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Friday, January 19, 2007
Who Should go to College, and Why
Charles Murray has recently published three pieces in the the Wall Street Journal on intelligence and higher education, ending up with a plea for a return to the ideal of a liberal education. In the first piece he argues that most of the college population doesn’t belong there because they aren’t intelligent enough to benefit from a college education:
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.
In the second piece he argues that many of those who do have the intelligence nonetheless have neither the desire nor the temperament for college, and some of these are obviously people of very high ability (e.g. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs). Among other things, he observes:
A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller’s market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman’s job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?
In his third piece Murray argues that the 10% who are both qualified and genuinely interested in a college education should be given a liberal education:
The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.
In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato’s Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.
Comments
Boston wouldn’t bother me, but what if we ended up being ruled by the first 2000 names in the Macon, Georgia phone book? We’ve come pretty damn close recently.
Murray is not my guy, but IQ aside, a humanities education produces a lot of extremely frustrated, not very employable people.
A humanities education creates employable people if the people are elite people. Icing on the cake, I suppose.
How about the first 2000 names in the New Haven phone book or the first 2000 names in the Milton Massachusetts phone book? That’d give us the 41st and 43rd presidents. Did the cognitive elite rise to the top? I hardly think we could do worse with Macon Georgia. Frankly, it’d be refreshing to get another ruler not peeled off the outer lawyer of the plutocracy.
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Since Murray’s such an easy target, I expect your purpose here, BB, is not to ask us to gang up on Murray (or, perish the thought, to defend him), but to discuss his points, such as they are, independent of their mendacious messenger. Is the point here to talk about the purpose of a liberal arts education or education in general?
I completely agree with Murray’s sentiments, which I have myself expressed on numerous occasions.
The whole notion of the humanist education was to produce employable people, not just humane ones, hence the formerly strong concentration on Latin, essential for use in the papal curia, etc. Training in logic and rhetoric was invaluable for law, etc. And so on. Our bureaucrats are different now; but the goal may as well stay the same, using different subjects.
More or less, Karl. I’m not interested in ganging up on Murray; I’m interested in the argument he’s making. On your second point, education in general I suppose.
A friend of mine likes to tell his kids that the C students will end up working for the B students, the B for the A, and the A for the dropouts. Clever, though maybe bit overstated. I have, however, met a number of very skilled and successful businessmen who dropped out of college—though I’ve never met Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
I hardly think we could do worse with Macon Georgia.
Let’s let that theme drop in interest of staying on topic.
It seems to me that actually carrying out this idea would require a huge dismantling of professionalization. There’s no way that 10% can cover the huge number of middle-ranking bureaucrats in business and government, all of whom require credentials and socialization beyond the high-school level.
I’m not sure we can separate “Murray” from his argument here. Which isn’t to say we should be ad hominem, but I don’t understand what that would mean when Murray here is nothing more or less *than* his argument.
Anyway, we have the obvious tautology: those with low intelligence aren’t cut out for more intelligence training. Follow that thinking back to when it first appears in our children’s lives (i.e., kindergarten), and we can see the self-fulfilling prophecy. The point at which a child is deemed uneducable is the point at which s/he *becomes* uneducable.
Sure, there are students in college who probably should receive a vocational rather than a scholarly education. But let’s not pretend that a child who really *is* uneducable can be better educated in the trades—unless one follows the idea of “multiple intelligences,” an argument made long ago and one which Murray should acknowledge.
Furthermore, Murray has a rather nostalgic view of the trades, one that will prove more mostalgic more quickly, as places like Home Depot and Lowes take over more and more of the trade in “craftsmen” work like plumbing, carpentry, and so on. They can buy labor in bulk, underprice self-employed workers, and cut the wage of the craftsperson. And talk to any American contractor about whether skilled craftspeople suffer hard times in bad economies. Wasn’t that the point of Dan Connor on *Roseanne*?
Then we have the vocationalizing of higher professions, like law or medicine. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. America produces fine engineers, lawyers, and doctors without forcing them through a liberal arts curriculum. (In fact, many of the biggest opponents of ACTA-like core curricula are people in engineering, business, pre-med and such programs, who don’t see why their students should leave their major—and cut enrollment and course need—and take “Intro to Western Art.")
Ah, and teachers. Are they part of Murray’s “elite”? Not by paycheck or social authority/cultural capital. But they certainly need a college degree in their content areas, as well as—‘tho some might debate this—an advanced degree both in content and in pedagogy. One of our goals should be to get the top students into the teaching profession and away from the technocratic governing elite.
