tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post2721761899467461694..comments2024-03-26T14:19:33.332-07:00Comments on Bench Grass: On the Origins of the Education-Complex State Erik Lundhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-34614491452522257492014-10-16T12:56:15.672-07:002014-10-16T12:56:15.672-07:00Graydon, knowing my nephew, I am not going to hav...Graydon, knowing my nephew, I am not going to have to look at all hard for a four generation, century+ medical dynasty. It is true that it's not a four-generation medical practice, but in the Canadian situation, medical practices aren't worth the effort. (I'll also note that thanks to my grandfather's skill in arranging to have two daughters, that it will be prosopographically all but untraceable.) <br /><br />Dental practices, and especially legal, but also civil engineering, on the other hand....<br /><br />And speaking of prosopography, you might want to take down a volume of the <i>Dictionary of Scientific Biography</i> and test your theory of the class alignments of mathematics. That office work is done by those in need of office work is another matter entirely....Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-62102037181843487852014-10-15T11:17:04.599-07:002014-10-15T11:17:04.599-07:00Ever seen one of the concrete moulds they formed h...Ever seen one of the concrete moulds they formed half a Sea Hornet on? http://www.airfieldarchaeology.co.uk/uploads/7/3/3/0/7330321/930445_orig.jpgAlexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17153530634675543954noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-61395500108892016222014-10-14T17:07:52.719-07:002014-10-14T17:07:52.719-07:00Doctors are not rich. Doctors are a closed profes...Doctors are not rich. Doctors are a closed professional guild and <b>prosperous</b>, but even in the American system it's a rare doctor who, in a narrow span of peak earning years, gets their takehome income over half a million a year. Real estate developers do much better than that. (Shorter -- no one becomes a doctor to optimize their income. They might do it to optimize their combination of income, social standing, and risk.)<br /><br />I don't think mathematics is bourgeois; the bourgeois aren't big on quantified analysis, either. They're doing exactly what the upper class are doing with a different set of virtues and fewer individual resources. (Possibly sumarizable as "MINE!" vs "Ours".) So far as I can tell, real -- meaning there's a social mechanism attached to an attempt to make the whole thing self-sustaining -- applications of quantified analysis are rare and transitory. Math is very nearly inherently lower class, something which people with no or limited social standing are consigned to, rather like the rest of the necessary technical work. (Why do you think "calculator", when that was a job title, was a female job?)<br /><br />I think you're going to look long and hard for a medical practice older than fifty years or extending into the third generation; it happens, but it's surprising. There are Century Farms (one family for a hundred+ years) all over Ontario.<br /><br />I suspect that running a practice really is harder than farming, for one, and a very shallow local maximum for the status+income peak associated with the surviving traditional professions. (Teachers and military and the Church aren't, anymore, in the sense that lawyers and doctors might be hanging on to.)Graydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09839374676813519438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-10437604744311240502014-10-14T11:16:36.970-07:002014-10-14T11:16:36.970-07:00No-one's ever made their peace with calculus. ...No-one's ever made their peace with calculus. As my teachers used to say, calculus isn't hard, but it makes you learn your algebra: no more skating your math homework!<br /><br />That said, I think it's incredibly dangerous to valorise mathematics as a bourgeois establishment. <br /><br />First, it's historically inaccurate and takes you right back to the "German ideology," where <i>Weltburgertum</i>, Protestantism and modernism are all packed together into a black box marked "capitalism" that produces all the virtue in the world. That's a warning for you Marxists, out there, to keep your head up in the ideological corners where "modern thinking" and "the virtuous mean" are just waiting to check you into the boards.<br /><br />Second, it means no serious thinking about the role of the MD in modern North American society. Doctors are rich, and they are passing on their jobs with their estates, all on the pretext of a meritocracy established by their ability to pass freshman calculus and sophomore organic chemistry. (Even if "volunteering" is increasingly the real gatekeeper.)<br /><br />Running an estate, either for stable yield or to maximise resale value, is obviously different from the CEO negotiating a golden parachute contract on the promise of "turning around" some self-evidently doomed company; but a legal-dental-medical practice is as much or more of a a long term commitment than a 100 square mile patent in the Ohio countryErik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-8693321475593715682014-10-13T19:10:32.593-07:002014-10-13T19:10:32.593-07:00High modernity jobs aren't parallel to landed ...High modernity jobs aren't parallel to landed estates because you can't profit-maximize an estate; the land won't take it, and you know it and everyone working for you knows it. Productive land forces a certain amount of long-term perspective, because you're trying to maximize the value returned.