At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future. Think of the many anecdotal home school success stories. (Of course there are also home school disasters.) This would be so disruptive to the current education and government institutions that I don't see it coming about soon. Primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities can still be education providers, but they would have to radically shift how they function.
At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future.
I think that'd be a pretty disastrous future; the purpose of "higher education", if it's to continue in any organized or disorganized form, is not to be personalized. The purpose is twofold:
* Give the students a common background of ideas and basic knowledge of their culture.
* Through study, discussion and debate of those ideas/culture, give them the ability to absorb and critically reflect upon arbitrary information.
In other words, there's a reason why, if you look at the bits which make them up, the terms "university" and "diversity" are practically antonyms.
In reading the comments I gather that there is a bias on HN when it comes to higher education. Namely, most of the people here seem to think of places like the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, University of Alabama, etc. when thinking about higher education.
Community colleges teach around 1/3 of all higher education courses. The typical higher education institution is not in division I sports and is not a research university. Sports are a financial drain for all but a handful of universities. Almost all TV revenue goes to division I teams and a large division I teams do no pay for themselves.
Even a division I school like the University of Oregon has to dip into the general academic fund. This dip comes from not repairing or funding needed expansions of classroom space. At some universities, like FSU, students are required to pay an athletic fee. Students are then able to attend games for 'free'. Thus this money is counted as part of the attendance revenue when it shouldn't be. There are all kinds of tricks when it comes to funding university sports.
Furthermore, institutions of higher learning are increasingly using adjunct labor. One university wants to outsource its grading to China. I idea of the typical higher education teacher being a professor is no longer true.
Perhaps it sounds heretical, but how hard would it be to shift all the funding schools receive for sports into academics? Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from?
The same place funding for professional sports comes from--ticket sales, sponsorship, TV deals, etc. The reason a university pays the football coach more than the president is because the football coach can bring in more money. (So can the players, incidentally, but there are NCAA regulations--in other words, a cartel agreement--that you don't actually pay the players, aside from giving them a generous scholarship.)
At schools where sports are profitable, the profits are indeed taken in by the university and used for academics, facilities, etc.
I've always wondered if it might make sense to hive off college sports into "minor leagues", wholly owned (at least initially) by universities. They get to keep their revenue stream, and could actually hire players for their market rates. I guess it wouldn't have the emotional attachment or something like that that I don't really get about college sports.
All of this has basically already happened except for the part where the teams pay players market rates, so you can see where the universities would be reluctant to change anything.
Certain sports are a profit center for certain schools. Football at U-Texas, yes. Football or rowing at Rutgers, no.
They receive a disproportionate focus even when they are not. The main reason is academic politics: a physics professor is busy doing research, while the athletic department has time for lobbying.
I consider my athletic experience in college (on a varsity team which definitely did not make money or prestige for the school) to be one of the best and most educational parts of college. Do your really think there are many programs which lose money and are doing harm to the students or the university?
I see basically two types of programs: a handful which exist solely to drive money and prestige to the university (big-time football, basketball, etc.) without regard to the tiny number of students participating, and the vast majority which are mostly focused on their primary purpose, providing a great experience for the athletes themselves.
I don't see many programs which are sucking a bunch of money away from research for nothing.
Your athletic program did harm students - it raised tuitions for everyone. You probably got more benefit than the average tuition increase, but most students did not. Universities should not be in the habit of forcing all students to pay for the recreational activities of a select few.
Incidentally, universities pocket about 50% of research money and put it into the general fund, which then gets spent on stuff like varsity sports.
In a number of schools, athletic departments are self-sufficient, so it's certainly possible the parent poster drew no general funds for his varsity sport participation.
Further, your argument about recreational activities for a few can be applied to pretty much every non-class activity at a university, from theater to quiz bowl to student radio. Why single out athletics?
Actually, for the most part I do extend it to pretty much every non-class activity at a university [1]. I only singled out athletics since that is what we were discussing. As a rule, I believe the cost of non-class activities should be paid for in full by participating students, not by taxpayers or other students.
