in favor of the new upstarts. Particularly since so much regulation and tort avoidance is tied to having workers with the proper credentials in the proper fields, as described by the colleges themselves.
Dude – ultimately some committee somewhere gets decide what gets taught vs. what doesn’t. That’s what a governance process is all about. If it makes you feel uncomfortable then time for some counseling as opposed to resting your laurels on libertarian philosophy.
Should I be able to get a PhD in under water basket weaving from Harvard? Why or why not? That decision isn’t up to you or me. Rather, it’s up to the trustees to make that call.
Likewise, at the k-12 level, it’s up to the local school boards, state boards or legislative bodies. Not that complicated.
Dude – or what if there were a bunch of different schools that taught different things? Then people could go different schools based on what they thought the best combination of things being taught was. Not that complicated.
When everyone has to go to the same schools, then you are always going to have people unhappy about the schools because they won’t like what is being taught. Getting to decide what is taught becomes a big political prize because that means you get to indoctrinate everyone’s kids. Hence, everyone fights over it all the time.
1) There is no conflict between fighting CRT in schools and supporting vouchers. You can and should do both. You should not use vouchers, which haven’t gone anywhere in a long time, as an excuse not to fight CRT.
2) Most private schools have worse CRT than the public schools. This is a cultural zeitgeist and there would be tremendous value in sending a clear signal that the general public does not support it.
The anti-AA referendum in CA hasn’t stopped universities from practicing AA, but it has made it clear that the public finds it illegitimate. Even if one failed to stop schools from teaching CRT, it would be nice that when my kids come home I can show them election and referendum results that prove that most people think it’s garbage and they should ignore it. So that if they do reject it they know they aren’t insane weirdoes.
The libertarians can keep throwing the school choice Hail Mary passes as they have for the last 50+ years. I support this, but it’s not going to happen. Good luck!
My problem is with the folks that criticize conservatives and moderates for trying to gain control of the governance process at the state education level. What precisely is your concern? Certain courses will be taught while others won’t. It’s been this way forever. Should the taxpayers not have a say in the matter? You ok with teaching creationism in k-12? If not, what means would you like to employ to eliminate it?
Eric Hammer,
You suggest people shouldn’t push for changes to the existing status quo monolithic K-12 school system, because ideally, we should move away from a monolithic K-12 school towards more school choice.
I agree that we should move towards more school choice, but while the status quo is what it is, we should also push for political representatives to address the reasonable concerns we have.
The circumstances under which anti-CRT legislation can work are the same as those under which school choice works: the majority of people don’t like it, and preferentially seek schools that don’t teach it. If enough people support or tolerate it that they won’t punish schools that teach it in the market, then enough people support or tolerate it to prevail in the political arena.
The only way I can see school choice failing where legislation succeeds is if the teachers’ unions care a lot more about their jobs than about ideology, and are thus willing to fight school choice to the end in a way they aren’t willing to fight anti-CRT policies.
Possession is 9/10th of the law.
People in good school districts don’t want vouchers because they are afraid to mess up a good status quo they paid a lot of money for.
People in bad school districts actually can go to charters. In most cities the few smart kids in the ghetto can find a charter to go to. The dumb kids in the ghetto don’t care because they are dumb and it wouldn’t matter.
What’s new is the radical ideology being pushed in public schools. That can make a “good” school district “bad” if you don’t like the politics. That is what people are fighting.
It seems to me easier to win the CRT fight then to win the voucher fight. Vouchers for white people haven’t gained any traction in fifty years, but CRT is new and most reps and independents don’t like it.
And yes, unions care a lot more about their jobs than CRT. I have no doubt that my teacher friend cares about his job but doesn’t care about CRT. I think if you force the rank and file to choose between their activists leaders and their own interests there will be a revolt. You have to give them that option though.
Others have said it before but it really needs repeating. State governments already tell local schools what they have to teach, and often by implication, what they can’t teach. These are usually called education “standards”. You can probably find out what they are for your state by googling, “[state name] education standards” or ‘[state name] [subject] standards”.
The difference is that present standards are usually promulgated by the state education commissioner and developed by bureaucrats and consultants rather than coming from the legislature.
The state education commissioners and bureaucrats, local school boards and superintendents who shape curricula all act under authority of laws enacted by the state legislatures. Those arguing that there’s some special problem with legislatures taking action against CRT in the public schools are just incoherent.
No, they are not. They have a very coherent, though I think horribly wrong, argument.
It goes like this: People who work in the public sector are public spirited. People with degrees in a subject are experts. So people who work for the state and have degrees should be deciding what is taught. The legislature should delegate their authority to these people. Because 1) the legislature is not expert, and 2) it will decide on the basis of “politics” rather than the public interest.