<br /><br />Value's benefit over cost; if you're trying to maximize your profit, you're either trying to reduce your cost or reduce the delivered benefit. You're destroying value, and you want to make sure it's someone else's. A traditional landlord didn't want to bankrupt tenants, generally, but we still get clearances when the profitable model shifts.<br /><br />Surveying from horseback notwithstanding, I stand by an assertion that the upper classes never really made their peace with steam, and certainly not with calculus. Anything that involves shifting to a quantified model devalues the upper-class core skills of social connection and mediating outcomes through social signalling, so they're very much against quantified analysis.Graydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09839374676813519438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-41453785624446752352014-10-13T19:05:50.996-07:002014-10-13T19:05:50.996-07:00If you've got significant student loans and yo...If you've got significant student loans and you can't get a job on graduation, of course it's a problem. Given that the youth unemployment rate is about double the main one even at the best of times, and the possibility of guessing wrong -- do not graduate with a CS degree in 2001, for example -- it's increasingly an issue because the degree is supposed to result in a good job and it doesn't.Graydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09839374676813519438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-87105706166392273832014-10-13T01:56:18.391-07:002014-10-13T01:56:18.391-07:00A few disorganised thoughts on "elite educati...A few disorganised thoughts on "elite education and apprenticeship training" in the Algerian context... <br /><br />I don't really know for sure where the children of the guys at the very top (the generals) are sent for their educations. To France, I would assume. But below them, it's still possible to discern a few layers of subaltern elites without resorting to major research. There's always a demand for STE in Sonatrach and the other oil companies, and to a lesser extent in the Army; medicine gets you a career in the national health service, which is less lucrative but still fairly respectable. STEM subjects also make emigration more feasible. There are also a few institutions training specifically for the State's demands: military colleges, schools of administration, etc. For other university subjects, you might with some luck get a position as a teacher, or an imam, and thus once again get a State income, meager though it might be; a lawyer or an interpreter might even be hired by an actual company. Most graduates, though, seem to be thrown back upon their own devices, starting some low-capital small business or relying on their parents (or both), and often gaining little more from their education than a few extra years to consider their options. Hey, at least it's free...<br /><br />Back in the halcyon days right after the Revolution, education presented enormous opportunities for class mobility - almost as large as those which opened up to the ex-guerrillas who had fought it. The state had a vast demand for cadres, which could not be met from the small minority of literate citizens. That ground to a halt sometime around the 1980s, making the mechanisms of elite reproduction a little more conspicuous. One of the most important, as it turned out, was access to French. The language of state education was gradually shifted to Arabic, in response to strong demand from what was left of the traditional elites reinforced by nationalist ideology - but university-level STEM teaching, and most of the state bureaucracy, was left solidly in French. In theory, French is taught everywhere in the country. In practice, fluency in French is and always has been very unevenly distributed across the country, by class and above all by region, and without it you can't realistically aim much higher up the elite than teaching. The resulting resentment is often cited as an underlying cause of the civil war of the 1990s. Be that as it may, the traditional elite unambiguously gets the short end of the stick compared to the STEM folks, but neither of them are in charge - the veterans and their children are. I suppose their position too can be said to rest on apprenticeship, though of a very different sort...<br /><br />Now, Algeria's relative failure to achieve industrial development sounds like it should support your idea that industrial development drives STEM skills acquisition rather than the reverse. But, of course, back in the 1970s Algeria was building big state-owned factories like every other self-respective socialist state - then it spent most of the 1990s closing them. Why didn't that do the trick? Perhaps because - like the universities - they were being run primarily to keep their employees/students busy, rather than to make a profit.