The Ends of Education
antipope.org
antipope.org
So, if you studied computer science in 1990 and kept the knowledge up, you'd still know a fair amount of what's relevant today. The problem is that what's employable isn't actually computer science, but trendy industry nonsense... the real CS is just in place to be an IQ test, a first-line hiring barrier.
You may be going a bit hard on the industry. I see where you're coming from, having a long academic past myself and seeing there is a lot of BS in industry. But there is also a lot of meaningful things in industry and academia is sometimes a little too arrogant about that.
Given that you went back to graduate school and are likely a bit frustrated with industry, I can see why you have that stance, but neither extreme is good. Neither is everything in industry just trendy nonsense nor is everything in it the holy grail. There are real problems being solved in industry. That's what produces systems that people actually use, be it mobile phones or server infra or network gear or embedded systems, which after all is the whole point of all this. There is also a lot of trendiness and lots of people who just hack things and don't have a clue. It's not black-and-white. Similar with academia. There is a real benefit to the fundamentals being taught and researched in academia. And there is a lot of nonsense there too, tons of paper produced just to produce papers and get the next grant and stay employed. (If anything, the gatekeeping in academia is way worse than in industry.)
Both worlds have their place and it's sad to see disparaging comments from either side about the other one.
I don't find Stross' thought experiment very convincing. One doesn't need to imagine time travel. A CS graduate from the 1990s who didn't timetravel directly to 2020s but got there regular way and didn't do anything to update their skills during those years would find themselves with equal difficulties in job market than the time-traveler. (edit: Or worse difficulties.) That is why it is a good idea to continuously develop ones skills.
However, on much shorter timescales, say, 5 years, one can make a reasonable guess what kind of degree is more likely to result in gainful employment after graduation than other. A degree doesn't equip one for a job, but a useful one results in one enough understanding of some field that one obtains, should I say, a fighting chance or more to equip oneself for a job related to the field. And having a job often results in better chances to learn more and further equip oneself for one's next job.
Then in a later part of the blog post Stross argues that as arts sector is today very profitable to the UK, it warrants continued government support for arts education. This strikes me a bit inconsistent with his earlier claim that prediction of the future need for skilled jobs from the current state is impossible.
A better argument would be that it is possible that arts are going to be more useful than STEM in the future, and it would be unwise to cease arts degrees. It has certain ring of truth to it. However, I came under impression that Stross is in favor of keeping the number of arts degrees at the same level or increasing their amount, but if we take "impossibility of prediction" seriously, there is no telling the current amount -- or higher amount, or lower amount -- of arts degrees awarded is any better in 30 years either.
I am not sure the education allocation is best done by the government giving commands how many artists and engineers are needed to be trained (or given subsidies to be trained, or whatever). If that choice is for each individual to decide without government planners intervening, they at least have some idea of their personal talents, wishes, and circumstances than either Rishi Sunak or Charlie Stross.
Is there any relationship between arts education funding and the 'arts export industry'? The arts existed long before university and the most successful don't appear to have been trained in a university. Stross himself went to CS and not the arts.
However, most of them will have been trained by someone who did.
Reduce arts education funding at the highest level and the reduction trickles down to the lowest levels.
You can look at China's history to see this. The civil service exams weren't perfect, and a lot of their most interesting people (artists, scientists, etc.) actually failed them because they didn't have the patience for all the rote memorization and for the conformity that success in that game required. Likewise, often the people who excelled at the exams (whether because of genuine talent or mere material ambition) turned into well-paid inconsequential bureaucrats, but--and this is key--the exams' existence, by forcing society to make it an unquestionable pillar that there must always be a supported market for intellectual talent, made China flourish for centuries, even if the exams themselves were flawed.
