The Liberal Order

Larry King and Donald Trump on Economics Education

KING: We don't learn about that in school at all. They teach you economics, but it's boring.

TRUMP: They teach you economics, and it has nothing to do with the real world, and that's part of the problem.

KING: It's a class you fall asleep in. ...

Interview transcript here.

The State of American Education

During a recent visit to the Raleigh, NC area prior to moving there in January, the family toured a couple of elementary and middle schools in order to narrow our search for a new home. We drove past about ten schools, and stopped to visit two elementary and one of the middle schools.

At the middle school and one of the elementary schools we were given tours by the principal and a counselor, respectively. Unfortunately, I walked away from both highly disturbed and disgusted with the egalitarian attitude inherent in public education today, as well as the poorly educated staff at at least one of these schools. All three, by the way, are purportedly some of the best schools in the nation, with all having been designated North Carolina Honor Schools of Excellence. If these schools represent the most excellent of our nation, we're in trouble.

At the first school, an elementary school in a suburb of Raleigh, a counselor took us on a tour of the school, showing us different classrooms and the outside playgrounds. At one point she informs us, that "There are less students" in such and such a classroom or program. Later on, during the tour of the two playground areas, she notes that one of the playgrounds was for use by the kindergarten and first grade students only, and the second "is where the second, third and fourth grade students plays."  Maybe she also feels that "the literacy level of our children are appalling."

During the last leg of the tour she made it a point to inform us that the school was a Title I school, which meant that they receive Title 1 funding to serve the needs of students requiring remedial education--a badge of honor, I guess. No, to me that means that as long as you receive more money the more resources you dedicate to kids with remedial needs, the less you'll be concentrating your efforts on my childrens' needs.

That same afternoon we toured a nearby middle school. The principal, a very nice gentleman who took time away from his obviously busy schedule, offered to show us around. At one point he informed us that they had two teachers who left higher paying professional fields to beome teachers, one a dentist and the other a lawyer.

Shortly thereafter he went on to discuss the combined learning programs they use and how students with diverse learning capabilities are taught together rather than separating them into different classes. It must not be easy to teach kids forced together like this since he admitted that they had to hire consultants to instruct teachers on how to teach students with such diverse learning abilities. I asked why they didn't just segment students based on individual abilities, allowing them to more effectively target the educational needs of individual students based on their specific talents. He responded that segmenting students like this would deny them an opportunity to learn alongside others different from themselves, which I'm guessing he meant was a bad thing. I guess he feels that by forcing gifted students to learn alongside students with more remedial needs, students learn to become more tolerant of others' differences. I wanted to bang my head on the wall. I had to bite my tongue to stop from saying, "So, it's your policy that more academically gifted students must sacrifice in the form of an inferior education in order to avoid hurt feelings among the less academically gifted?"

Later, after a janitor came by pushing a broom and a trash can, I again had to bite my tongue to keep from asking the principal, "Might the janitor's self esteem be damaged because he has to push a broom rather than teach students? Wouldn't it benefit us all, therefore, to have him teach the students and have other teachers like the former lawyer and dentist sweep the floors?"

My tongue was hurting.

Markets in e-Tutoring

"It's made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before," said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.

Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 "e-tutors" mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.

This is indicative of a larger problem in U.S. education. Private schooling is a growth industry, with some private secondary schools charging as much as--some even more than--elite colleges and universities. The primary problem as I see it is being able to sort my kid from yours. This is not possible in a one-size-fits-all system provided through public education.

Also, the last figures I saw were that 75% of students actually graduate from high school. That has changed . . . for the worse.

It comes at a difficult time for the U.S. education system: only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics, according to government statistics.

Story here.

Choosing a Major

If money isn't your only motivator, which I hope it's not, Newmark's Door links to this analysis of how to choose a major. I like this one:

PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

Marc Fisher on Patrick Henry College

James Buchanan once told me that if you believe that you possess the truth you don't belong in academics, you belong on a pulpit preaching your truth. Academics, he argued, is the continual pursuit of truth. Marc Fisher of the Washington Post explains the plight of a few professors at one school who pursued this belief.

I fear that this is becoming more and more prevalent in higher education today. Rather than being marketplaces of ideas, the academy is increasingly becoming battlefields of ideology.

The Role of the Academic

I’ve heard it said that an ineffective psychotherapist tells you what you want to hear while an effective psychotherapist tells you what you don’t want to know. I believe the same applies to teaching.

Teaching is not the process of espousing one's personal belief system, seeking converts to support his or her ideological views. I refer to that as the celebrity lecture: “Enough about what I believe in, now you tell me what I believe in.” Teaching is the process of constantly challenging one's beliefs - including their own - in their pursuit of “truth.”

Looking back at my own education, from those whom I learned the most I usually walked away from their lectures or discussions befuddled and questioning what they said. “What the hell just went on there?" Sometimes I even left frustrated and disbelieving. “How the hell could they ever believe that?" But I always left thinking hard about what they said and trying to figure it out. Usually, with enough patience and an open mind, I did.