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-82577906131586850402014-10-08T21:04:33.806-07:002014-10-08T21:04:33.806-07:00I don't have statistics before me, but I can t...I don't have statistics before me, but I can tell you that it has been a sufficiently serious problem as to provoke three successive tightenings of loan repayment provisions, in 1995, 2000 and 2008, culminating in the current arrangement under which student loans cannot go into bankruptcy until seven years after ceasing to be interest-free, and then falling on highly motivated debt collectors. (The common wisdom is that while the federal government is ultimately responsible for collecting delinquent loans now and before 1995, it was more liberal in the halcyon days of 1964--95 than today.)Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-90008978252623380172014-10-08T02:17:31.203-07:002014-10-08T02:17:31.203-07:00Did people actually declare bankruptcy on student ...Did people actually declare bankruptcy on student loans in any numbers? A few people did in the UK in the early 2000s in a spirit of woohoo, quick fix but that was literally about five people.Alexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17153530634675543954noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-38378632299701912662014-10-07T12:23:16.167-07:002014-10-07T12:23:16.167-07:00STEM is not always the most useful of acronyms. Wi...STEM is not always the most useful of acronyms. Within the larger field, I know a life sciences PhD, an electrical engineering BA.Sc., and any number of two-year IT certificate holders still working with my employer for lack of jobs in their subfields. <br /><br />So stop here, and hack off the last letter: "M" is for medicine. Doctors probably have the most secure and largest income that you can get outside of finance, where the path to employment is obscure, and probably for good reason. We know why this is the case. Apart from a broad social consensus that doctors should be well-paid, we know that entry into the field is strictly controlled, specifically to maintain incomes. <br /><br />How are the ramparts manned? Above all, by gatekeeping undergraduate courses. The powerful one-two punches of calculus and second-year biochemistry keep the unserious, the dumb, and the immature out of medical school. These are good barriers --but they also increase university seats, hence, in the Canadian model, anyway, funding. <br /><br />Second, there is "volunteering," an additional requirement on one's medical school application that has held for at least a generation. Again, one may infer social signalling here. Apart from what being able to volunteer says about one's background, how one goes about doing it sends a powerful signal about the kind of advice and support an applicant gets in the family setting, hence the kind of family (medical) the applicant is likely to have.<br /><br />But what happens when this breaks down? Suppose additional criteria were being ladled on the applicant: to be "nice," to have "good people skills." These are things that you want in a doctor, of course, though probably not at the expense of brains. The question is the background that produces "niceness." Coleridge's imagined clerisy has room for both the "nice" and the smart. The former he saw, long ago, as polished children of privilege, brought up to be polite, and self-assured enough to carry it off. The latter, of course, would be your lower-class strivers, gentled by their contact with their privileged peers at Oxbridge, and imparting some intellectual drive as their share. <br /><br />To cut things short, I'll end with a question. What if the "good jobs" of high modernity are becoming like the landed estates of the past? New kinds of social signalling are required. I'm getting the feeling from talk of rents in the financial sector and "startup culture" that they exist, and if they are uncertain, status anxiety is no new thing. There's a reason that old regime landed society needed all those property right lawyers!Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-6285134437489475372014-10-07T11:30:17.145-07:002014-10-07T11:30:17.145-07:00So if I'm going to summarise these coffee-fuel...So if I'm going to summarise these coffee-fueled ramblings, it is terms of that transition from grass to oil, from an economy in which wealth is rooted in land and its productivity to one in which wealth is something of a moving target. Land-as-real-estate remains a key form of wealth but one no longer usually backstopped by its value as farmland. Also, surveying isn't hard any more. Our maps are ubiquitous and perfect. Even our agricultural science is as good as it once thought it was. "He's worth 10,000 a year" can still reasonably be said in terms of a big trust fund, but it's all so evanescent. People lie about that kind of stuff. And a job at Google? How long can that last/ Unless there is some way that a job at Google isn't like a regular job...<br /><br />Now I want to come back to our longstanding STEM crisis, to the skilled labour shortage that has supposedly been imminent since the 1941. Brett Holman, over at Airminded, is very interested in "air panics," and I've argued there that fear is a tricky emotion. We may see it as extrinsic (you think you're seeing "mystery aeroplanes," but you're actually reacting to the German spring offensive), or as intrinsic --a projection of what we want to see on the dark skies. But why would we want to see scary things? Well, why do we go to see horror movies? Because fear can be thrilling.