>Universities should not be in the habit of forcing all students to pay for the recreational activities of a select few.
Yes, thank you. If they're going to pay for someone to play football, they might as well fund me to play Chess or Go. They could probably also fund that guy down the hall from me to play Tetris all day; I'm sure he'd be able to find something "educational" in that.
How about playing an instrument? Acting in or directing a play? Dance? Painting? Drawing? Are these recreational activities, educational, both, neither? Is competing in a sport at a high level more or less educational than these things?
I read somewhere the suggestion that basketball and football players in big time programs have the option of majoring in their sport, just like a Dance, Drama or Art major might. At least it would drop the pretense that those students are doing anything else.
Right, but to some degree it seems self-perpetuating: the schools get big because they get money for sports, which causes to them to get bigger, so they put more money into sports, etc.
My question is, I guess, why aren't schools founded around the idea of education? It's the same feeling I have towards fraternities and sororities. I find it incredible that most people tout school as a place to learn, and yet it's quite obvious that a lot of people attend for any reason but that.
I don't think that playing a sport or living a fraternity/sorority prevents someone from getting an education at the same time. For the people that do those things to the exclusion of their education, they deserve to flunk out and lose their place at school.
My point was that so much extra time and money that could be focused on improving academics is spent by the university (and by donors to the university) on irrelevant activities. I don't really care what someone does in their free time.
Maybe the answer is more aggressive pruning, I don't know what it's like in America but in Australia someone can probably spend 5 or 6 years barely trying before they would get kicked out.
Depends on the school. I went to one of the smallest schools with a D1 football team and it is my understanding that the football team there only survives due to funds alloted by the conference, which are collected as dues from the other universities.
Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from?
I'm not totally sure (so please correct me if I'm wrong), but here are my best guesses:
- Money for sports complexes, stadiums, etc. mostly comes from donors who want to help make their alma mater more competitive and/or get something named after themselves.
- Conferences and the NCAA pay schools with money from sponsorships, TV contacts, etc.
- Schools are willing to spend some money on sports because it brings exposure to schools. For example, I'd be willing to bet that Butler's applicant pool is much larger next year due to their recent success in the NCAA tournament.
Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund. Athletics is a highly corrupting influence on the university.
EDIT: It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now. People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility.
> Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund.
Citation or definitions needed.
For example, while Stanford is elite in some ways, it isn't a sports school. However, its "big athletic programs" (football, basketball, baseball, and possibly tennis) are more than self-supporting via directed donations and tickets.
The profits are used to fund less lucrative sports.
Well, citation is needed as well for the belief that sports brings in money. Do some research on the Google. Sports is a money loser for all but a handful of universities. You especially have to be careful when doing this research because universities are creative when it comes to accounting for sports expenditures.
I had access to Stanford's numbers. Its big ticket sports are profitable. The lesser sports aren't., although some are closer to break even than others. If Stanford has a loss in sports as a whole, it's because the lesser sports cost more than the profit from the big ticket sports.
And yes, that includes the new football stadium and the newish tennis stadium.
You have not the slightest idea of what you are talking about. Research sports spending at colleges and you will find that except for a few schools football programs do not support themselves. Few sports program anywhere or any type pays for itself.
"People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility."
Really? It appears to me anecdotally that the run-up in tuition has been accompanied by a run-up in university building programs. My alma mater, a large state-related research school with a big sports program, is nearly unrecognizable ten years after I graduated, with a new IS building, a new science building, a new business school building, and a new law school building.
I read that Harvard spent tons of money on building projects they could no longer afford when the market tanked. None of them had anything to do with sports, if I recall correctly.
It might be the case for your school but the funding for sports at my school came from alumni, the overwhelming majority of whom were former athletes from the school.
The university did charge an athletic fee. This was to cover the publicly accessible tennis courts, basketball courts, football, baseball, and soccer fields. They also provide buses for the intramural teams. And part of it went to subsidize student football tickets to the nationally ranked football team, played in a stadium the football boosters paid for.