This would be somewhat fine if were were discussing the best method for teaching fractions (which in theory could benefit from expert empirical research) and not inherently ideological content.
Ultimately, the problem is the inability of educators to acknowledge the empirical reality of the Null Hypothesis, because it means their very existence is superfluous. The inability to close the black/white gap just being the most ideologically charged lever they can pull to cover up this empirical reality.
If none of that they do really improves educational outcomes, becoming Red Guards is basically the only way to justify their existence. We can’t teach Jamal fractions until we purge white supremacy!
Perhaps this argument is “coherent,” but it has no basis in law, and it is completely authoritarian (as are many arguments from the Stalinist frauds who constantly blather about their “democratic values” and how they are trying to protect “our democracy”).
And there is absolutely no “expertise” involved in the 1619 Project or CRT, it is all just about elevating the status and honor of certain favored groups and their allies while degrading and dishonoring nonwoke whites. Anyone who thinks it is in the public interest to use the public schools to create and worsen tension between the races, and to inculcate feelings of shame and worthlessness in schoolchildren of the disfavored race, has a very odd view of the public interest.
djf, one of the problems in America today is that lots of leftists just can’t conceive of how non-leftists think. They can’t pass an “ideological turing test”. I fear you are doing the same thing.
There are lots and lots of laws that delegate legislative powers to bureaucrats. At one point, there was a question of whether this was constitutional (the “non-delegation doctrine”) but for the last century it has been settled law.
The 1619 Project may indeed be about “elevating the status and honor of certain favored groups and their allies while degrading and dishonoring nonwoke whites” but it involves lots of expertise. The people who developed it know a lot. You can say they are wrong about how they interpret things, that their whole narrative is tendentious and hateful, but they are experts. If we haven’t learned anything else in the last 60 years, we should have learned that experts are often wrong. That knowledge is often not used to impartially seek the truth but to justify beliefs already held.
And, of course, those who push the 1619 Project think that all the transitional bad feelings are necessary to get to a place where America has a decent society, that they are very much in the public interest and that anyone who opposes them is choosing comfort over justice.
The Ideological Turing Test is that the 1619 crowd can’t explain why there are gaps in performance because they will not allow themselves to consider the evidence in works like The Bell Curve.
Lacking an explanation for large and stubborn black underperformance in the face of sustained efforts and reforms aimed at fixing the problem for several decades now, they increasingly have to assume causes that are powerful, malignant, and seemingly resistant to all moderate reforms.
If you look at Rufo’s work or the anti-anti-CRT people, they will always grant the premise that “systemic racism” and things like it have explanatory power for current performance gaps. They object to it being the *overriding* cause. Yet they themselves are never willing to assign say an actual MATHEMATICAL value to how much of the gap is caused by systemic racism (you can have confidence intervals, but if you can’t differentiate between say 75% and 25% you’re not even trying). If the value is small, then a revolution isn’t warranted. If its large, perhaps it is (its at least more debatable). We can’t answer questions like “what are the policy implications of systemic racism” or “what should we teach kids about racism in schools” without being able to size the nature of the problem being addressed.
This is why saying that “well of course systematic racism is part of the issue” and then handwaving about “how much” is just people talking past each other.
At least Murray puts actual math to his estimates of:
1) non genetic causal factors (since genes make up a majority of his estimate, that means systemic racism is by definition not that big an issue)
2) empirical likelihood of certain policy proposal working
Any opinion you can’t put a number to is probably one you would be embarrassed to put a number to.
I think the 1619 crowd believes in bad things because they are based on bad facts and those bad facts are due to an intentional desire to ignore facts available to them that don’t make them feel better or increase their personal power. The *asymmetric insight* is that one side bases their beliefs on empirical facts and the other doesn’t. I don’t find anything about what they say to deserve respect and I don’t think there is anything to learn from them. It’s garbage stemming from their conscious decision to ignore facts they don’t like.
asdf, I don’t really disagree but trying to be charitable … many of the people who believe the 1619 Project and that “it’s all whitey’s fault” aren’t deliberately ignoring facts. Often, they don’t know other facts exist. Or they believe that what critics are presenting as facts aren’t really facts.
Maybe they’ve read Gould’s Mismeasure of Man. Maybe they’ve read the obituaries of Lewontin which tell them that between group variation is unimportant. They get this from people they trust and they don’t bother to go any further.
And this is normal. People who “believe in evolution” feel no need to read creationist literature. For the woke, the anti-woke are equally ignorable.
And if not ignorable, immediately rejectable. No need to even consider. Like when the Chinese government says there is no chance COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
At a certain point, being uninformed is a moral failing worthy of admonition.
The more power you are trying to exert over others, the more Chesterton’s fences you are trying to tear down, the more burden there is to engage in very serious and deliberate inquiry.
That people fail to do this doesn’t make them any less at fault than people who fail to do lots of things. It’s a sin, call it out.
Especially considering that the people most into this sort of stuff have the education, IQ, and means to do better…they are failing to reach a very low bar.
“legislating what schools can teach feels really bad for liberty.”
That’s just a framing/marketing problem. Recasting this sentence as the far more accurate “The state has no business determining what is taught in state-run schools” shows the issue pretty clearly.
I was disappointed that Kling wrote supportively of David French’s outrageous position on the issue. David French basically said that Republicans shouldn’t ask government to take any action on the issues that concern them, and they have an obligation to lose out of principle. French is deliberately trying to confuse and frustrate Republicans into losing.
What Kling says in this thread is entirely different and reasonable.
My criticism here is: what is Kling going to do about it? He has a modest following of people who admire what he says. But Kling is not in position of great authority to turn any of this into action.
This is you (Niko) from a few days ago:
“I try to focus on enjoying my life and delivering value to the world and investing in my career, helping my employer, my family, and my personal health. I have a lot of control over those things.”
This is insightful and I think there a lot of merit in this. Can we call it the stoic position? Control your “sphere of influence” and ignore everything else? Sounds like great advice.
However, what happens when the the levee breaks at your employer or at your kids’ schools? What to do then or are you calling the risk as remote at this point?
For some reason, I’ve been thinking about Candide these days. How much is “tending one’s own garden” still feasible? To the extent that it is, then I fully support you and this is wise.
Handle had a comment about how the ancients figured all this out long ago.
We already had a philosophy that said “ignore politics and find self fulfillment”. The problem is that lots of people who followed it still ended up on the proscription lists because other people wanted their stuff.
Look, I hate society and people. I don’t want much to do with them. I don’t particularly have a lot of free time to waste on stuff. Even my posting is mostly an artifact of needing to be at my desk but not having much to do. I totally understand if one doesn’t want to waste time on politics.
But feeling like your job and young kids don’t allow you to spend time on extremely marginal political action isn’t the same as David French style condemning it. I support those who have the time! To the extent that individuals find it makes sense for them, do it. I’ll show up at the polls.
I don’t think the grandstanding at school board meetings has a big marginal influence on school board policy. Those assholes are going to do what they do anyway. However, I don’t think the press involved is net negative. If people want to raise awareness, turns out raising awareness isn’t good for the CRT cause.
So that has an impact. What I mostly care about is that we turn enough board seats to change the curriculum. For that I need a broader coalition then die hard republicans. I need people who hate the school closures due to covid, asians that hate the closing of the magnet school, and other local issues that matter. I need signatures. They had 1/3 of the necessary signatures a month ago…now they have 1/2. That’s shitty progress on the only thing that matters. Why the hell if I’m on the email list do I not get notifications of signature events in my town? Why for the first several months was is just at the republican HQ on the other side of the county? Why is the website more about outrage and donations then figuring out how to flip seats if you want to change policy?
Ending CRT literally saves me multiple tuitions per year. I’m motivated! Put a path out there. 83% of Dems support this and I need to flip Dem areas to get a school board majority. Give me what I need. Expand beyond CRT. Everyone hates gender. Everyone hates covid. Everyone had their own local issues. Who even are the candidates I would vote for if we had a recall? What is their platform?
Look, its easy mode selling this in red areas. But the people who are going to shove this down your throat in a generation are growing up in the light blue suburbs. If you can’t flip them, give up.
“Handle had a comment about how the ancients figured all this out long ago.”
Fact check: false.
He probably had an essay that meandered on to and fro for paragraph after the endless paragraph, so I probably skipped over it.
Is it too much to ask for an executive summary in the first paragraph prior to going to go off the deep end?
(Handle is probably the best commenter on this blog and I’m obviously complete rubbish compared to him. But seriously, the verbal diarrhea is a problem. Scott Alexander or whatever his name is could use this advice as well.)
BTW – Haidt probably nailed this topic the best in his underrated first book.
Yes, that was me. It’s basically the “serenity prayer”.
It seems there is nothing I or most normal people can realistically do to prevent or prepare for political problems in the future. Am I wrong? What can be done? If the left does something crazy and there are repurcussions, well I don’t think I can realistically stop that from happening.
Lots of people worry and obsess and politics and ultimately make zero difference. That is a giant waste of effort. I am a news junkie, which is a bad habit. Even reading + posting here is probably a waste of time. But I’m somewhat realistic about that. In a non-political sense, I have a great career, amazing wife + kids, I do a lot of fitness, and some social stuff. Investing in that stuff is definitely not a waste of time.