<br /><br />This is why I hesitate to take something like the Sputnik panic as an extrinsic stimulus for a fear of the future that, in turn, provokes policy responses. It seems at least equally useful to see Sputnik as triggering a more orgiastic fear, a sense that, "I knew this was going to happen, and now we have to do something about it!" The Space Race was something that, in general, America wanted to do. It was just waiting for it to become necessary. <br /><br />So, space race, yes. But also the huge burst of STEM educational funding? This is why, although I've probably buried the point past all finding, that I actually find the preceding Fedden Report-driven "small drawing office" crisis of 1943--46 so illuminating. In retrospect, we can see that the demand-side driven expansion of the aerospace engineering sector of World War Ii was incredibly successful. Mock the Boeing School all you like: its graduates got us to the Moon. <br /><br />So what is wrong with arguing that if we need to go to the Moon, the solution is to throw enough money at Martin to give it the means to design and build moon rockets, even if one of those costs is going to be training new engineers?<br /><br />The answer, it seems to me, is that we've gone all-in for a "supply side" model of technical education. The state and the big universities have combined to produce all the STEM workers that our perfect, dreamed of, post-Singularity techno-utopia could have needed in order to bring it about. That is, as it turns out, a lot of STEM workers! It is hardly surprising that, up to the moment in which the techno-utopia arrives, industry is unsatisfied with its actual supply, and instead keeps on asking for more. It's a free input! That the implication is that we are depressing wages in the STEM sector seems lost on...<br /><br />Well, lost on who?Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-63102441016848479262014-10-07T11:17:55.286-07:002014-10-07T11:17:55.286-07:00The idea that universities are about class mobilit...The idea that universities are about class mobility is an old one. Coleridge talked about it as taming mobility. Bright, poor kids were directed through the universities into his "clerisy," a larger community, centred on, but not limited to the clergy of the Established Church and reaching out to include the Prime Minister (notoriously an Oxford graduate). Something something Habermas public sphere twisted through a conservative lens.Pierre Bourdieu built up a massive theoretical apparatus in which the universities "reproduce class." Having lost the anchor of the Established Church, we want to talk instead about everything from manners to aesthetics in the interest of showing how the children of the last generation of elites, combined with a small group of lower-class strivers are turned into elite university graduates with a lock on all the Good Jobs. Bourdieu's provocative and Parisian language has had less play in the English-speaking world than the more scientific-sounding "signalling," in which a university degree "signals" your suitability for a Good Job in such a way that social contexts are as or more important than the actual training. In jumping from the 1820s to the 2010s, as I just facilely did, I highlight by omission the crucial change. This isn't going to work when university graduation rates go up from 3% of the population to 31%! Unless not all universities are alike; which is certainly true for the United States, but much more problematic in Canada, where the "elite" universities tend to have the highest enrollments. Meanwhile, student loans remove one of the most obvious things that "signalling" might signal, the parental income. That said, there might be proxies for parental income that show up on a university transcript. (My nephews are quite vehement that "volunteering" serves. I'll come back to this, and hope that my brother doesn't yell at me.) <br /><br />Now, second, there is the content of the degree --the educational training. I've been slightly cynical about this ever since the Lieutenant-Governor's Award for Academic Excellence in the Field of Excellence was won at my graduation by a Tibetan Studies major who had taken all her Majors courses from a single instructor for the fairly obvious reason that....<br /><br />Again, let's start way back when. A young Englishman might choose:<br />i) the two universities of England, ostensibly founded to provide educated churchmen, ostensibly and in the rosy light of the stained glass windows, curates for the pastoral care of England, and practically, canon lawyers to defend the endowments of the Church.<br />ii) The Inns of Court, there to train for the bar, and here with the assumption that the majority of graduates will not go on to practice law, as there is not the demand, but with the ancillary assumption that the landed gentry benefit from knowing property law.<br />iii) An apprenticeship suited to their parents' station ranging from a "premium apprenticeship" in banking to carrying buckets of clay for a brickmaker. <br />iv) The Army/Navy. Now, here, as I will, I'm going to "ride the land." It may seem as though being a cavalryman has no knowledge component, much less a career-building one, but in fact, being able to do reconnaissance usefully means measuring distances and filling in a map of the campaigning space. You're building on your trivium training in geometry to become at least as good a surveyor as anyone else working in the mid-1700s. Land speculation ahoy! Well-buried here is a criticism of Graydon's claim that the ruling class didn't use to be technocrats. On the contrary! The issue is that the issues relevant to being a technocrat have changed from the agricultural to the industrial. <br />Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-26284458878359859532014-10-06T19:00:08.021-07:002014-10-06T19:00:08.021-07:00Universities function as a class laundry post-War ...Universities function as a class laundry post-War until about 1985 or so, when someone decides that there's been quite enough of that.