Indeed, what today's Chinese (meaning the leadership) understand well is that we in the West and especially the Anglosphere, by handing the keys over to our short-sighted, micro-optimizing merchant classes, have all but guaranteed our own decline. China [1] has thousands of years of experience at making sure that, no matter how rich a businessman may get, he will never attain even full respectability let alone the cultural influence requisite to corrode a society from within the way ours has. The West, which may not survive the disaster that has been neoliberalism, needs to learn before it is too late that spreadsheets themselves do not generate useful arts or scientists, never have and never will.
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[1] I may sound fawning on this particular point, but I'm not pro-CCP and never have been. China's maltreatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs is especially deserving of execration. Their government has done quite a lot that is wrong. However, China's 5,000-year commitment to, while allowing the merchant class to flourish when it is useful, keeping it in its rightful place below actual intellectuals, is a case of excellence (not unbroken in time, perhaps) we should try to replicate.
Define "actual intellectuals"? Rigorous scholarship can of course be valuable, especially if combined with broader community engagement - but most of the time the notion of an "intellectual" refers to nothing more than pointless navel-grazing, with very little in the way of real, enduring achievement.
To be honest, you raise a valid point; often the people who show the highest degrees of intellectual vigor are those the purportedly intellectual institutions reject. Einstein wasn't actually a poor student, nor was he ever thought to be stupid, but he was an absolute misfit in academia even then, and he would have failed out of the conformist environment today (in large part because, as an ostensibly mediocre graduate student, he'd never have gotten his 1905 papers published or read at all). Which raises the question of why we have them in the first place. Brilliant kids who grow up in Harlem will never get into Harvard; complete dolts from prominent families do; so why have it at all? It becomes a long discussion.
The issue in discriminating "navel gazing" from "enduring achievement" is just that latter adjective. We don't know ahead of time what will endure. We have to be more accepting of the 999 contributions and efforts that, in the long run, will not amount to very much in order to get the 1000th that will. The tradeoff is that, while we ought to nurture genuine contributions as if they all have intrinsic value, we have to get better as a society at preventing charismatic (or merely randomly successful) artifacts from taking up all the oxygen and starving what we really want to see. We have to be tolerant of intellectuals who want to offer their ideas, but intolerant of those who insist on only their ideas being heard.
My impression was that arts eduction is generally an exploitative scam. As someone (Grayson Perry?) said, they teach all of the stuff you can't learn and none of the stuff you can.
You'll spend 100% of your time trying to develop an 'art practice', which is very likely to entail staring into the middle distance for most your course, or perhaps half reading some philosophy books (preferably ones with no agreed interpretation, so no one can tell if you've actually read them or not).
Meanwhile, you'll spend 0% of your time learning the durable skills you'll need to have a career - varies of by context, but project management and the technical skills for whatever your medium is would be useful.
They whole sector is obsessed with constantly reasserting its moral superiority - "artists are the enemy of dictators" etc. - while studious turning a blind eye to the fact that nearly all the students are hopelessly ill equipped to do anything when they graduate.
I could go on - but the culture of UK arts institutions is hopelessly broken in my view.
This places the blame entirely on the masses, while ignoring the harm that ivory-tower teaching has done to alienate the general population. The Academic style taught 100 years ago was beautiful by most people's standards, while today that's been abandoned.
I agree that we need more general education, yet has failed to prove to the general public that it can provide this.
The arts, the social studies, the courses targeted by this are important
At the same time, especially in the US, there's a whole industry dedicated to selling naive young people the idea that they totally should get a $100k student loan for their Harvard Basket Weaving Bachelor's. Or Mongolian Literature. Or for a Cinema Course in Ohio. And then just get another $100k for a subsequent Masters.
The problem is of course not in the studies, but on how overpriced they are. And of course the tuition doesn't translate in higher salaries for the faculty (because of course they don't)
FINALLY a good article that mentions this point! Employers have been shifting the risk of selecting an "unfit candidate" - including discriminating against otherwise protected candidate classes, given that people protected by anti-discrimination laws tend to not have university degrees because they simply cannot pass the hurdles - and the cost of basic training to the candidates for decades.
