Grantcoulson's Blog

Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

A short, highly readable, free book about Direct Instruction has been published by Shep Barbash and is available on the  Education Consumers website.

      1. Be clear

    Each presentation should produce only one interpretation

2. Be efficient

     Teach as much per unit time as possible

3. Teach to mastery

      Move on only when learning is mastered

4. Celebrate success

      There should be nodes at which success is acknowledged

5. Beware intuition

      Follow the script

P. 20 You teach the mainline stuff first: any combination of positive numbers that the kids already know. Once you’re solid on those, everything else is going to be a minor variation—negative numbers, letters in fractions, fractions over fractions. But here’s the test. Can you teach all this stuff without ever contradicting anything you taught earlier? If you can, you have a good system, with great acceleration potential down the pike. If you start implying something different or suggesting new inferences, then you’ve done it wrong. You should never have to change your basic view about what fractions are from the first day you learn about them.”

<insert>

    Care is taken to teach concepts which can be used in seemingly disparate situations. For example, area is taught so that areas of different shapes can morph into volumes of items such as cubes, cones, pyramids, etc.

p. 27–Student errors should not be seen as problems, but as valuable information, Engelmann says. “They tell you exactly what you need to teach at any given moment to bring your students to mastery, so that testing and teaching become the same package.”

<insert>    Error analysis tells the programmer where the program, not the student, is deficient.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    A short, highly readable, free book about Direct Instruction has been published by Shep Barbash and is available on the  Education Consumers website.

More from the book.

Pp. 13-14 Direct Instruction grew out of an experiment Engelmann performed that summer to see what young children could learn when taught with the same techniques he had developed teaching his sons. His goal was to show that all children, not just precocious ones, could learn much more and much faster than any theorist predicted. He took two groups of three- to five-year-olds—one white and affluent, one black and poor—and within a few weeks taught them things Piaget said couldn’t be taught before age 11 or 12: sophisticated concepts like relative direction (A is north of B but south of C), conservation of substance, and the behavior of light entering and leaving a mirror. Having done the ‘impossible,’ he was nevertheless disappointed. He had predicted that if the teaching were designed carefully enough, both groups would learn new material at the same rate, but to his consternation, the rich kids learned faster. He traced the difference to a severe language deficit in the African-American group—now commonly called the language gap—and resolved to figure out how to overcome it. Within a month he and his colleagues Carl Bereiter and Jean Osborn had opened the most revolutionary preschool in America. The Bereiter-Engelmann preschool, as it came to be called, was the first to show that the academic achievement gap between rich and poor could be closed, and that early intervention with an hour or two of well-designed instruction per day was the key to closing it. Open half-days and serving poor families, the preschool resembled others in that children were encouraged to play, sing songs, listen to stories and get along with each other. What made it unique was that for twenty to thirty minutes two or three times a day, they were taught skills in language, reading and math whose mastery Engelmann understood to be critical to their future academic success.

<insert>

   Many of theorists in those days, and now, were consumed with observing children and making up theoretical schemes to describe development, not interested in teaching children.

The school dramatically accelerated learning even in the most verbally deprived four-year-olds. Children who entered the preschool unable to count to ten and not knowing the meaning of “under,” “over,” or “Stand up!” went into kindergarten reading and doing math at a second-grade level. Confounding the belief that intelligence was hereditary, Engelmann found (and others later confirmed) that the mean IQ for the group jumped from 96 to 121 in one year—the largest IQ gains ever recorded in a group of children. He also found that, contrary to popular belief, kids enjoyed learning hard things from adults, and gained confidence as they gained skills. Most important, he found that the results did not depend on him or a few gifted colleagues: he could write programs that allowed most people to use his methods after some training. Teachers using early versions of Engelmann’s Language for Learning, Reading Mastery, and Connecting Math Concepts achieved results well above the norm for poor children in nine preschools and more than thirty elementary schools across the country in the 1970s.
<insert>
    Being twice as good as public education is easy. You’re competing against jobs-for-life, politically correct dimbulbs. Too be many times better, as is Direct Instruction, is laudable.