Basically, Murray’s argument is simplistic. Of course there should be job opportunities for students who don’t want to or cannot pursue a college education. And of course, students who cannot handle college --for emotional, intellectual, social, or personal reasons—shouldn’t go to college. But to start arguing that we can start deciding who is and isn’t educable is crazy and dangerous. The sheer number of learning disabilities left undiagnosed—some very treatable, others more debilitating—should suggest that a child might be a C student in college and yet extremely capable in the real world. Perhaps that means making assessment in school more like real world assessment and less about “term papers” and dot-matrix exams.
I fully support a liberal arts education. But I also don’t see why this isn’t given to every American child, free of charge, in grades K through 12. Let’s make our public schools more rigorous. Let’s also continue to provide high schoolers with the opportunity to move into specialties, from performing arts to nursing to auto mechanics. But let’s not make college strictly into some exclusive “generalist” humanities program. Unless you want even more people to have to go to grad school!
But I also don’t see why this isn’t given to every American child, free of charge, in grades K through 12.
That’s the most interesting response I’ve seen to this set of articles. You might want to google “Liberty School” and read around. It’s a small private high school in Maine where most of the students come there on vouchers from the state. They’ve got a most interesting program, which is in the process of being revised. One can certainly argue that the whole educational system needs to be reworked, radically. Just how that might be accomplished in the real world, that’s another issue.
As for liberal education, I don’t think of that as being strictly a humanities education. It should be full-spectrum across the disciplines.
Hmmm. I’m interested in how Murray’s line of argument relates to the recent thread on the symbolic utility of English departments, or the way *our work becomes the filter through which the “idea of the University” gets discussed (which is to say: how, as the reputed custodians of literary culture, we are imagined to have reneged on our duties to liberal education).
Today I had a meeting with a student an English major (the kind of meeting I imagine we’ve all had), who is weighing what she “should do”—i.e., what employment opportunities are open to her—what with her “interest in books.” She disclosed how many of her undergraduate friends make fun of her—that is, how science and engineering majors see the world as their oyster, and how English majors are seen as the chumps, having fallen for blather about “learning to think” in ways that will place them (justifiably, in some way, by that reasoning) at an economic disadvantage viz. opportunities in the market place.
Brainstorming with her on “career possibilities,” she thanked me my saying how grateful she is she can “go back to her mom” with “concrete options.”
Thus resisting the urge to repeat the blather (though should I?), I also pointed out to her how cosseted said mocking majors are by the new research facilities on campus—how Ford and Motorola fund science and engineering programs, not T.S. Eliot reading groups, and how the very economics of the university, what the university develops on campus to attract students, their parents, and heavy-hitting investors, projects and reinforces a utilitarian view of education, one which diminishes the value of the studia humanitatis.
The studia humanitatis intended to prepare graduates for placements in public service—from this perspective, we can weigh Murray’s point that only so many positions are open and available in the white collar sector . . . that is, that point always reminds me of the Parnassus plays, this series of plays produced at Cambridge at the end of the sixteenth century, where Cambridge grads, failing to find a position at court (the studia having produced a glut of such career-seeking grads), are reduced (literally) to shoveling shit. Thus a myth is born, and endures.
So, don’t know what my overall point is here. I’m sure it will come to me once I click “submit.”
Submit! Maybe that’s it!
And I know we’re not supposed to pick on Murray, but I have to say his utopian vision of the “wonderful intrinsic rewards” enjoyed by the “master craftsman” merits at least a couple swift, and bruising, kicks.
Please forgive my omission of a comma between “a student” and “an English major.” Gosh, I’m just useless, aren’t I?
How do Home Depot and Lowes undercut plumbers and carpenters? They can certainly undercut local hardware stores, and I suppose that it undercuts the part of a plumber’s business that is distributing plumbing supplies as opposed to plumbing installation and repair.
One could also look at higher education systems in other countries to see how they do it and if it works out any better.
Conrad, a theurgist of g. Remarkable.
Everyone knows that Murray is a tool of the high-iq society Noesis, who are working in conjunction with the Jesuit General, the Bilderberg group, and the reverse vampires to weaken teachers’ unions and to bring about a second Seattle windshield pitting incident.
Home Depot and Lowes undercut craftspeople the same way Walmart undercuts independent tire dealers: They package additional services with their products. That is, you can go to a Home Depot/Lowe’s, buy and have installed your plumbing or woodwork. The two companies have on staff plumbers, carpenters, etc. It keeps the money in the company. They undercut independent folks by paying their in-house tradespeople less.
Anyway, on to the main topic: What I’d like to see is a resurgence in teaching critical reasoning/writing/thinking to all students, preferably by the end of high school or even middle school/junior high. An education with a liberal/humanities component for everyone is a great idea, but we’re a long way from doing it. Critical thinking skills are near-universal regardless of the social status of the profession, and seem a more pragmatic goal.
JG, I suspect this is the first and last time I’ll be called a ‘theurgist’, but I hope not, although really I’m more into goety than theurgy.
