what I said re: education

I'm reposting a comment I'd made on Instapundit that had earned me 15 likes (validation!). First, though, I need to provide context. My comment was in response to this:

As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students, Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome [according to Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But the more] pointed critique… is a populist one, and it reflects sentiments that can be found these days on the left as well as the right. Economists have shown that higher education as a whole has become more stratified by income and class over the last 20 years…. Hess says many conservatives have grown skeptical that students are learning much at these selective institutions. Instead, he says, college has become simply a place for students to collect a gold-plated credential. ‘It’s a racketeering situation,’ Hess said when we spoke last month. ‘In many elite occupations, the price of admission is now an elite degree. That’s true whether it’s a posh D.C. think tank or a big consulting firm or a fancy journalistic outlet.’ For many students, Hess said, the point of an expensive college education is not to gain practical job skills. ‘It’s just a really expensive toll that lets you jump the queue and get the good jobs.’

I wrote in response:

Some disjointed points:

1. What that paragraph describes has been the case in South Korea since forever. I used to teach here in Korea; now, I'm doing textbook-content creation, but I'm still a cog in the education machine. Academia here is a joke. Education in general, from elementary on up, is a joke. It's all conformism and rote memorization, and any Westerner touting the supposed virtues of East Asian-style education doesn't know much about East Asian-style education.* Koreans "value education"? Sure: they value it because you get a piece of paper at the end that lets you slip into white-collar work more easily. And society has become so hollow that being a corporate drone, a cubicle cow, has become one of the highest aspirational goals for young people.

2. I graduated from Georgetown in 1991. Back then, if I heard someone was from Harvard or Yale, I was genuinely impressed. A degree from those places (and even from my own alma mater) meant something. But now, in the fullness of time, I wonder whether my memory of academia-gone-by has been tainted by youthful idealism. I suspect that the whole education-as-joke thing has been around a lot longer than post-1991. The Closing of the American Mind was written in 1987, the year I graduated from high school. American societal deterioration in general was a thing when Tom Wolfe wrote his The Bonfire of the Vanities (also 1987). How far back does the problem really go?

We have been, to use Carlin's phrase, "circling the drain" for a while.

__________

*The one virtue of rote memorization is that you come away knowing facts. But in Asia, you don't really learn their context or how to apply them. When Asians learn math, they outstrip their Western student counterparts, learning things like trig and calculus years earlier than students in the West do (I did calc my senior year in high school; many Koreans do it in middle school or early high school, depending on the region and the school's quality). But the Asians' "learning" amounts to memorizing a bunch of tried-and-true tricks to be able to solve complex problems. Give these same students a totally new situation in which it's not obvious which math skills to apply and how, and they'll stare blankly because they were never taught how to think. Richard Feynman wrote about this mentality. This is why the West innovates while the East generally copies and miniaturizes.

There are exceptions, of course. In Korea, there's KAIST, for example—Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. A lot of creative innovation is coming out of there, mostly in the fields of robotics and cybernetics. But that's because KAIST emphasizes Western approaches to problem solving, developing a culture of questioning and discussion. It's a rare gem in a pile of academic turds.

But Westerners keep praising the Eastern system because of its emphasis on memorizing facts. These Westerners look at American kids failing geography tests and shake their heads sadly. Why can't our kids be more like Asian kids? they ask. Trust me: you don't want that. Here's the thing about memorizing facts to pass tests: after enough time goes by, you forget the facts you "learned" because you never really learned them—you merely memorized them. When I taught at Sookmyung Women's University, I'd pepper my students with hanja questions: "What's the Chinese character for such-and-such?" Blank stares or sheepish smiles in response. Why? Because memorizing 1800 Sino-Korean characters is a requirement through high school, but after a year in college, with that requirement no longer in place, many students forget what they've memorized.

In Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognition, rote memorization is at the bottom of the cognitional pyramid. Positively, this means it's the most basic form of cognition: you can't apply facts if you have no facts to apply. But negatively, it's at the bottom of the pyramid because it's also the simplest, most boneheaded form of cognition. Asian kids master the pyramid's bottom, but they've got nothing much beyond that. From what I hear, something similar is happening in Western schools. And as an aside, the introduction of leftist ideology, with its neurotic need for conformism, isn't helping matters unless the goal really is to create drones.

#WhenTheFootnoteIsFarBiggerThanTheMainText