But Engelmann also found that while parents encouraged their schools to adopt DI, colleges of education opposed and attacked it. The University of Illinois in particular would not let him train student teachers. He approached every teacher training program he could find that had a stated mission to help the poor. Only two showed any interest. His first choice was Temple University in Philadelphia, but Temple backed out after two faculty departments voted unanimously against his appointment. He then accepted a position in the College of Education at the University of Oregon, thousands of miles from most of the schools where he was then working. He moved to Eugene in 1970, and retired from the university in 2003.

<end>

     What contributions, one wonders, did the skeptical academic people make to teaching children. I know the answer to that–none. Academics don’t care about the power of your techniques. They only care about your social network connections, how well you fit into their theoretic schema and your political beliefs.

     Parents like stuff which works, pragmatically not caring about massaging theories. Massaging theories is like arguing about who has the best imaginary friend.

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    A short, highly readable, free book about Direct Instruction has been published by Shep Barbash and is available on the  Education Consumers website.
   
    With all the scientific evidence, personal experience with DI and testimonials about its effectiveness, this has always seemed to me to be the strongest evidence. The educult people like free money to the extent they live on it. They will not take Engelmann’s offer because, in spite of severe cognitive deficits in the area of teaching, they know they will lose.
      From p. 46

“BETTING ON SCIENCE
Will Anybody Take Engelmann’s $100,000 Offer?

For forty years Engelmann has offered to bet anyone $100,000 that he or anyone trained to use his programs could out-teach anyone else using any other approach. No one has ever taken the bet. Based on the evidence that has been amassed showing how well DI works, anyone who did would have to be considered the underdog.”

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    A short, highly readable, free book about Direct Instruction has been published by Shep Barbash and is available on the  Education Consumers website.

      This book, although short, says almost everything that needs to be said about DI. Today, I add my reason what DI isn’t used more.

“Why isn’t DI more popular? Page 2
So why isn’t DI more popular? Critics—most of them outside the classroom—have a litany of complaints, all duly noted and refuted in this report. Their overriding reservation, however, is that DI contradicts much of what educators are taught to believe about “good” teaching.

<insert>

    The reason that the educult can maintain such ridiculous positions is that they are government agencies which get free money from government coercion and only have to operate an hysterical propaganda machine, not produce results. This allows them to do the most bizarre things.

DI is old-school. It uses teaching practices that were scorned by Progressive Era reformers but widely used until education was swept up in the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies. These include teacher-led exercises, skill grouping, choral responding, and repetition. DI also provides a carefully designed and tested script, not just a content outline or lesson plan from which the teacher endeavors to create an effective lesson.

Essentially, DI teaches academic lessons the same way great trainers and coaches teach the fundamentals in sports. It identifies key skills, teaches them first, and then adds to that foundation. It builds mastery through practice and intervenes early to prevent bad habits. Unlike virtually any other approach to instruction, it is built on the premise that the program is responsible for the results. If the student has not learned, the program has not taught.”

<insert>

   DI uses the same assumptions and techniques as many other areas. No one I know uses any of the techniques of public education to correct the errors  of public education. Di teachers take responsibility for lack of learning, they do not attribute lack of learning to lack of student capacity or “social injustice”.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

      A short, highly readable, free book about Direct Instruction has been published by Shep Barbash and is available on the Education Consumers website.

from the introduction by J.E. Stone:

    “History shows that innovations with obvious benefits are often ignored and
resisted for decades or even centuries. Take the case of citrus fruit as a treatment
for scurvy.

Prior to 1750, scurvy was a horrific problem on long sea voyages. As author
Jonathan Lamb notes, “In 1499, Vasco da Gama lost 116 of his crew of 170; in 1520,
Magellan lost 208 out of 230… all mainly to scurvy.”

You would think that any promising treatment would be readily adopted—but
it wasn’t.

In a 1601 voyage from England to India, British captain James Lancaster gave
three teaspoons of lemon juice per day to the sailors on his flagship. The crews
of the other three ships under his command received none. Halfway through the
voyage, 110 of 278 sailors on the three no-lemon-juice ships had died of scurvy,
while those on the flagship stayed healthy.

Incredibly, Lancaster’s experiment was ignored for nearly 150 years! It wasn’t
until a shipboard physician who knew of Lancaster’s findings tried a similar experiment
in 1747 that citrus was again evaluated as a cure for scurvy. Eventually,
limes became a standard provision in British ships—but not until 1795—another
48 years after Lancaster’s results had been confirmed!”