Jake, the home superstores all offer services as well as supplies, and they do so at a much cheaper rate than many self-employed or small-business plumbers, electricians, etc. In Philadelphia, a lot of such tradespeople I knew wound up working for—at least much of the time—the superstores. They might nominally remain private, but they receive much of their business through the superstores, which, as middlemen, take their pound of flesh.
The problem with the IQ thing is that an IQ test does evaluate what is their what i would call their existential intelligence.
Nixon’s IQ was 155 and he had no problem killing cambodians and laotians. He had no problem whatsoever ordering people to kill other people for no reason.
A person with a high IQ can be a racist, and also can be a raving sociopath.
what people do not understand is that it is not so much intelligence that makes history, but the ability to stand alone, to not be a coward. When Rosa Parks was like, ‘I’m sitting here, I’m not moving.” What Rosa Parks did, did not take a high IQ, but bravery.
Sartre talked about this in Being and Nothingness. A liberal education does not create bravery, because the person never had to learn how to deal with an intolerable situation, so they never learned how to stand alone and take on the intolerable.
What he suggests is utopian and as history shows all utopian attemps usually lead to around 20,000,000 deaths.
a couple of points:
Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Celine, and Heidegger who all had high IQs became fascists.
Another point:
What he is describing already occured in history, The Soviet Union had a system just like this: they would raise children from an early age to become part of the Communist Party when they grew up. The people who were admitted into the party were supposed to be the elite of the society.
We all know what a failure that was.
What makes a person kind, caring, and brave is a hard thing to understand, you can’t test that.
I know craftsman who do not have high IQs but i believe would make the right decision when it concerns the well-fare of people.
I know people who are getting doctorates who i believe would not make the right decision concerning people.
I think this is a question for historians. When looking at history it is strange, Voltaire’s ideas helped the French Revolution, but it was carried out by illiterate Madame DeFarges.
I can think of a lot of changes I’d like to make in the education system—real training in multiple foreign languages from a young age (as opposed to the sick joke that our current high school language classes represent), for instance. But somehow all such changes seem utopian.
I don’t think there’s a constituency for genuine humanistic education—neither business interests nor government interests would benefit if a broad base of the population was knowledgable, inquisitive, and adept at critical thinking. (Skills like that might help one to find certain jobs, but we already over-produce people skilled enough for those jobs.) Learning to sit still and take standardized tests seems to fit people better for today’s Economic Realities.
I think that there an incredible confusion about the purposes of education and college education especially is pretty widespread. I’ve written voluminously about this. Leaving Murray’s IQ considerations aside, I’ll enumerate a few areas of tension.
1. Some people who do not want or are not capable of liberal arts education also do not get an education that they would profit from.
2. Some people get liberal arts / humanities educations that are vocationally useless. If they have strong family support ($$$), or if they’re socially very fluent, or if they picked up some non-college skills along the way, this is no big problem. But some people from unrich families end up with white elephant degrees, no skills, and no money.
3. In order to make the humanities studies seem like real productive work, many of them have been scientized and methodologized, thus destroying much of the political edge, liberating potential, and fun of the humanities, which become normalizing hierarchal bureaucracies.
Your ideal-type loser would be someone from a poor family who beats his brains out and goes heavily into debt in order to master a suffocatingly methodologized kind of humanistic study, but who still remains unemployable.
At the bottom of this discussion in the US and probably Europe is the fact that any competitive hierarchal system, by definition, produces winners and losers. Questions of inequality cannot be solved by making everyone above average. Even if competition were completely fair, there still would be a loser demographic. Even if talent or IQ within the pool were exactly equal, you still could not make everyone who wanted to be an English professor into an English professor.
Luther nails it, I think. Like Walter Benn Michaels, Charles Murray senses (rightly, I think) a national or global problem, but because he can’t really picture anything outside his own experience, his prognosis has that “LOCAL MAN INJURED!! / Germany Invades Poland” feel. The USA’s loss of decently paid non-white-collar labor opportunities is horrific, but that problem won’t be solved by making it harder to attend college. (Unions and protectionism seem more to the point, but for some reason the American Enterprise Institute’s paid scholar doesn’t mention them.)
Like Murray’s two examples of non-academics made good, I was only able to class-climb because I lucked into a slim niche of opportunity: programmers were so desperately (and cluelessly) desired by rich people that we could learn our craft on the job at a better-than-minimum wage. But he’s in a dream world when he says those opportunities “will expand for the most natural of reasons”. Open source and the web still allow for some out-of-nowhere careers—if the programmer happens to be financially secure enough to have the equipment the time—but most of the resumes I’ve encountered over the last two decades have included a degree in so-called “Computer Science”, and virtually all the job postings I’ve seen require such a degree or its equivalent.