<br /><br />Before that, we get a war (an obvious, looming, long-term war that brought with it fundamental change in how the economy's conducted) and a desperate need to transfer technical skills into the managerial classes. (they never did make it into the upper classes.)<br /><br />After that, we get the Y2K tech boom, the recognition that technical skills can get paid more than managerial ones, and a great deal of effort being expended to fix that.<br /><br />Rather like you can look at the Industrial Revolution as a failed revolution -- it didn't transfer power from the landholding classes very well, it forced them to acknowledge another form but didn't dislodge them -- you can look at the computer revolution as a failed revolution, where the novel forms of social organization obviously possible and desirable due to ubiquitous communications are strangled by the tightly scripted IVR back into plain old rent extraction.<br /><br />There really isn't much to that century-long hop between rent for land and rent for access to the financial system, without which you can't do anything. The student loan thing is using debt as a means of preventing the class laundry from functioning without ever actually saying that's what's going on.<br /><br />(Much like Apple, Google, etc. getting caught wage-fixing doesn't have significant consequences.)<br /><br />Sputnik is just the rentier class being terrified someone's going to drop A-bombs on their heads; it goes away right quick as soon as they stop being terrified.Graydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09839374676813519438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-17323672356482015802014-10-06T09:48:13.090-07:002014-10-06T09:48:13.090-07:00It would be. Now, I'm not very well placed to ...It would be. Now, I'm not very well placed to observe this moving into the Third World. My lived experience is as an Westerner, and first as an pedagogical object inscribed with the "Sputnik crisis; second as a manager dealing with a labour force thoroughly enmeshed in the consequences of this process, which have only become really pressing since the end of student-loan discharge through bankruptcy in Canada. If there's anything so thoroughly vampiric in the Maghreb, I'm not sure I have the heart to hear about it.<br /><br />In the Third World (and here I'm sorting through stereotypical images of Nkrumah building steel mills and university students rioting) I have the idea that STEM education drives "development." I think that the implications of my hypothesis is that we've got the causality backwards, that industrial development drives STEM skills acquisition. As a historian, my inclination is to go backwards, to look at the tension between actual elite education and apprenticeship training and understand how there came to be a tension in the first place. <br /><br />The experience here is surely generalisable. Our, or at least my point of entry (it will certainly be different for France and Germany) is the competition between the Classics and Natural Philosophy Tripos, but it seems clear enough that there are very close parallels in China, complicated by the emergence of Han identity. The Chinese case seems particularly toxic in that the idea of a "Han Chinese" seems more dangerous than self-actualising right now, and because at the condescending distance of a century it seems less certain that the traditional Chinese education was so deleterious in the first place. <br /><br />I feel much less comfortable about talking about tensions between traditional education and technical in the Islamic world. (Or India. God, India.) In fact, just typing that phrase invites dissection of the notion of a unitary or even binary "Islamic world."<br /><br />That said, I'm beginning to think that the Sputnik crisis requires a closer examination. I've also thrown out the possibility that "something" was going on in English schools during the Long Depression that might have some relevance here.<br />Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-14326200600963038902014-10-06T07:28:42.371-07:002014-10-06T07:28:42.371-07:00Thanks for this post. Lots of interesting data, b...Thanks for this post. Lots of interesting data, but it does leave me wondering about the motivations of all those involved in the push for, as you almost put it, "supply-side STEM educational infrastructure". It would be interesting to see the next chapters, as the idea gets extended from STEM to university education in general, and from a few Western countries to large segments of the globe, mediated by a curious nexus of socialism and national liberation movements. Come to think of it, could the first moves in this direction - in a rather different context, admittedly - have come from the USSR rather than from England?Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com