Make college harder.
Flunk more people. Alternatively, encourage people to quit when it is too hard for them.
Agreed. However, I still don't get how the above jibes with the following:
I am one of those liberal wimps who believe that anybody who's not suffering from a mental deficiency can learn if they put their mind to it and they re properly taught.
It sounds like you don't believe that it actually gets too hard for them. Moreover, American-style egalitarianism tends to get squicky when you toss people out for not having been taught properly. Equal opportunity and all that. So, does this result in only flunking out the people really just don't care?
That alone might go a long way. Trouble is, a lot of people really, really do care. They care about getting the piece of paper that is supposed to make their lives better or they care about some namby-pamby non-intellectual goal e.g. the law student who really wants to convict sex offenders because her dad was an expert at bad touches, the psychology student who was oh-so-misunderstood in high school and wants to be a school counselor to prevent future teen-aged angst the world over, the pre-med student who really, really, really wants a Jaguar. Those are fine goals and motivations, all of them, but while they might be enough to keep someone up all night memorizing metabolic pathways or breaking her teeth on Freud or outlining all the cases in the casebook and in the notes, they aren't enough to foster a deeper understanding of the field, of its more abstract concepts, of the margins of workability for solving particular problems.
author=Phantom Warrior link=topic=27290.msg534270#msg534270 date=1292317635I respect people that go into humanities because they have a genuine interest in history (which I do like) or literature because they want to write (or love literature) or woman's studies because they want to study the history and culture of women. Good for them. What bothers me is people that study philosophy who are snotty and pretentious or people that study women's studies because they are man haters or people that study literature so they can talk about the post-pre-modern-neoclassical-monohistorical deconstruction of some really crappy literature. Blecch.
I also respect people who have a genuine interest in history, literature, or women's studies. But I don't think that's enough. Heck, I don't even mind if a philosopher is snotty and pretentious or a woman's studies scholar hates men--as long as he is a good philosopher or she is a good women's studies scholar. But it is not enough to have the opinions/motivations (pleasant or unpleasant though we may find them) and the interest and to put in the time to learn the field and earn the degree. One must also have the ability to add something to it. There must be well-developed skills and abilities to analyze issues. There must be an ability to see the invisible and to not only face the unpleasant or distasteful (y'know, like the fact that women *still* need men to make more baby women, and haven't yet come up with a good mechanism for keeping them caged
), but to build it into their scholarly work.
If you hand out PhD's to everyone who is well-motivated (righteously or not) and who actually does the work, then you end up with a whole lot of BAs, BSs, MAs, MSs, PhDs, MDs, JDs, <insert alphabet soup degree denotation here> who have credentials but who cannot really do their jobs. You end up with the following:
1) A law student who is really good at digging up cases trying to apply a grandparents' rights case to a CPS action. All attempts to explain that grandparents' rights cases have, for the protection of parents and children, all been tightly restricted to specific sets of facts, and therefore do not apply at all fail. All attempts to explain that administrative law procedures are in fact going to be the framework for any action at a particular phase in a case, because if you want to bring a civil rights action in Federal court, you need to actually show jurisdiction and standing all those good things, similarly fail. All attempts to explain that no, no, rules of ethics really do apply, even when you don't think they are fair. That guy just COULD NOT grasp some very basic but abstract concepts of law. He clearly had a high IQ--very high LSAT scores--but completely sucked at analyzing and applying abstract concepts, like how civil rights CAN always be an issue, but not everything that is a right is always a right in every situation. The combination of high intelligence and lack of abstract reasoning skills, plus some other oddities, makes me think this particular guy has asperger's or similar. I'm sure there's some mentally demanding field where his particular brand of intelligence is helpful, but it ain't general practice of law.
2) A doctor who follows a simple flow chart for treating everything, whether it works or no. One of the blogs I read from time to time is by a respiratory therapist who very frequently runs into doctors who treat any shortness of breath with a nebulized bronchodilator. It's not particularly harmful, most of the time, but it often cannot possibly help the actual problem. Similarly, doctors who either constantly or never use antibiotics for viral infections: When dealing with one of the most complex systems that people regularly meddle in, it's problematic to put things in the hands of someone who can only think linearly. Even if he put in the hours to pass his classes. I personally ended up getting badly hurt by this kind of medicine--by a couple doctors who kept working through the flowchart for treating one condition, never bothering to think, for years, that perhaps the reason that process had either no effect or a negative effect was that they were following the wrong flowchart.
3) A psychologist who sees child abuse everywhere. Depression, anxiety, defiance, autism, eating disorders: all are the fault of mean ol' mom who didn't love her kids enough, or mean ol' dad who beat them all the time. I have personal experience with a parent making what I--and most people--consider horrible decisions that unjustifiably hurt their kids. I know that I am not alone in this. Yet, I can see some good things that my parents have done and on balance don't consider them terrible parents. I know I'm not alone in this either. But I know that there are many psychologists who can't make the distinction between a parent having made a bad decision and a parent being horribly, irredeemably abusive. They can't seem to grasp the complexities involved in parenting or in life. It's all limited to their judgment based on their own experience.
4) A historian who is not only interested in researching his specific field, but is interested only in validating his own preconceived notions of whatever. All evidence becomes either validating or not evidence. This often leads to outright fakery--ignoring obviously vital and reliable sources in favor of shaky, incomplete, obscure sources, without acknowledging what one is doing. I'm not of the school that believes that history should not judge, and I don't think anyone anymore believes that modern history must consider all the sources, but it also should be about learning and discovering, not validating. If one does not have the intellectual agility to understand the opposition, to take the sources as given, to build an opinion that deals with discordant ideas instead of dismissing or outright ignoring them, then I don't care whether one can recite the fundamental works of Burkhardt, Ranke, Hegel, and Braudel from memory, one doesn't have the ability to contribute to the field. Now, a good friend of mine is a history adjunct. He is very, very ideologically driven, a staunchly conservative Catholic who, in any other time, would be a monk. His historical writings are very ideologically driven, but he's also well-versed in all sides of his fields, but only in his religious writings does he dismiss the sides he disagrees with. In his historical writings, all sides are thoroughly addressed. That is the mark of a scholar: one who perhaps can write polemic based strong and well-grounded opinions, but chooses not to do so within the academy.
However, all too often this correct sentiment is turned into a system that simply forgives people's failures in an attempt to avoid confrontation and to avoid seeming 'formalistic'.
Agreed. Often the problem is an inability to be creative on a level more advanced than "I like purple and yellow together1 Aren't I just the most uniquest snowflake evar?" and yet we don't flunk 'em out because somehow having objective standards isn't accepting enough of their unique snowflake-dom.
You're a third-year second-term student in English studies and you don't know what a paragraph is? GTFO.
Ftfy. I'll give a pass on the first term. Maybe. In a community college. People who can't write paragraphs in the language of instruction (with possible exceptions for non-native speakers in technical subjects where language is slightly less vital) do not belong in college. They don't belong in an academic track in high school. Yeah, like MillCreek, I'm a fan of the German system.
You're a fourth-year General History student and you've never read Burkhardt? GTFO.
Or for that matter, a first year history student and you CAN'T read Burkhardt.
If you can't read, you don't belong in a history program. If you can't multiply, you don't belong in a science program. We have all sorts of remedial options--adult community education, community colleges--for people who are lacking these basic skills.
But it requires the ability too. Sure, I'll allow that absent intellectual disability, anyone can learn to write a paragraph or do basic arithmetic. But not everyone has the ability to become a competent scholar, doctor, lawyer, or scientist. In the above scenarios, those people all had the motivation and put in the time and learned most of the skills, but they are lacking a vital ability to analyze and resolve complex problems.
IQ is a good, but not a flawless measure of this. If you have a below average IQ, you probably do not belong in college. This does not equate to how worthy one is generally. Whether one has the ability to do well in college has exactly zilch to do with personal worthiness. But someone who doesn't have the ability to do well in college, goes to college anyway, goes to grad school anyway, and then works as a doctor, lawyer, scientist, or scholar, and heals, advocates, analyzes, writes, or teaches incompetently is probably a less worthy human being in the grand scheme of things than the average highly competent foodservice worker.
One of the several reasons I didn't go to grad school is I couldn't seem to learn German adequately. My mentor considered a good grasp of academic German vital to being a good historian. Many would have encouraged me to simply study American history, simply because it's more acceptable to not have any languages. I decided I'd rather not be a historian than be an incompetent historian, or a historian who landed in a field because it would be easier for me, although I think those are probably the same thing. One of the reasons you, Micro, are imho, more likely than most to actually land a tenure-track job in the US is that you have languages, which differentiates you from the vast numbers of PhD's who chose American history because they lacked the will or the intellectual capacity to learn languages. Of course today, I probably could learn German, so it just goes to show something-or-other.
No mercy.
A lot of mercy. It is not kind to allow people who muddle through degree after degree, leading to the inevitable result of either un/underemployment or underperformance. It is cowardice. We're too afraid to say no. It's that American egalitarianism again, but equal opportunity ought to stop meaning we don't acknowledge different ability levels.
Of course, the problem with stating that anyone can succeed academically (and at any level, primary, secondary, undergrad, grad school, etc) is not only that it's clearly wrong, but also that people who don't have the ability to function on a highly intellectual level gravitate to intellectual fields because they look easy, they look interesting, they look flexible, they look like they respect the individual far more than a foodservice, factory, health care, or retail job. They mostly aren't and don't, but if one isn't driven by the abstract and complex, it's very difficult to see that. This is why the gatekeepers of academe should be keeping out people who don't have the ability to excel in their field. Those most likely to be very confident about their abilities and driven by the desire to develop a career in it are least likely to have the actual ability to do well in it. But everything is a marketing course, every classroom a business school, and except for the outliers on the far left side of the bell curve, the wash-outs are pretty close to random.
It's nice to say that everyone has abilities, and then turn average people into low-functioning imitations of scholars, but that means that people with much greater intellectual abilities get shut out on a regular basis. As someone who regularly relies on the skills and abilities of scholarly professionals, this concerns me.
Finally, I've said it before and I've said it again: I have a real problem with a clearly gifted intellectual stating that anyone can achieve on his level if only they'd really, really try. This reeks of hubris. No. They can't. Not measuring up to your or my level of academic/intellectual achievement is not an indicator of a weak will. It may be an indicator of a weak will or of a lack of interest. It may also be an indicator of average, below average, or merely slightly above average intelligence. Low or average intelligence is not a character flaw. Lack of willpower is. Multiply-degree intellectuals should not be sitting round patting themselves on the back for having a stronger will than ordinary people, but should be sitting around humbly appreciating their gifts and doing the best they can to do the best job they can in their chosen field.