     Resulting in the nickname Limeys for the English.

      A similar story can be told about Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who introduced the notion that it would be a good idea for physicians to disinfect their hands between autopsies and delivering children. He was hounded mercilessly for this belief.

    This has happened with Direct Instruction—ignored or vilified.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    Many of the students I teach are very deficient in academic skills, but all of them excel in recycling as I hear when I “incorrectly” dispose of paper or a soda can. The students can’t do math, read or write, but they know the recycling rhetoric. When I point out that most of the “recycled” material ends up in general landfill, I am not believed. The public schools are good in brainwashing–poor in teaching academics.

     On a related note, Ontario has a “recycle” fee for electronic material such as monitors, computers and TVs, payable at purchase. I have had two occasions in the last year to dispose of old computers and monitors. One both occasions the items went to general landfill. On one occasion, I paid a “special fee” for disposal. Thank God our tax dollars, special fees,  are not wasted.

From Terry Moe–Special Interest a book about the impact of unions on public education in the U.S.

p. 41–“The key to the spectacular growth of public sector unions is that the laws changed. And what the laws did was to make union organizing and collective bargaining much easier, largely by setting up legal frameworks that allowed for elements of coercion.

    Coercion, the linchpin of socialism.

Educational unions are the biggest special interest group contributor to federal elections campaigns, almost all of the money going to the Democratic Party.

Page 137–76% of candidates with union endorsement win compared to 31% of those not endorsed.

    Government unions owning officeholders. Can anyone think of a more corrupt system?

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    Relatively long, but worthwhile

Why Intellectuals Still Support Socialism

Mises Daily: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 by Peter G. Klein

Intellectuals, particularly academic intellectuals, tend to favor socialism and interventionism. How was the American university transformed from a center of higher learning to an outpost for socialist-inspired culture and politics?

As recently as the early 1950s, the typical American university professor held social and political views quite similar to those of the general population. Today — well, you’ve all heard the jokes that circulated after the collapse of central planning in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, how the only place in the world where Marxists were still thriving was the Harvard political science department.

<insert>

      Socialism can only exist when supported by private enterprise or Individual Striving

More generally, US higher education often looks like a clear case of the inmates running the asylum. That is, the students who were radicalized in the 1960s have now risen to positions of influence within colleges and universities. One needs only to observe the aggressive pursuit of "diversity" in admissions and hiring, the abandonment of the traditional curriculum in favor of highly politicized "studies" based on group identity, the mandatory workshops on sensitivity training, and so on.

A 1989 study for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching used the categories "liberal" and "conservative." It found that 70 percent of the professors in the major liberal arts colleges and research universities considered themselves liberal or moderately liberal, with less than 20 percent identifying themselves as conservative or moderately conservative.[1]  (Of course, the term "liberal" here means left-liberal or socialist, not classical liberal.)

Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein have recently examined academics’ political affiliations using voter-registration records for tenure-track faculty at 11 California universities. They find an average Democrat:Republican ratio of 5:1, ranging from 9:1 at Berkeley to 1:1 at Pepperdine. The humanities average 10:1, while business schools are at only 1.3:1. (Needless to say, even at the heartless, dog-eat-dog, sycophant-of-the-bourgeoisie business schools the ratio doesn’t dip below 1:1.) While today’s Republicans are hardly anti-socialist — particularly on foreign policy — these figures are consistent with a widespread perception that university faculties are increasingly unrepresentative of the communities they supposedly serve.

Now here’s a surprise: Even in my own discipline, economics, 63 percent of the faculty in the Carnegie study identified themselves as liberal, compared with 72 percent in anthropology, political science, and sociology, 76 percent in ethnic studies, history, and philosophy, and 88 percent in public affairs. The Cardiff and Klein study finds an average D:R ratio in economics departments of 2.8:1 — lower than the sociologists’ 44:1, to be sure, but higher than that of biological and chemical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, management, marketing, accounting, and finance.

<insert>

    The explanation for the nonsense that is modern sociology. So ideologically twisted as to be unable to produce anything useful. I’m sure psychologists teaching at universities would show a high ratio, probably less than 44:1.