It's high time for this to end. The world doesn't need academic degrees for paper-push type jobs.
Under capitalism, it won't.
You're right, of course. The purpose of the credentialism is to sustain class barriers. Most of these jobs are brain-dead simple, and quite a large number are unnecessary (see: Graeber's Bullshit Jobs).
The reason employers hire overqualified people is actually quite complex. Classical nice-guy management theory ("Theory Y") would argue that it's bad for morale to hire smart people and put them on dumb work, but in practice it turns out that bosses can easily utilize this discomfort by selectively and politically offering more engaging assignments, so the morale hit is offset (from a careerist manager's perspective) by the enhanced power and importance accruing to managers. So, don't expect it to change. Workers will often work extra hard "to prove themselves" (i.e., for free) because they think it was benevolent bureaucratic mishap, rather than deliberate emotional manipulation, that got them placed on work several levels below their actual ability (and thus underpaid and easier to exploit).
The truth, though, is that the system only works if the people at the bottom believe meaningful promotion is a real possibility... and indeed, it sometimes (rarely) can be, but for each person who wins, tens or hundreds have to lose, especially given that the few good jobs have already been allocated to progeny of wealthy or connected families. Companies can only get diligent, conscientious work out of people (as opposed to bare-minimum work, over which the associated middle management checking/correcting costs would render them uncompetitive) if they lead people to wildly overestimate their prospects. This requires a whole mythology wherein each hire has to be, at least, a longshot call option on an executive; companies want college graduates in call centers because they want call center managers to work like people who might one day be executives (even though, let's be honest, 99 percent of them won't be) rather than like people who would be better served by leaving at 5:00 on the dot.
WFH is set to totally break this. When you WFH, you increase your per-hour productivity by about 150 percent and your total productivity by about 70 percent... but your chance of being promoted to an executive role drops to near zero. You go from spending 50 hours at the office to work a 10-hour week to working about 17 hours in 17 actual spent hours. You're now doing your job duties and probably doing them better than before, but you're snubbing the carrot of promotion into the executive clique. They can no longer entice you with your own office (as opposed to a depressing cubicle or, worse, a seat in an open-plan fartbox) if you already have a home office and a zero commute. So, once you go WFH, you're basically admitting that "work" is not some passion but the depressing trade of one's finite time for a very small amount of money, and this blunt fact about corporate work is so depressing that even executives hate to acknowledge that it is true.
So, yeah: don't expect it to change, unless capitalism is overthrown. The corporate system runs entirely on empty, unrealistic promises. The mythology in which every loser paper-pusher might one day be a CEO can only hold if employers demand that even the loser paper-pushers have CEO-able degrees. If they hired at-level for menial jobs, they'd get people who'd probably do the jobs just as well, and for a lower price, but they wouldn't get people who'll do scut work with smiles on their faces and thereby make the bosses actually feel good about themselves.
He’s right that university degrees have become a Ponzi scheme. Likely privatization of university had something to do with that, albeit indirectly.
Anything financed by debt needs to have value that equals or exceeds the debt, for the life of the debt.
The inflation in education prices has dramatically outpaced the value of the education, for many degrees, especially in the arts.
He’s right that skills become obsolete much more quickly these days, but he’s wrong in assuming/implying that the degree still has value, esp value exceeding the debt, for any degree. No where is this more apparent as in arts degrees, particularly in the humanities. Graduates with these degrees end up with lower incomes (and lower rates of employment) than graduates with science degrees.
It seems to me that with rising cost of degrees that many one involved with funding an education should look at future value of the degree as a significant decision criterion.
Additionally, there is politics involved as many humanities departments have adopted increasingly left-of-center ideologies. So of course conservatives are going to criticize and target that. Note that I’m not interested in arguing the merits/correctness of such ideology, but I can understand why people who disagree with an ideology would be reticent to fund places that promote such ideology.