I've watched the college next door to me transform from a small community college to a full fledged university. And they got there by having a serious athletic program.
It's the case for almost all schools. Sports does not lead to increase in enrollment, generally speaking. Sports do not pay for themselves except at a few schools.
Wow, the ignorance here is amazing. Why is my comment being down voted? Only around 20 division I schools have their sports teams making money. All of the rest are subsidized by the general academic fund. Ignorance is bliss.
> It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now.
Sadly, you're probably right about this. Sports seem to have become so ingrained in the popular paradigm of what you do at a university that it would be impossible to change. Oh well.
so it may be that even in the Ivy League, which is on top of just a few sports, the sports generate more applicant interest in the universities, and thus help them recruit stronger (both physically and mentally) students.
If you eliminated sports, alumni giving would drop significantly, almost certainly by enough to offset the small gains you got from eliminating sports.
This is completely wrong. There is not a shred of evidence to support your statement here. Sports programs do not pay for themselves and almost never give money back to the general academic fund.
You just need to step back and look at the incentives. The vast majority of college students are there to be "certified impressive", and socialized to cooperate in the workforce, NOT to learn. If learning were the goal, the system would look radically different. As it stands, students get their certification, employers get their pre-socialized workforce.
The situation will change when the basic proficiency level of the average student makes them untenable to hire. Unfortunately for those of us who would like to see the system improve, the required level seems to be dropping as technology allows corporations to automate a lot of tasks, and make other tasks nearly fool proof (think customer service flow charts).
For those roles that require actual acumen and responsibility, training for those will continue as it has since time immemorial: passed directly from family member or family friend to eager young adults, which is a primary force creating and maintaining class boundaries.
Well they think that because that is meant to be their role, it's not their fault that industry at some point imposed a lot of artificial degree barriers so people that don't want to be at university need to be there to stand a chance.
I think in software dev the trend is going the right way, you see a lot of degree helpful but not required. There is a lot of benefit in the degree but there are many paths to a goal and they should be objectively compared in hiring.
Professors don't collect money from undergrads to pay for research; they collect grants to fund themselves, their students, their labs, etc. They spend a tremendous amount of time and energy writing these grant proposals and submitting them to all the right people.
The reality is that most Research Professors (not all professors are on the tenure track, after all) are more motivated by research than by education, because they have to be. Nearly everything is stapled to #/quality of publications. If you don't like that, you'll have to revamp the whole system.
Besides, as much as we glorify it, teaching students sucks. Students do the bare minimum it takes to get the grades they want, and exhibit next to no real interest in the topics at hand. Add on to that that the professor has likely been researching an offshoot of this topic for years or even decades and you don't exactly have any motivation for the professor to put himself out there for the student.
If you want a professor to really care about you and make an active investment in you, you have to engage with him or her somewhere outside of class. The best way to do this is through research. If you want to put in your minimum to get your diploma, you're going to get that professor's minimum as well.
"Besides, as much as we glorify it, teaching students sucks. Students do the bare minimum it takes to get the grades they want, and exhibit next to no real interest in the topics at hand."
Teaching students sucks when students aren't engaged. It sucks to teach students who don't actually want to learn something; they just want to fulfill a requirement, or put the class on their CV. You're exactly right to say that "If you want to put in your minimum to get your diploma, you're going to get that professor's minimum as well."
That is, when teaching sucks, it sucks because students are participating in the exact same behavior that colleges are: bolstering their perceived reputations. Students do this because they have been taught (by colleges and the schools that prepare them for college) that reputation is what counts. So, if you fix the reputation-seeking system, student and professorial engagement in learning should increase, too.
But the really good and memorable ones took the job seriously and seemed to have a lot of fun.
Since I was in an engineering curriculum, I didn't notice many unmotivated students. Anyone like that washed out pretty early.
I don't think teaching inherently sucks. I think universities have let people into the profession who lack either the skills or the motivation, since teaching is seen as secondary to research.
Disclaimer: My wife is one of those professors (accounting).