A survey of American Economic Association members, examined by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern, finds that most economists support safety regulations, gun control, redistribution, public schooling, and anti-discrimination laws. Another survey, reported in the Southern Economic Journal, reveals that "71 percent of American economists believe the distribution of income in the US should be more equal, and 81 percent feel that the redistribution of income is a legitimate role for government. Support for these positions is even stronger among economists with academic affiliations, and stronger still among economists with elite academic affiliations."[2]

Why do so many university professors — and intellectuals more generally — favor socialism and interventionism? F. A. Hayek offered a partial explanation in his 1949 essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism." Hayek asked why "the more active, intelligent and original men among [American] intellectuals … most frequently incline toward socialism." His answer is based on the opportunities available to people of varying talents.

Academics tend to be highly intelligent people. Given their leftward leanings, one might be tempted to infer from this that more intelligent people tend to favor socialism. However, this conclusion suffers from what empirical researchers call "sample selection bias." Intelligent people hold a variety of views. Some are lovers of liberty, defenders of property, and supporters of the "natural order" — i.e., defenders of the market. Others are reformers, wanting to remake the world according to their own visions of the ideal society.

Hayek argues that exceptionally intelligent people who favor the market tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success outside the Academy (i.e., in the business or professional world). Those who are highly intelligent but ill-disposed toward the market are more likely to choose an academic career. For this reason, the universities come to be filled with those intellectuals who were favorably disposed toward socialism from the beginning.

This also leads to the phenomenon that academics don’t know much about how markets work, since they have so little experience with them, living as they do in their subsidized ivory towers and protected by academic tenure. As Joseph Schumpeter explained in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, it is "the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs" that distinguishes the academic intellectual from others "who wield the power of the spoken and the written word." This absence of direct responsibility leads to a corresponding absence of first-hand knowledge of practical affairs. The critical attitude of the intellectual arises, says Schumpeter, "no less from the intellectual’s situation as an onlooker — in most cases also as an outsider — than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value."[3]

Hayek’s account is incomplete, however, because it doesn’t explain why academics have become more and more interventionist throughout the twentieth century. As mentioned above, during the first half of the twentieth century university faculty members tended to hold political views similar to those held by the general population. What caused the change?

To answer, we must realize first that academics receive many direct benefits from the welfare state, and that these benefits have increased over time.

<insert>

    The pursuit of “public welfare” for personal gain.

Excluding student financial aid, public universities receive about 50 percent of their funding from federal and state governments, dwarfing the 18 percent they receive from tuition and fees. Even "private" universities like Stanford or Harvard receive around 20 percent of their budgets from federal grants and contracts.[4]  If you include student financial aid, that figure rises to almost 50 percent. According to the US Department of Education, about a third of all students at public, 4-year colleges and universities, and half the students at private colleges and universities, receive financial aid from the federal government.

In this sense, the most dramatic example of "corporate welfare" in the US is the GI Bill, which subsidized the academic sector, bloating it far beyond the level the market would have provided. The GI Bill, signed by President Roosevelt in 1944 to send returning soldiers to colleges and universities, cost taxpayers $14.5 billion between 1944 and 1956.[5]  Federal spending on the latest version, the Montgomery GI Bill, is projected at $3.2 billion in 2006 alone.

To see why this government aid is so important to the higher education establishment, we need only stop to consider for a moment what academics would do in a purely free society. The fact is that most academics simply aren’t that important. In a free society, there would be far fewer of them than there are today. Their public visibility would no doubt be quite low. Most would be poorly paid. Though some would be engaged in scholarly research, the vast majority would be teachers. Their job would be to pass the collective wisdom of the ages along to the next generation.

In all likelihood, there would also be far fewer students. Some students would attend traditional colleges and universities, but many more students would attend technical and vocational schools, where their instructors would be men and women with practical knowledge.

Today, many professors at major research universities do little teaching. Their primary activity is research, though much of that is questionable as real scholarship. One needs only to browse through the latest specialty journals to see what passes for scholarly research in most disciplines. In the humanities and social sciences, it is likely to be postmodern gobbledygook; in the professional schools, vocationally oriented technical reports.

Much of this research is funded in the United States by government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the USDA, and others. The large universities have tens of thousands of students, themselves supported by government-subsidized loans and grants.