So it’s not just “conservatives are bad and stupid” as TFA implies; and I don’t think that the article was either accurate or fair in its conclusions.
[ed] s/find/fund/g
What was that qualification in again? That's an absurd statement.
Best case, I'm assuming the author means you "can't guarantee due to the human factor". But given the rest of the anti conservative jibes littered throughout I doubt it.
Edit: loving the blame of all economic woes on Brexit. I don't know a serious supporter who didn't expect a contraction immediately after leaving due to at least market fear. But frankly the massive lockdowns of the last 2 year bare much more responsibility in this "new" reality.
> The UK arts sector includes film, media, computer games, and music: it's one of the UK's most profitable export industries. For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back.
> But it's ideologically suspect to gammons' eyes. Gammons—the Tory party membership, whose support Sunak is canvassing—are predominantly white males aged over 60 living in the South East of England, authoritarian by inclination and well-off but poorly educated.
In my limited foreigner's understanding, Britain was "the powerhouse of world-changing ideas" during period that has fuzzy limits but starts maybe around Newton and continues until maybe Turing -- but after WW2, what was left the powerhouse was certainly eclipsed by the US, and after the 1980s, Asiancountries.
Maybe one can stretch it bit further after the WW2 if one thinks that popular culture production like Beatles is a worthwhile substitute. [1]
How was the education in Britain organized during that era?
[1] I don't; AFAIK income distribution in popular culture production is very winner-takes-all top-heavy, much worse than the software income distribution often denigrated as favoring the 10X developers. 10X coders may make much more than a marginal software developer (I am imagining soon-to-graduate CS student who would-be entry-level dev who has difficulties getting the first interview), but I believe it easier for the marginal software developer land a software job that pays the bills than for a marginal would-be musician to land a music job that pays the bills.
Mostly, intensive one-on-one tutoring starting at a very early age. See https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...
Except I grew up in part of the country with gun violence (yes a UK labour stronghold too), still got a degree, a post doc, a job and a decent income and would never vote labor or green due to their broken policies. (Selling/merging schools, anti nuclear, broken secterian policies to appeal to fringe groups, etc.)
Anti intellectualism isn't being driven by tribal politics on this side of the pond so please refrain from spouting such nonsense.
Don't pretend this is a simple matter of party politics, you're not a hammer and this is not a nail. It's a large cross-partisan social ill which is only fixed by people working together not insisting "it's all his fault".
The blue are guilty of their own politico-crimes, insider trading, favouritism/nepotism, classism and alike (we could go on), don't go making up justifications for them not being reputable they can do it on their own.
Again, rampant anti-intellectualism is party policy of most parties. Greens (anti-nuclear given it's low carbon footprint), Labour (import more people rather than invest in the NHS in the good times by raising taxes), SNP (waa freedom), Brexit/GBP/???(whatever they call themselves, the backbencher OAPs calling for a return to the mythical 'good ol days').
There isn't a single party aspousing anything close to meritocracy. The closest we got to that was cummings who frankly has a lot to answer for, for trusting idiot 'data scientists' who luncheon with him in the boys clubs. He at least drove solid policy based on input from peers, even if it turns out his peers can't tell the difference between the black death and a sniffle.
Goal posts firmly fixed.
Why are you then comparing this party to others promoting both diametrically opposite sides of the same arguments as a sane "position".
Both extremist religious views and personal freedoms are promoted by the labour in the UK. If they're not promoting anti-intellectualism (your claim) then are they simply demonstrating it?
A party cannot hold both sides in an argument and plead with you not to question it. That is either being anti intellectual and anti discourse or demonstrating anti intellectualism. That or at worst is probably being dishonest. It's impossible to make a coherent argument promoting such a position.
The same goes for the green party and it's anti nuclear stance despite knowing that had we adopted this decades ago a lot of the problems in the last 12 months wouldn't be coming to a head. You can't be anti fossil fuel and anti the only more carbon at scale reliable alternative. This is again holding both sides on the same argument.