It was from these experiences that I came to realize the difference between advocacy and academics, and what effective teaching is all about. It is the process, not the outcome, that is sacred.

 

James Buchanan (among others) was one of those professors from whom I learned the importance of pursuing truth in class and not just imparting "truth" onto students. And it’s certainly not surprising. After all, he was a student of Frank Knight. Knight taught four students who would go on to win Nobel Prizes in economics: Buchanan, Stigler, Friedman, and Samuelson. All but Samuelson credit Frank Knight and his teaching philosophy for their eventual success. (Samuelson might have as well and I just haven’t read it.)

Buchanan says of Knight’s influence on him,

“Frank Knight was not an ideologue, and he made no attempt to convert anybody.”

“Frank Knight was the intellectual influence during my years at the University of Chicago, and his influence increased over subsequent years, enhanced by the development of a close personal relationship. Knight became my role model, without which I wonder what turns I might have taken. The qualities of mind that Knight exhibited were, and remain, those that I seek to emulate: the willingness to question anything, and anybody, on any subject anytime; the categorical refusal to accept anything as sacred; the genuine openness to all ideas; and, finally, the basic conviction that most ideas peddled about are nonsense or worse when examined critically.”
Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (page 5)

I am forever indebted to those professors like James Buchanan, and it is they whom I try to emulate in the classroom. As Alan Charles Kors once said to me, "Academics is a marketplace of ideas, not a battlefield of ideologies." I've never forgotten this wonderful advice.

Student Evaluations of Faculty

A cousin who I had not seen for decades until recently, and with whom I once lived when he was three-years-old, emailed me a link to Rate My Professor and probably the negative comments made about me by a group of former students. My cousin obviously found this amusing. Way to go cuz; way to support me.

I neither pay attention to them, nor do I give much weight to the end-of-semester student evaluations of faculty. Are students really equipped to evaluate faculty? And should administrators put any weight on student evaluations?

What I am supplying and what the students are purchasing are two different, even competing products or services. I am a supplier of education (knowledge, critical thinking skills, etc.) while students are essentially purchasing a diploma. If this weren’t the case the diploma would essentially be a meaningless byproduct of a college education. More importantly, the median student would actively participate in his or her education instead of treating it as a passive activity much like they approach getting a suntan: Spread out the towel and lay back waiting for knowledge to pour over them and through osmosis makes them smarter. And if they don’t learn anything the professor must obviously have been a cloudy day. 

A diploma certifies that a student has some base level of knowledge sufficient to represent the objective(s) of the institution. Therefore, what I am supplying in the form of education is actually an obstacle to what some students ultimately seek: that diploma. I look at most – not all – disgruntled students as individuals who I blocked from obtaining their desired end. My job is to preserve the integrity of the institution by preserving the signal of the diploma. This means evaluating each student’s ability at the end of each class and flunking those who in my estimation have not proven competence in a subject. Their negative remarks are often part of their outburst of anger that results from their failure.

Although some students may have constructive comments about their professor’s performance, the incompatible objectives discussed above lead to too much noise in student evaluations of faculty to make them meaningful. Worse still, if administrators weigh evaluations for tenure and promotion there is a resulting perverse incentive for faculty to degrade the integrity of the institution.

Fortunately for me, the median student here is focused and interested in learning and intelligent and puts forth considerable effort into their education, especially the ones I've had the pleasure of teaching this past year. This makes my job more enjoyable and more interesting. So for me, I listen to comments students make directly to me, good or bad, like the following, which I literally received just this afternoon after I had written this post.

I thought the lecture today was very cool with the foreign currency, you run a great class

(Unfortunately, today's lecture was on a history of U.S. currency. Go figure.)

The Carrot in Education

It's always difficult to get students to respond in class, much less come to class prepared. My guess is that fewer than 20% of the students have read the material for the currentl lecture prior to coming to class, with fewer than 50% reading at least 50% of the required reading some time during the semester.

I am going to try an experiment to induce more reading and class participation. I will pose questions about the material during the lecture. The student who answers the question correctly will receive points, and the individual with the most points at the end of each week will receive $10. Each question will start out being worth five points, and if there is more than one student wishing to provide an answer  I'll auction the right to answer by lowering the points rewarded.

We'll see if this creates an incentive to come to class prepared and to participate in discussions. Who knows, maybe we should raise tuition and students can earn credits towards their tuition (a reimbursement) by being prepared and participating in their education.

Addendum: By the way, this plan amounts to something akin to an academic scholarship with the rewards paid incremently rather than in one lump sum paid ex-ante.

Alan Dershowitz on Harvard's Faculty

In discussing the affairs currently taking place at Harvard, law professor Alan Dershowitz argues:

"I'm clearly in the left 20 percent of the country, nationally. I'm a Ted Kennedy liberal," Dershowitz said. "In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I'm in the 10 percent side of the conservatives.

"That doesn't show I'm out of sync with the country," he said. "It shows how out of sync Harvard is."

Larry Summers to Resign

This is just a sad turn of events for academics.
Past comments about Larry Summers and the Harvard elite are here and here.