Beyond university life, academics also compete for prestigious posts within government agencies. Consider my own field, economics. The US federal government employs at least 3,000 economists — about 15% of all members of the American Economic Association. The Federal Reserve System itself employs several hundred. There are also advisory posts, affiliations with important government agencies, memberships of federally appointed commissions, and other career-enhancing activities.

These benefits are not simply financial. They are also psychological. As Dwight Lee puts it:

    Like every other group, academics like to exert influence and feel important. Few scholars in the social sciences and humanities are content just to observe, describe, and explain society; most want to improve society and are naive enough to believe that they could do so if only they had sufficient influence. The existence of a huge government offers academics the real possibility of living out their reformist fantasies.[6]

It’s clear, then, that there are many benefits, for academics, to living in a highly interventionist society. It should be no wonder, then, that academics tend to support those interventions. Economists, in particular, play active roles as government advisers, creating and sustaining the welfare state that now surrounds us. Naturally, when government funds their research, economists in applied fields such as agricultural economics and monetary economics are unlikely to call for serious regulatory reform in their specialty areas.

Murray Rothbard devotes an interesting chapter of Man, Economy, and State, to the traditional role of the economist in public life. Rothbard notes that the functions of the economist on the free market differ strongly from those of the economist on the hampered market. "What can the economist do on the purely free market?" Rothbard asks. "He can explain the workings of the market economy (a vital task, especially since the untutored person tends to regard the market economy as sheer chaos), but he can do little else."

Furthermore, economists are not traditionally popular as policy advisors. Economics teaches that resources are limited, that choices made imply opportunities forgone, that our actions can have unintended consequences. This is typically not what government officials want to hear. When they propose an import tariff to help domestic manufacturers, we economists explain that this protection will come only at the expense of domestic consumers. When they suggest a minimum-wage law to raise the incomes of low-wage workers, we show that such a law hurts the very people it purports to help by forcing them out of work. On and on it goes. As each new generation of utopian reformers promises to create a better society, through government intervention, the economist stands athwart history, yelling "Remember the opportunity cost!"

Over the last several decades, however, the role of the economist has expanded dramatically. Partly for the reasons we discussed earlier, the welfare state has partly co-opted the profession of economics. Just as a higher murder rate increases the demand for criminologists, so the growth of the welfare/regulatory state increases the demand for policy analysts, antitrust consultants, tax and regulatory experts, and various forecasters.

To some degree, the increasing professionalization of the economics business must share the blame for this change. The economists’ premier professional society, the American Economic Association, was itself created as an explicitly "progressive" organization. Its founder, the religious and social reformer Richard T. Ely, planned an association, he reported to a colleague, of "economists who repudiate laissez-faire as a scientific doctrine."[7]

The other founding members, all of whom had been trained in Germany under Gustav Schmoller and other members of the younger German Historical School — the so-called Socialists of the Chair — were similarly possessed with reformist zeal. The constitution of the AEA still contains references to the "positive role of the church, the state and science in the solution of social problems by the ‘development of legislative policy.’"[8]

Fortunately, the AEA subsequently distanced itself from the aims of its founders, although its annual distinguished lecture is still called the "Richard T. Ely lecture."[9]

If asked to select a single event that most encouraged the transformation of the average economist from a critic of intervention to a defender of the welfare state, I would name the Second World War. To be sure, it was the Progressive Era that saw the permanent introduction of the income tax and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. And it was during the Great Depression that Washington, D.C. first began to employ a substantial number of economists, to join such central-planning organizations as the National Resources Planning Board. Still, even in those years, the average economist favored free trade, low taxes, and sound money.

World War II, however, was a watershed event for the profession. For the first time, professional economists joined the ranks of government planning bureaus en masse:

    To control prices, as with the Office of Price Administration, led by Leon Henderson and later John Kenneth Galbraith. This group included prominent "free-market" economists such as Herbert Stein and George Stigler.   

    To study military procurement (what later became known as "operations research") with Columbia University’s Statistical Research Group (including Stigler, Milton Friedman, Harold Hotelling, Abraham Wald, Leonard Savage), or with the Army’s Statistical Control Group, which was led by Tex Thornton, later president of Litton Industries, and his "Whiz Kids." The most famous Whiz Kid was Robert McNamara, Thornton’s leading protégé, who later applied the same techniques to the management of the Vietnam War. 