And yes the conservatives promote both free market and then practice crony capitalism which are both self defeating opposites of the same fiscal policy.
Edit: I'm assuming at this point you're trying to make some statement about people pretending to be "learned" or "educated" by waving around that they could afford a degree of sorts without being learned. The problem is that you are cherry picking because there is now the modern problem of "too much data". Getting 13 answers from 12 experts means there is likely no answer and fits the statement of don't believe the "experts" aspousing their answer. Although I think the problem is the lack of gatekeeping around actual degrees which are worth the paper they're written on vs media studies toilet roll.
This might be what you take anti-intellectualism to mean, but it is not the common meaning (as given in the linked Wiki article or various other sources).
Anti-intellectualism is a narrative of hostility towards intellectuals (e.g. academics, scientists, writers...).
Having contradictory or unscientific views is not anti-intellectual, it's just stupid.
Wanting to defund and reform the education system because of some idea that it's dominated by a cabal of left-wing revolutionaries who want to poison the minds of the youth, is anti-intellectual.
My god man did you pay attention when Blair sold the whole thing off during the good times?
> Anti-intellectualism is a narrative of hostility towards intellectuals
No this contextually is against self proposed "learned" who aspose things like critical gender theory as a science which is by construction unflasifiable.
I'm done if you're going to argue around various definitions yourself we've taken 4 or 5 steps back in a conversation.
A choice between playing stupid or acting stupid is the same as I've said.
Anti intellectualism, as a broad topic not a politico farse (created by putting a hyphen between the words) is a broad social problem that needs addressing and is not based on party politics, you should be annoyed at all parties for this.
If you choose to be a hammer and see this as a single party problem go ahead I can't stop you. Hold your contrarian views if you must. I won't tell you your wrong, I'll just feel sad for you.
Yes - no arguments from me that this was anti-intellectual. I'm not saying that the Conservatives are the only anti-intellectuals in politics or that they always have been. I'm just saying that anti-intellectualism lies at the heart of their current ideology. Blair was not as ideologically distinct from modern conservatism as Corbyn or Starmer.
> argue around various definitions
I really feel like I've stuck to a single, commonly understood meaning of anti-intellectualism, and tried my best to keep the focus on this in order to clarify what "nonrandomstring" was talking about.
> Hold your contrarian views if you must.
I don't think they're so contrarian. If I search duckduckgo for "anti-intellectualism in UK politics", the top results are:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/britishness... - 'A brief history of the ideology of anti-intellectualism and conservatism in the UK. ... As I hope to show here, anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in the political history of Britain and has long performed a strategic conservative ideological function – which is to shield the status quo from systematic criticism.'
https://resistinghate.org/anti-intellectualism-in-britain-an... - 'Perhaps the most well known incident involved Michael Gove during the Brexit Campaign when he said in an interview on Sky News that "People in this country have had enough of experts"'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism - Already discussed
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532673X177195... - 'Recently, Americans have become increasingly likely to hold anti-intellectual attitudes (i.e., negative affect toward scientists and other experts) .. For example, Trump questioned on several occasions whether or not climate scientists were secretly working with Chinese business interests to falsely promote evidence of climate change, hinted at researchers’ ulterior motives in producing research about the safety of vaccines, and called researchers “idiots” for creating (and advocating the use of) environmentally friendly but potentially carcinogenic lightbulbs'
https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/anti-intel... - 'it is commonly understood as a populist disdain of individuals who speak of certain universal values and engage in the pursuit of knowledge from reason'
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01112-w - 'Ideological conservatism appears to predict COVID-19 attitudes cross-nationally, especially in Canada and the United States ... Scholars have also increasingly seen anti-intellectualism as a component of conservative ideology'
http://www.politicsforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41482 - 'The pattern seems to be that Tories attack what they see as intellectual, maybe because they expect intellectuals (well educated people who can think critically) to think critically against them.'