In my experience professors care deeply about their students. Hell, most academics exist outside of fundable research. Think of the hundreds of humanities professors at every university. While they all have research interests... they hardly have anyone wanting to throw money at it.
The article actually touched on the fundamental issue. My wife did her time at a major research university. She finally decided that she'd rather spend her time as an educator, rather than as research arm for governmental policy (top level accounting professors play a big role in setting the direction of policy decisions).
She is now at a teaching-focused institution, but there is one problem: certain administrators continue to think in terms of the elite university model. They use the research metric, rather than the educational metrics as the ones to base advancement on. My wife is fortunate. Her time at the research focused institution has left her with a lifetimes worth of material for publishing. She can focus on teaching and her students benefit from it. A huge (epic) shortage of accounting professors means she is quite secure in her job... but that's definitely not true for most disciplines. So instead of being allowed to focus on students, these professors are FORCED into focusing on research. This is a scenario played out over and over again.
I'm not really sure what the right answer is, but I do think the traditional elite university model is quite broken at the lower level universities.
Well, maybe most professors at research universities. However, most teachers of higher education are not at such universities and are not conducting research.
> The situation will change when the basic proficiency level of the average student makes them untenable to hire.
You can kind of see that now. It used to be that people with only High School diplomas were very hire-able and people with B.A/S.s were the rarity. Now, in most professional environments a B.A/S. is a minimum requirement and M.A/S.s are preferred. Before too long M.A/S.s will be required for entry level jobs and either a second degree or a PhD will be the preferred.
Vested interests that have control. By removing voluntary interaction and replacing it with decree by fiat old incentive structures are calcified.
To fix this situation:
1. Remove all government funding
2. Remove all guarantees on student aid
Then students would be forced to do some economic analysis on what they think is worth it. They would care significantly more about he value proposition. By removing guarantees on student aid institutions would have a vested interest in creating the highest quality graduates or else it would become difficult for future students to receive loans.
I don't think this is an issue that's solvable by changes in funding. If someone in our society wants a college education, it should be provided for them. I think the bigger issue is that people feel they have to go to college to get anywhere.
The solution is for society to quit placing such a high value on am arbitrary piece of paper.
The solution is for society to quit placing such a high value on am arbitrary piece of paper.
It's primarily an IQ test. An inefficient, expensive, and not terribly accurate test, but one that employers can use without getting sued out of existence.
Absolutely. Or at minimum place equal value on other types of training such as apprenticeships or vocational programs, where appropriate. I've always thought that it's a shame these practical types of education are looked down on in the U.S. There's no reason many degrees - lets say graphic design, or journalism, for example - couldn't be taught equally well through these options.
> If someone in our society wants a college education, it should be provided for them.
Why? If you want to give education away, start with free kindergartens. The guys who are ready to go to university have already have already made it into the middle class.
Really? I must have missed my automatic promotion to middle classhood upon graduating high school because I was pretty broke when I went to University.
The solution is for society to quit placing such a high value on am arbitrary piece of paper.
The value of that paper would go down if the government took away tax incentives, interest rate subsidies, and the ability to eliminate student debt liabilities after 10 years.
1. In 2010, if you want to be truly educated, you have to do the work on your own. This was probably always true. Going to a great college helps, but it's a 20 or 50 percent improvement on the use of your time, and only if you use the time to learn: the opportunities are amazing, but no one requires that you take them, and many students don't. You can learn a lot more with the Internet and a library card than by completing what minimal work is required to pass through higher education.
2. Related to (1), the biggest benefit "college" offers to a person's education is that it allows "traditional" (read: well enough off to do college "correctly"-- residentially and in a four-year block without employment on the real economy) students to spend a substantial portion of their life with a very high degree of freedom without any non-educational work to do. Some students would be better served with $200,000 to spend as they wish, and an excuse to take four years off and do as they want... but that's not socially acceptable.