Before World War II the primary language of economics, in the English-speaking world, was English. Since then, however, economic theory has come to be expressed in obscure mathematical jargon, while economic history has become a branch of applied statistics.

It is common to attribute this change to the 1947 publication of Paul Samuelson’s mathematical treatise, Foundations of Economic Analysis, and to the development of computers. These are no doubt important. However, it is likely the taste of central planning that economists — even nominally free-market economists — got during World War II that forever changed the direction of the discipline.

What about other public figures, what Hayek called "second-hand dealers in ideas" — the journalists, book editors, high-school teachers, and other members of the "opinion-molding" class? First, intelligent and articulate liberals (in the classical sense) tend to go into business and the professions (Hayek’s selection-bias argument). Second, many journalists trade integrity for access; few are brave enough to challenge the state, because they crave information, interviews, and time with state officials.
    
   
What does the future hold? It is impossible to say for sure, but there are encouraging signs. The main reason is technology. The web has challenged the state-university and state-media cartels as never before. You don’t need a PhD to write for Wikipedia. What does the rise of the new media, new means of sharing information, new ways of establishing authority and credibility, imply for universities as credential factories? Moreover, as universities become more vocationally oriented, they will find it hard to compete with specialized, technology-intensive institutions such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, the fastest-growing US universities.

Home schooling, the costs of which are greatly lowered by technology, is also on the rise. And traditional media (newspapers and network news) are of course rapidly declining, and alternative news sources are flourishing.

The current crises in higher education and the media are probably good things, in the long run, if they force a rethinking of educational and intellectual goals and objectives, and take power away from the establishment institutions. Then, and only then, we may see a rebirth of genuine scholarship, communication, and education.

Peter G. Klein teaches economics at the University of Missouri. This is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the New Zealand Business Roundtable in 2003 and the Austrian Student Scholars Conference in 2005. Klein blogs at Organizations and Markets. Send him mail. See his archive. Comment on the blog.

Notes

[1]  Cited in Dwight Lee, "Go to Harvard and Turn Left: The Rise of Socialist Ideology in Higher Education," in T. William Boxx and Gary M. Quinlivan, eds., The Cultural Context of Economics and Politics (Lanham, MA: University Press of America, 1994), pp. 15–26.

[2]  Lee, "Go to Harvard and Turn Left," p. 21.

[3]  Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942), p. 147.

[4]  US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, "Financial Statistics of Institutions of Higher Education" surveys; and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), "Finance" surveys, as reported in 1996 Digest of Education Statistics (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 1996).

[5]  Theda Skocpol, "Delivering for Young Families: The Resonance of the GI Bill," American Prospect 28 (September — October 1996): 66–72.

[6]  Lee, "Go to Harvard and Turn Left," p. 22.

[7]  A.W. Coats, "The First Two Decades of the American Economic Association," American Economic Review 50 (September 1960): 555–574, esp. p. 556.

[8]  Coats, "The First Two Decades of the American Economic Association," p. 558.

[9]  For more on the professionalization of economics see Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

<end>

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

     One of the assumptions underlying what I write about is that, if a group of people is maintained with funding and lack of responsibility over decades, it will become a cult. A cult, by definition, has beliefs far out of touch with reality. Postmodern philosophy is one such belief. It lies at the bottom of constructivism, the teaching method which requires students to “create their own reality” and “discover” facts and methods. It doesn’t work, so it’s a perfect academic paradigm for public education.

Postmodern Science and Western Civilization

By William H. Young –

Much of the American academy has come to reject the concept of natural science developed by Western civilization and has replaced it with postmodern ideology. Most importantly, this misguided contempt for Western science has contributed to placing America in a non-competitive and perilous position relative to other industrialized nations because of a lack of college graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM.

The ancient Greeks first formulated the mathematical description of the structure of nature, but they never carried out the empirical experimentation necessary to convert the ideals of Plato and logic of Aristotle (the Organon) into science and scientific principles. It would be two thousand years before the balance between logic and empiricism would be achieved, uniquely by the West, in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution.