For that matter, I’d like to see statistical evidence for his assertion that “NBA basketball players” don’t need to go to college.
Even if talent or IQ within the pool were exactly equal, you still could not make everyone who wanted to be an English professor into an English professor.
And - and I think this is where some of the confusion comes from - just because English professors are better off (in whatever sense) than plumbers working for the Home Depot doesn’t mean that the way you improve the lot of plumbers working for Home Depot is to make their education more like that of English professors (by adding training in multiple foreign languages at an early age, for example).
That last bit about statistical evidence was the clincher for me. It would have been nice if he had given some indication that his ideas had a statistical basis, but they seem to be made up.
Also, I think it is appropriate to link the articles with who Murray is and what his goals are. It isn’t like he’s writing because he just thought of this and decided to let us all know. Its always been a project of his to “reform” American education in some way, and I don’t see anything new in these articles that would make the argument more convincing, nor that would make me any less suspicious of Murrays motives.
A few comments:
First, a minor correction: the point you say Murray makes in his first piece is really made in his second piece. The first piece says nothing about college.
Second, we can hardly judge these articles apart from Murray in general, given that they are based on factual claims which are only said to be supported by unspecified “studies”—or nothing at all—and that Murray’s earlier books have been heavily criticized for misrepresenting evidence.
I’m particularly skeptical of his assertion that “There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher” and his implication in the preceding paragraph that people with an IQ of 100 “cannot follow complex arguments accurately”—for neither of which does Murray provide any evidence.
Third, my understanding is that when master “carpenter[s], painter[s], electrician[s], plumber[s], glazier[s], mason[s]” make six-figure incomes, it’s largely because they belong to strong unions which tightly limit the supply of workers, thus making these occupations unable to absorb all the millions of people who have above-average IQs but according to Murray shouldn’t be going to college. (And if these millions were to all become craftsmen, six-figure incomes would quickly be a thing of the past.)
This thread is confused, as any thread that starts with Murray is going to be. Murray wants what all conservatives want: stable social classes. So of course he wants a “rationalized” scheme for who gets admitted to college. He’ll draw on any form of racism, classism, bogus IQ study, etc. that lets him try to influence society in that direction.
As for the job market, the truth is that people are fitted into the jobs that employers want to create, not the reverse. If there are jobs for McDonald’s workers, people will become McDonald’s workers. Education only works to help determine which people are stuck doing those jobs. Changing the job market so that it provides different kinds of jobs is a political matter that requires a politics of social solidarity, not one of meritocracy.
If you accept the job market as currently structured, who are you working for when you propose “better” access to education as a job-placement tool? The ones who can best game the system. I think that they can figure it out, or not, without any additional effort on our part. The figuring it out is part of the practical test of intelligence, if you really care that intelligent people aren’t going to college.
If you consider education to be important not for jobs, but intrinsically, then you’re back to social solidarity again. If your quantity of education available is limited, you may have to ration it—that’s effectively what Britain did or tried to do with intelligence testing for some time, I believe. But the limiting factor is not then the intelligence of the pupil, it’s the total societal resources available for education. In a country like the U.S., that effectively means that people should be voluntarily dropping out before the resources run out.
Contra Murray over at Confessions of a Community College Dean:
Where Murray could have gone with his piece – and where there really is a productive discussion to be had – is on the question of what the academically mediocre or disinclined should do to make a middle-class living in the new economy. That’s what the real question is. There will be only so many glaziers. Construction, as anyone who has paid attention can tell you, is a manic-depressive industry, and some people don’t savor the thought of life on a boom-bust cycle. The old unionized heavy-industrial jobs aren’t as common, or as lucrative, as they used to be, and the service sector – the one reliably booming vocational area – generally pays quite badly. (That is, except for all those ‘easy to find’ lawyers and doctors.) Given that higher education is one of the few reliable hedges against disposability, students are acting quite rationally in seeking degrees. Yes, many of them will drop out --- it’s called standards – and many graduates have a tough time getting the first real job upon graduation. The real issues are around income distribution, and economic security, and the ability to handle changes the nature of which nobody can predict.
Murray is absolutely correct in advocating a liberal [arts] education for the elite; however, for those continuing students who are not interested in being true scholars or simply thinkers, this is clearly not the choice for them. Regardless, having an education focusing on the humanities and other seemingly useless or impractical subjects is what it is – usually impractical and useless in a direct sense. Nevertheless, the liberal arts education teaches one how to think. In learning vast arrays of knowledge in this academic and scholarly setting, one will be able to live and work in his post-collegiate environment as learned individual with an attached respect from those who are not so. Murray’s push for a movement towards liberal educations will only better America’s currently lacking reserve of scholars in a time where the country is more interested in watching a television program with no literary merit whatsoever than reading anything at all. Murray’s push is aimed at making America more intelligent on a macro scale.