3. Our society has a disastrously mixed attitude on whether to invest in culture and refinement. Generally, we don't, and the result is an America that is hypercommercialized and ugly, with very few cultural achievements and a "high art" scene full of nouveau-riche charlatans. Tenured professorships aren't too numerous and overpaid, but the reverse is true. Although universities have a huge problem with bloat, professor salary is not the source of the problem. My major reason for hating what academia has become is that the universities are raising tuitions while slashing academic jobs: one or the other could be acceptable (leaner, cheaper universities; or rising costs for better quality) but the combination of both is intolerable.
We invest heavily in the trappings of culture, but essentially ignore it otherwise. This is why the people who contribute most to culture (artists, writers, teachers) find their contributions undervalued, and most professors are encouraged to treat their teaching as commodity grunt work.
4. Universal higher education got its steam from its relatively broad-based support across the political spectrum. The Left (which has been irrelevant since the '70s in the US) believes that bringing the proletariat into college will turn them into rebels, primed to fight back against capitalism (which hasn't happened). The centrists and conservatives (US Democratic Party) believes that making college more accessible will increase social and economic equality (which hasn't happened). The right wing likes universal higher education because their corporations get a sorting mechanism whose costs are paid by someone else (the public, and the people being sorted). Of those three "parties", the right wing is the only one to actually have gotten what they wanted out of it.
Only in the midst of a massive recession are we beginning to realize that this movement was mistaken.
College is also a great time to figure out what you don't want to do. While some people already know that they want to be a Pediatrist at 16-17 when they are researching college, others might think they want to be a (insert career) but they have limited experience actually interacting with that field.
Some of the smartest people I've known going to the Ivy league schools seemed to change what they wanted to do while there, or got their degree and then did something completely different- realizing that they enjoyed learning about the subject but didn't want to work in the field. It isn't that they didn't have initiative, but figuring out your entire life at 17 and researching/meeting every professor for every college that you're applying to is both time consuming and expensive.
I'm not sure it's so productive to get caught up into the rat-race to get into a good school. After all, there is a tremendous amount of emotional energy and effort expended by a great many people to this end. What if the lion's share of that energy could be devoted to substantive work? Ok, so many will claim that a lot of the things that they did in High School to pad their resumes were also "substantive work." Let's be real about this, though. By "substantive work" I don't mean educational opportunities, or some sort of scale model preparation or role-playing for what you might do in the future, I mean actual value-added, getting paid for it in the market work. What if even half of that which is just "preparation" could be harvested as real work?
I'm sure that this would result not only in increased productivity of the economy as a whole, but it would also result in superior educational experiences.
Also, there is no reason at all why this has to be structured in a way that gets in the way of "figuring out what I want to do." In fact, I'll bet that actually doing work will provide better information on which to make those decisions.
> Generally, we don't, and the result is an America that is hypercommercialized and ugly, with very few cultural achievements
I've seen this viewpoint before, but it doesn't seem right at all - people drastically underestimate how amazing some of the America's cultural achievements are in a very short time.
The United States has got a pretty impressive literature tradition in less than 250 years. It doesn't stack up with, say, England's, but they've had a lot longer to build theirs... Our industrial design is out of the-world-good, one of the best of all time. Movies, of course. I'm not sure, but the best video games might wind up being studied and looked at as high art later - not sure which, I get the feeling the Planescape: Torment is incredibly high art, very philosophically deep and makes you think on some really interesting questions but who knows if that'll stick around, and who knows what else will.
Comic books and graphic novels have been criminally underrated as art until very recently, and I didn't even like comics that much as a kid. I only got into it when a friend of mine gave me some Frank Miller stuff, and I don't like all of it, but the good stuff is pretty amazing.
We've had some pretty amazing cartoons, animation, and amazing drawing and rendering in those mediums, ranging from Walt Disney's time to Pixar and so on. I'm in China right now and I was watching some Mickey Mouse dubbed into Chinese, and it's amazing how accessible it was. There was one cartoon with Daffy Duck going hunting and they analogized it to the trench warfare in WWI - amazing how it mixes deep themes about violence, animals, the barbaric nature of man trying to conquer and get trophies with some comic humor and pretty scenery that keeps kids interested. I don't even agree with that particular cartoon's political stance, but it's impressive that the visuals alone could tell a rather complete story without me understanding the language.