In his New Organon (1620), Francis Bacon laid out a new method of inductive reasoning—the “scientific method” in which facts would first be gathered without preconception and then analyzed. He established the scientific credo as well as method: the endless pursuit of knowledge, which grows incrementally and systematically over time; the use of experiment and evidence to provide proof of truth (or falsity) and a basis for inductive logic; and practical utility as the goal of science. It would later take Newton and the Principia (1687) to establish the need for theoretical formulation prior to observation and the application of mathematics as integral to the scientific method. With the scientific method, the natural sciences made possible “the metamorphosis in humanity’s estate,” the health and well-being of the Western common man, as Stephen Balch observed in Metamorphosis, or Why We Should Study the West.

But beginning with the counterculture of the 1960s, postmodern academic thinking—other than that applied in technical professions such as natural science, medicine, engineering, finance, accounting—came to dismiss the “rationalistic” mentality associated with scientific mechanism and materialism, what Theodore Roszak derided as “objective consciousness.” Academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences, turned against Western science through misuse of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

Kuhn postulated that Western science had advanced by a series of revolutions in which creative individuals and groups, starting with new discoveries and perceptions of the ways in which nature exists and works, developed “new paradigms,” which were validated through acquisition of data—or evidence—using the scientific method. In Kuhn’s terms, there have been hundreds of such new paradigms, such as the discoveries of x-rays, the voltaic cell, electromagnetism, and Newton’s and Einstein’s laws. Such new paradigms were subject to rigorous independent verification by competent peer groups before acceptance as truth within the limits of knowledge and measurement at a given time. Kuhnian science is cumulative. But Kuhn’s work “became perhaps the most influential misunderstood book of the century,” explains philosopher Ken Wilber in The Marriage of Sense and Soul (1998). Postmodernism says, in effect, that the world is not perceived, it is only interpreted. Different interpretations are equally valid ways of making sense of the world, and thus no interpretation is intrinsically better than another. Science is not a privileged conception of the world but merely one among many equivalent interpretations; science does not offer “truth” but simply its own favorite prejudice; science is not a set of universal facts but merely an arbitrary imposition of its own power drives. And in all cases, science is no more grounded in reality than is any other interpretation.

Postmodernism, Wilber continues, postulated that science is not governed by facts, it is governed by paradigms, and paradigms are not much more than ad hoc constructions or free-floating interpretations….This is not at all the way Kuhn defined or described paradigms, and he strenuously denounced this abuse of his work—to no avail….This blatant misreading of Kuhn erased evidence from the scene of truth, and into that vacuum rushed every egocentric project imaginable….that allowed them arbitrarily to deconstruct any reality that happened not to suit them and insert their own “revolutionary new paradigm” into the scene, imagining that they were somehow vanguards of a revolutionary transformation that would shake the world to its very foundations, and the keys to which, they now held…

In Higher Superstition (1994), biologist Paul R. Gross of the University of Virginia and Rutgers mathematician Norman Levitt began the science wars of the 1990s by revealing that college programs were turning out graduates convinced that natural science is ideological, reflecting the postmodernist assertion that knowledge is at best relative and socially constructed, and that there is no truth, only opinion. As a result, such graduates “are hostile towards scientific knowledge and methodology themselves and deny their validity. Claiming superior ways of knowing—and courting and proclaiming pride in irrationality—they condemn science and seek to exorcise it.”

Many sociologists “view science as a social convention, reflecting social prejudice”; gender feminists “view science as poisoned and corrupted by an ineradicable gender bias”; radical environmentalists “view science as an instrumentality alienating man from nature”; postmodernists “view science as part of bankrupt Western civilization”; and multiculturalists “view science as inherently inaccurate and incomplete by virtue of its failure to incorporate the full range of cultural perspectives,” including deep racial wisdom. “With the aid of an unrelenting moralism that cloaks itself in political and social virtue… the critics enthrone a doctrine and a methodology for thinking about science that is at once scornful and ignorant.”

Science and Technology Studies and other college programs continue that anti-science ethos. Moreover, schools of education and teachers have undermined the understanding of, and attitudes towards, science taught in the public schools, guiding students to see science through the ideological prisms of social justice and sustainability—and now, ironically, seeking to divorce math from science. Most students are already not prepared in math and science to undertake the rigor of STEM degrees, especially engineering. And they are weak in critical thinking skills, such as the ability to assess the validity of evidence or the logic of arguments, faculties indispensable to scientific disciplines.