This is not an argument or conversation I'm having with you, nor will it be one that you would win for presenting opinion as fact.
I will agree to disagree and leave you to go do whatever it is you do, feel free to rant, or not, or declare internet victory, or not, whilst screaming party politics rather than contributing to social change I'm just not interested anymore.
We at least agree, party politics aside, that anti-intellectualism is on the rise. That should be worrying not just because of the horror it historically leads to, but because we are now in a technological society that cannot tolerate it without collapse.
I believe the seeds of the collapse of the Soviet Union were sown much earlier, in Stalin's purges against the engineers and experts. The fact that China "got away" with the Leap Forward as a pre-industrial nation may mean someone is stupid enough to think it's worth trying again for a neo-primitivist course.
I keep saying to fellow hackers, all you "Silicon Valley" types - don't think that the machine you're building wont turn against you. Who will be the first in line? Programmers and engineers who understand how it all works, and are therefore the greatest threat.
Building resistance to tyranny into technology should be a number-one priority. A big part of that is educating people to treat it as the miracle of intellect it is, instead of being dumb, ungrateful, cargo-cult consumers.
I do think unfortunately the conversation is often dominated with "So therefore terminator?..." when dealing explaining advanced computing concepts to the public.
I do wonder how much success is had in demonstrating core computing concepts with bright colours and zero code. It would have to work as science outreach does with bright colours/concepts and no equations or data despite the messy reality of research.
Given this shows the engine can't differentiate between UK and US data I would implore not to use that as a sensible source of anything. Also articles from biased groups are not a 100% unbiased source and demonstrate the public perception of this again being a partisan issue that would go away if the evil blue suits in the city all disappeared.
I,... sigh... yes, You, must be correct because you can copy and paste from google, well done, a person on the internet bows to your clearly superior intelligencia.
I don't appreciate the sarcastic and attacking nature of this comment (and some previous comments). I've been civil - albeit a little frustrated - and I hope for the same from others.
Perhaps you could provide some examples of where other parties' policies, ideology, or MP's statements undermine expert or scientific consensus? For the Conservatives, I can name several issues where MPs have publicly undermined expert consensus, e.g. Brexit, COVID, climate change, and abortion.
BTW I do already think that the Green Party's stance on GMO and nuclear verges on anti-intellectual, given that they have supported protests against ongoing scientific trials. Whilst it is a minor party and it doesn't reach the level of Conservative anti-intellectualism, it is an issue.
You've mentioned that Labour "promote extremist religious views" which could potentially be anti-intellectual, but this isn't something I've come across except maybe on the very fringes. A slightly stronger claim I've seen is that identity politics could be classed as anti-intellectual if it denies scientific realities regarding sex, although again I haven't really seen this veer into anti-intellectualism except on the fringes.
So in a way that's what's weird about the present day "Tory" party. They are nihilists. There's nothing there to even rally around or against except a nebulous fear of change, because they are so empty, so naked in their disgust for principles of any kind.
A: Most people on this list of anti-intellectuals were communists.
Therefore, B: anti-intellectualism is historically a feature of left-wing politics.
By showing A to be false, the inference of B is undermined.
Allowing Arm to be sold to the highest bidder was probably the clearest recent expression of this.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/11/how-britain-wa...
Facts vs thinking. Where do you go to learn how to debate and how to structure knowledge?
If you want to learn a useful skill, just attend the same country club your daddy did. That and the legacy is all you need. Education is a good place to drink and get laid but you're not going to need it.
- Mao from China's Cultural Revolution
- Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey [1]
- Joseph Stalin, author of the Great Terror
- Adolf Hitler in Poland [2]
- Ahmednejad in Iran [3]
- And ISIS, in the smoking remains of the Middle East [4]
* All agree with you [5] *
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/the-mass-murder-of-polish-intellectual...
[3] https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/ahmednejad_urges_purge_of_...
[4] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/isis---echoing-the-purges_b_6...