By the way, on a personal note, do you mind if I ask if you're an American? I see lots of comments on American culture from you, and I can't tell if you're from the States or Europe or elsewhere. I'm an American myself, grew up on the East Coast and in the middle of the country, have since lived, worked, and/or traveled through 30-40 countries or so.
I know some Europeans pooh-pooh American culture because we don't have as much classical high art in painting, etc, as Europeans do. But damn man, it's been 250 years, we've done some bloody marvelous things in that time. And I'm not even talking about talking about the technology necessarily - American movies, literature, animation in both cartoons and feature films, American architecture, American design and industrial design, American innovations in music... America's done some cool stuff in not very long. It's currently considered "pop culture", but all high art starts out that way. Some of the most celebrated European artists were lambasted or ignored for deviating from the classical Academy style of painting. From England, The Beatles were considered pop culture, and are now evolving to be considered high art.
Likewise, if you like at the IMDB Top 250[1], I'd bet many of those films are studied and debated and talked about for quite a long time, and the bulk of them are American.
I'm American, and I agree that I'm being a bit unfair. We have had some cultural successes, but (in my opinion) fewer than I would have hoped, given our resources and ability.
The problem is that nearly everything that is produced has to be filtered through large corporations; in most of these, major decisions are often made by filthy, uncultured pig-like creatures who hate creativity (even though they'll say they're all about "innovation") and defile everything they touch. There are glowing exceptions to this rule, but they're rare. The next-quarter mentality is killing refinement.
In the US, to be creative requires that you fight against the larger society, and succeed in spite of it rather than with its assistance. Our artistic successes exist because we have a large population and (for other reasons) draw ambitious people from all over the world, but for us to truly fledge (and I believe we can; we have an incredible number of talented people within our borders) we'd have to move to a different socioeconomic model than the corporate-dominated mess we have now, in which parasites who don't actually do anything have almost all of the power, and the truly creative are almost always treated as pawns.
Not necessarily. Even though average people are generally not creative themselves, you can have a social arrangement where such people respect and admire creativity.
Jesus, people, please stop downvoting. I disagree a bit with pw0n's basic philosophy, but he put some time into his comment. Discuss, debate, and look to clarify instead of just flicking the arrow. I mean, hell, I asked him to respond and he did and clarified what he thought.
That said...
> The problem is that nearly everything that is produced has to be filtered through large corporations; in most of these, major decisions are often made by filthy, uncultured pig-like creatures who hate creativity
Hasn't this always been the way, everywhere? The high art of the Renaissance was mostly financed by the Medici, who were... well I wouldn't call them uncultured pig-like creatures, but they were definitely businessmen/statesmen/power-first, love-and-good-feelings second type people. Lots of such people finance art throughout history - the Catholic Church, for instance, has been pretty barbaric at various times, but also commissioned a lot of history's greatest art. The Tokugawa Shogunate financed much of the art from 1600 to 1850 in Japan, the various dynasties in China, and so on.
> we'd have to move to a different socioeconomic model than the corporate-dominated mess we have now, in which parasites who don't actually do anything have almost all of the power, and the truly creative are almost always treated as pawns.
Isn't the internet doing just that? I think more decentralization is the answer, with services like Amazon, Youtube, cheap hosting, etc. letting artists connect directly with people. I tend to think rule by large government is no better than rule by large corporation, and potentially much worse - the Soviet Union isn't exactly known for its beauty and high culture... but you know what, I'm often guilty of doing too much talking and not enough listening in discussions like this. How do you think we could stimulate the arts in the States?
I think the Internet is making a great deal of progress with regard to decentralization.
On the subordination of culture to commerce, it hasn't always been this way. In dynastic China, the social pecking order was this: scholars, farmers, artisans, then merchants. Although the merchant class had the most money, they were lowest on the totem pole. I'm not arguing that we should move to a caste system based on occupation, but I think it's important to note that societies haven't always allowed the rich to buy their way into elite spots.
What fails about American elitism is that it's post hoc elitism. Those who have wealth and power are presumed superior and allowed to get away with almost anything (white collar criminals get busted sometimes, but usually those turn out to have humble beginnings, and they're getting nailed in part because of all the rich people they caused to lose money).
For example, in our society, we take it on assumption that the nicest apartments will go to those with the most money, rather than the most cultured. Education is heading that way, as well-- sold to the highest bidder. This isn't right. Trashy celebrities and powermongers shouldn't be able to displace the natural leaders-- the ones chosen by God, genetics, and culture to make the major decisions-- or affect the lives of such people at all.
I agree that a large, powerful government can be as bad as rule by large corporations, but I think that, in general, corporate rule is worse. Corporations have a unique ability to give us the worst of both worlds between socialism and capitalism, and their ad hoc "because I say so" elitism (as opposed to elitism based on talent and culture) leads to mediocrity and worse-than-useless leadership.
I do think that government needs to take a stand on the issue of re-elevating the cultured and talented, but I don't think that a government needs to necessarily be massive or overbearing in order to do so.
A scholastic or religious or political elite isn't "chosen by God, genetics, and culture" either--it's chosen solely by culture, more precisely by whatever power system happens to exist in that culture. Most of the time, it's hereditary (so I guess genetics play a role). But there's no "talent and culture" involved in choosing that elite--they're a self-perpetuating parasitic class at best, which is why many countries had the whole lot of them killed.
In fact most elitists in effect define "high culture" as the culture consumed by the elite class. On a purely artistic and creative level, this is absolute horseshit--some of the best culture was historically created for and consumed by a mass audience. A vulgar, tasteless merchant elite will gladly subsidize that, but a snobby "high-culture" elite won't. Some of the greatest music produced in the West since the 20th century originated from American blacks. The "natural elite" gifted by "God, genetics, and culture" wasn't about to let "Negro music" be popularized or even adapted by white musicians, but even the racist corporate merchant elite realized people would pay money for jazz and rock-and-roll records.
And, in fact, when you talk about an elite that's "chosen by...genetics", you're talking about the functional equivalent to racism. It's possible to get into a vulgar merchant elite if you're clever and persistent no matter what, but a blue-blooded elite you have to be born into, just like a white-skinned elite.
By "genetics", I invoke the Rights of Talent. It's not hereditary and certainly not racial, since talented people appear at a highly (if not completely) uniform rate across all races and ethnicities.
Fact: the talented thinkers-- the people who can see the big picture, who are capable of philosophical thought, and who have a strong sense of morality and compassion-- belong on top of society. This is the Right of Talent. Control rightfully belongs to such people, and not the scumbag gangsters who rise to the top in a poorly-managed, entropy-driven system such as ours.
The hereditary elitism you describe is one where a parasitic elite uses the trappings of culture but ignores the spirit of culture. Hereditary aristocracy is a horrible system-- and what our supposed market society actually is in practice (large corporations and clubby boardrooms exist to ensure the absence of meritocracy).
What we need is a true "meritocracy" (I'm scared to use that word, seeing how badly it has been abused) where knowledge and thought determine who rises to power, rather than political and economic machinations.
All very interesting. How do you propose such an elite be selected? Keep in mind you need a natural process rather than any formal institution making these decisions, since the institution itself would simply become an elite.
The nice thing about a merchant elite is that they can arise through some sort of market system, with no one group or institution holding a monopoly on kingmaking. If you want to establish a philosopher elite you have to establish some sort of analog to that--and probably destroy the market in the process, especially if you're interested in allocating the nicer apartments to the philosopher elite.
(There is of course a political elite as well, which is partially chosen by political institutions and partially evolving through the democratic process. Perhaps the political system could establish a philosopher elite. How do you propose it do so? Democracy obviously won't work.)
Great points, and I have to admit that I don't have all the answers. I see where we need to go, but not necessarily the path there.
I think political democracy is necessary, but politics shouldn't be the core of society. We want a society that's politically democratic and has a mostly market-driven economy, but in which scholarship, creativity, and culture are revered above all. Right now, the salesmen and bean-counters dominate. I'm not saying that business leaders shouldn't have a place at the table-- the talented ones are very valuable-- but they shouldn't have control of all the seats. Right now, they (and, worse yet, their unproven and entitled progeny) do: they own our politicians and dictate our culture, and they control invitations to the parties and clubs (including, per our interest, venture capital) that are essential if you want to get anywhere in society (save a 1:100000 home-run success).
As for bringing society to a morally acceptable state, it's not easy. You have to change peoples' values on a fundamental level. In the US, people accept it as "natural" that the narcissistic social bullies belong on top and the smart people ("nerds") are to be beaten up, and that the social bullies are destined to be running large companies, and that this is somehow okay. It's not, and just as easily as we wound up in this anti-intellectual arrangement, we can work a way out of it and build a society that is the opposite. With the internet and rising importance of technology, there's no better time to do so.
I think your ideas are incoherent at best if you expect, f.ex., economic investment to be driven by some sort of elite class of philosopher-kings rather than the people who actually manage to earn that money in the market. Venture capital is a means to enter the higher echelons of the merchant class, and you want the merchant class to be disenfranchised therefrom?
I'd also like to point out that, to whatever extent these philosopher-kings exist, they already have some degree power to drive political policy, but this power is strictly limited by the vulgarity inherent in a democratic system. By which I mean obviously beneficial policies which the intellectual elite already agree on are often politically infeasible due to public opinion.
I don't know what, in concrete terms, you want this intellectual elite to be on top. It can't be in terms of political power or wealth, because by definition those are controlled by the very political and economic classes you'd like to leave to their own devices. And I don't know any other substantive way in which they can even be an elite--living in nicer apartments, as you mentioned earlier, is a prize hardly worth even mentioning.
Let me express it better: I think we need a mercantile and political infrastructure-- such "classes", if you will. However, I think the ultimate power should be held by a scholarly class, which should generally use it lightly so long as society remains in a morally acceptable state.
Right now, for example, if an entrepreneur makes a deal with a VC, the founders pay the VC's legal fees. This is a domination ritual designed to humiliate the founders, of a "lesser caste" than the business high priests. This is wrong. The founders, being the creative force, should be setting most of the terms. This world of the "Golden Rule"-- those with the gold make the rules-- needs to shot to pieces and rebuilt in another form, where those with talent and creativity make the rules.
Ultimately, power should be held only by a scholarly set of people who are aware of (and intellectually competent enough to defend against) power's inherent tendency toward abuse and evil.
> A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in "prose literacy"–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example.
Well shock and awe, people can't do a college compare and contrast assignment after they leave college. Just ask them what's different in the articles.
> More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can’t calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue.
A skill that isn't strictly needed if those people can use a calculator, it's good enough. Stop measuring how effective school is by having people retake tests they took in school.
I think you're missing the point by a wide margin. Determining the difference between two articles and ordering supplies are two very common tasks -- if people with a college degree lack the ability to do them, we really are in trouble.
If they were testing something that was obviously very college-centric but not a commonplace in a regular job -- say, integral calculus -- I would agree with you. However, if someone graduated with a degree in physics and they couldn't do calculus, I would say there was a problem also. It sounds like they just tested the bare minimum of skills.
I work in construction and I work with guys who haven't graduated high school, but they can easily perform the basic arithmetic required for the latter of the tasks, and they're frequently doing the former when discussing everything from radio stations to movies and video games.
For anyone who graduated college and can't accomplish these thoughtless tasks, all I can say is that they wasted way too much money to essentially get dumber than your average high school dropout. Similar procedures can be performed for a much more reasonable price and involves taking a hammer to the flattest part of a persons skull . . . although I'm unsure even a major concussion and amnesia could make someone dumb enough to forgot how to do 1 + 1 + 1