But “it’s not just a K-12 preparation issue,” notes a New York Times article, “Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard).” Latest research suggests that grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences provides an incentive for students to leave STEM majors. STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors.

What is the result in the real world? According to the National Academies of Sciences, the U. S. has fallen to 27th out of 29 wealthy countries in the proportion of college students with STEM degrees. As recounted in his biography by Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs told President Obama that Apple employs 700,000 factory workers in China because it can’t find the 30,000 engineers in the U. S. that it needs on site at its plants. Could the need for change be clearer?

As NAS has recommended, our universities urgently need to return to teaching the knowledge of Western civilization about science, to restore understanding of and respect for the scientific method, to improve rather than further degrade the teaching of math and science in secondary schools, and to foster an increase in the number of graduates—both men and women—with STEM degrees, if America is to regain competitiveness in the global economy through technological innovation.

<end>

      Education is in such a mess because there is no expectation of production and no consequences for non-production. There never will be so long as it is provided by public employees. You can have a government job or respect.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

Do As I Say

The Miseducation of a University President
Posted by EducationViews.org on November 17, 2011 in Daily, Higher Ed | 0 Comment

by Jonathan Butcher -

Aesop tells us that every man carries two bags, one in front and one behind, both full of faults. The bag in front contains the faults of others, while we carry ours in the one behind. As a result, we always see someone else’s mistakes and rarely look at our own.

<insert>

      ASU is Arizona State University.

Writing in the Washington Post earlier this month, ASU President Michael Crow chastises universities for not being more innovative during the current financial crisis. “Their lack of creativity in adjusting to the reduction of resources has shocked governors and business leaders alike who want to see universities innovate in order to educate more students better, faster and cheaper,” said Crow.

But ASU hasn’t exactly been a model of efficiency. Across the country, colleges are hiring massive numbers of administrators and ASU is no exception — in fact, the Sun Devils are an example of this “administrative bloat.” Between 1993 and 2007, ASU increased the number of full-time administrators per 100 students more than 167 other comparable universities while the number of instructional staff and researchers actually decreased. Goldwater research finds “[n]early half of all full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators.”

<insert>

      A little more than one other staff for every administrator–One wonders what they administer.

Considering these hiring practices, Crow’s warning that proposals to turn universities into businesses are “ill-conceived” is remarkable. Also “ill-conceived” are programs that would “send our kids to college in the basement with the local online university.” Yet the University of Phoenix reports that some 75 percent of higher education students today “are older…work full or part time and have family responsibilities, including financial obligations,” which means online access to college classes may be the only access they have.

ASU and other state universities should focus on core academic programs and direct spending not to administration but on practices directly tied to student instruction. In addition, Arizona colleges and universities should align tuition more closely with the actual costs of providing an education, pursue more private funding, and make themselves more financially self-sufficient.

<end>
 
  Fixing higher education is such an enormous task that it will never be accomplished. The only way to stop them wasting money is to give them less.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

     The New York Times is sure that the way out of the government deficit problem is in raising government revenue, i.e., increasing the amount of economic activity controlled by bureaucrats. With good ideas such as this, how can we fail to be led out of the economic doldrums? If the economic drag of government produces a decrease in economic activity, how can more drag fail to produce an increase? It’s only logical.

      More positive news: I have three students, all on the autism spectrum, who have been taught to a high level of fluency; two in mathematics, one in reading. None has been taught much in school, but all have recently shown remarkable academic behavior.

       The first, given questions such as, “You go into a store with $3, 120.65 and purchase three items, one worth $345.67, another $1,908.23 and the third, $543.98. How much change do you get?”, can calculate the answer in much less time than the average adult.

     The second, is now starting to learn to count money and is performing far above my expectation, requiring much less instruction than the average student not on the autism spectrum.

      The third, who began reading to help with an articulation problem, keeps setting new personal records.

    All three were taught to high fluency and are performing as the theory demands–training in the fundamentals produces quick acquisition of more complex behavior.

        Education is not a question of more money, like every other human activity, it’s a question of better techniques.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies