Review of “Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals” (2001)
uow.edu.au
uow.edu.au
Do you know many engineers who think non-engineers should play a greater role in designing airplanes?
Most professionals are less likely to buck the system, but they would see that system as a "feature, not a bug." The work of society is largely pyramid building--big groups of people achieving complex goals through disciplined cooperation. Society needs creatives, but just a few. The system is what enables all of the comforts of modern life--the creatives just keep the system vital and fresh.
Nurses can (and do) do about 75% of the work a doctor does, same with paralegals and lawyers. Have you seen the absurd amount of stuff on the CPA exam?
I'm not saying we should allow the untrained to do highly skilled jobs, that's how accidents happen, but the real-world skills for those jobs are often different than the skills learned in law school, med school etc anyways. Not that the credentialing has zero value, it obviously has value, but it's not 100% or even 50% of what makes a good doctor/lawyer/accountant.
This is true (but the term "pyramid building" is suggestive, see below), but this...
The system is what enables all of the comforts of modern life
...does not follow from it. What follows is that disciplined cooperation is what enables all the comforts of modern life; but people can engage in disciplined cooperation to achieve complex goals without having either the goals or the methods for achieving them dictated by someone or something outside of themselves. The methods, and even the goals, can evolve out of the very process of disciplined cooperation itself, i.e., they can be created by the participants instead of being imposed. Contrast, for example, pyramid building with the Linux kernel. See below.
Society needs creatives, but just a few.
In the project of building the Great Pyramid, yes, there were only a very few "creatives" as a fraction of all the participants. (Of course, that just illustrates Cheops' Law: a few "creatives" can accomplish anything if they have an unlimited supply of expendable labor.) But would you say there are very few "creatives" among Linux kernel hackers?
I think society can benefit from many more "creatives" than it currently does; the fact that society currently thinks it needs only a few "creatives" to keep things vital and fresh is a bug, not a feature.
The problem is finding them and getting their work out there.
In fact, many jobs that are done by professional engineers can quite easily be done by certified tradespeople or even non-technical people. OP does not suggest that nurses should do open heart surgery (the medical equivalent, perhaps, of designing an airplane). It would not unreasonable to have non-engineers do many of the project management tasks typically done by engineers in large corporations, or to have tradespeople do detailed design work in their areas of expertise.
This is top-down thinking. An interesting thought would be the bottom-up version: What kind of society would we get if we allowed everyone to remain creative? Will we really lose all the modern comforts of life? If yes, what would we gain in return? (perhaps more play/leisure, arts, more time spent with families and so on). Would the trade-off be worth it?
This argument (that we don't need many creative people) also seems a bit condescending. Oh, I like my creative freedom and undisciplined curiosity but it's not for everyone!
There are two types of workers... One which makes a product one can evaluate before consuming and one whose product isn't. In the cases where you can't conservative approaches prevail. When the product can be judged than more liberal attitudes prevail, because one can always judge the product. This is why the software or art or writing professions are filled with those who aren't formally trained.
This kind of makes sense, if the goal of pre-secondary public education is to provide a base level of proficiency in skills and common knowledge.
I also found "Moral Mazes" to be a good book.
But I think I appreciate the arguments made.
I wonder if it's always mutually exclusive. Can you be a traditionalist when it suits your goals, or the task at hand, and a little more of a wild/creative "radical" at other times? Learn the commonly accepted methods/needs/approaches but keep a part of my mind as of yet unwritten?
My own education (currently underway) is this constant dance between practical engineering problems and highly theoretical physics or mathematical constructs.
At a high level, the question is really: how do we train someone's body and mind without crushing their soul? The idea that "society only needs a few creatives" is deeply disappointing and misguided. Society needs discipline, society needs creativity, an individual needs discipline, an individual needs creativity.
* desires fundamental change in society's institutions
* desires participatory, bottom-up institutions; rather than elitist ones. (This condition excludes right-wing radicals.)
The idea is that professions don't exist in a vacuum; they fulfill goals in society's context. In particular, professionals are different from other workers in that ideology is important. So, the system doesn't particularly care what restaurant dishwashers think, as they have little workplace freedom; but teachers and lawyers have much more latitude in their jobs.
For instance, we don't have economics teachers helping students design their own economics systems, since econ is a crucial part of status quo morality. Instead, they have to teach a (not too critical view of a) narrow subset of them: capitalist ideologies for the most part, and the more rebellious are channeled into top-down forms of marxism.
Chomsky, mentioned in the book's preface (might've been the first chapter), discusses further constraints of educational system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktNK67M8hkw
* "Engaging with the system and trying to improve it is always the best strategy". The other point of view is that if you have an adversarial relationship with an institution, it might serve your interests, or the greater good, to refuse to cooperate or participate until certain demands are met.
* "Bad actions can usually be explained by good intentions gone wrong". I think this incorrect viewpoint also relates the the first point, in that people feel that it is better to correct institutions than to fight against people. It is especially disturbing to me when things that should be crimes, are downgraded to institutional failures.
That said, (and without having read the book), I think that people such as the author suffer from other, equally serious biases. In particular, thinking "critically" usually means introducing a bias in our thinking to counteract some alleged bias we already suffer from. But if we are wrong about the initial bias, then our attempt to correct the bias will also be wrong.
Interesting argument. I think you're depending a lot on what you mean by bias. Can a bias be corrected at all? If yes, should it be called a bias? I guess attempts at critical thinking may not be perfect but they are still the best thing we've got. If the author's argument has flaws, those need to be pointed out using critical thinking instead of just saying that "everyone has biases".
Is Europe really so different? All those Marxist teachers who really don't do that much differently...? I've met a few. A different standard sort of rhetoric, but really no different.
This was an interesting read. Lots of truths. Might read the book.
Might you offer a hint as to what you meant?
"In developing his critique of professions, Schmidt draws on his own experiences and uses extensive quotes from correspondents, such as graduate students who became aware of the political nature of their training. This makes for an engaging account that feels authentic rather than remote in the conventional academic style.
Readers familiar with literature on the sociology of professions and the sociology of education may be surprised that Schmidt has few citations to it. He makes no mention of works on the professional-managerial class, such as Alvin Gouldner’s well known The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), nor of critiques of professions such as Randall Collins’ The Credential Society (1979). Actually, Schmidt knew about such works but decided not to mention them because he found that they were not necessary to his argument. This may reflect his physics training. A social scientist would naturally become familiar with "the literature" and refer extensively to it, in order to show how their contribution relates to it. A theoretical physicist, on the other hand, may start out with a theoretical framework, such as Schrödinger’s equation in quantum mechanics, and derive logical consequences from it, without having to cite prior or related work.
That is essentially what Schmidt has done in Disciplined Minds. The book’s analysis is quite rigorous in its own terms. Schmidt has set various challenging fundamental questions for himself, such as why theory is more prestigious than practical work, systematically examined possible answers and then made a conclusion based on logic and evidence. His intellectual framework for this task can generally be characterized as a critique of domination and inequality coupled with support for egalitarianism and democratization. The result is bold and refreshing. While Disciplined Minds misses the more elaborate structural theories and empirical evidence from works in the sociology of education and professions, it redresses a key shortcoming in these works, namely a concern for analysis without ideas for change. Schmidt’s voice has the authenticity of experience and concern, and thus has a much more subversive quality."