Current read: Woke Racism by John McWhorter

I'm currently reading Woke Racism by John McWhorter. It's a critique of "wokeness", the latest name for political correctness. I won't blog the whole book because much of it is unsurprising to me. Gratifying to read, well-stated, but not new or surprising.

But I have to talk about pages 104-105. McWhorter is discussing college admissions and argues that there's nothing wrong with attending a less selective school. One intriguing thing he delves into is the difference between a general education course at Columbia (where he teaches) and some less selective school. At Columbia every student is assigned to read all 300 pages of Plato's Republic. At a less selective school students might read ~50 pages of carefully curated excerpts. McWhorter notes that most people (aside from diligent philosophy majors) will not recall much of the Republic beyond the Allegory of the Cave, so what's the harm in just reading that excerpt and really delving into it? They'll still be prepared for thoughtful examination of the world around them.

There's much that one could say in defense of reading the entire book. (Disclosure: I read the whole thing nearly 20 years ago, but I don't remember much except the part about the cave.) And obviously philosophy majors should read the whole thing, as well as more theory-oriented political science majors. Even those who aren't philosophy majors might benefit from reading the whole thing and discussing other parts besides the cave. There are always good reasons to read all sorts of things. And surely students at other schools could read the whole book, if the reading assignment were spread out over a couple weeks and the discussion were more gradual.

But we shouldn't get too hung up on the particulars of this one text. McWhorter's main point is that at Columbia the courses will go into more depth than an analogous course elsewhere, because the students are prepared for it.

But one might turn it around: Why does Columbia make everyone read the whole thing? Why do they aim their program at the level of kids who were privileged to get the sort of k-12 education that would prepare them for a very intense general education program? Why shouldn't Columbia admit students with great potential but less preparation and Meet Them Where They Are At, to use a common phrase in education? Do you really want to deny a kid with great potential the chance to study at a great place just because they weren't prepared for a certain pace of assignments? Why not take them and groom them and lift them up?

The short answer is that you can't do that AND simultaneously challenge the other kids at the level that they're ready for. At least not in the same class. And as soon as you have different tracks like that we're back to all of the same dilemmas. It's not so different from trying to teach physics to a group in which some students are struggling with high school algebra and others have mastered differential equations.

But some people would push back and say that the kids who can handle long reading assignments or hard math problems or whatever don't need our attention. And I guess the question then is whose attention? Obviously the Columbia-ready kids won't be coming to me, so there's no need to deliberate over whether they need, deserve, or get my attention. But the more fundamental dilemma is about how to handle different levels of preparation, and I know and work with people who would say that in every case we should prioritize the least-prepared. From a religious perspective, well, Jesus said that we need to serve the least of His people. 

The question, though, is whether the least prepared are actually well-served by being pushed along paths that aren't working for them and can't really be made to work for them via any means plausibly available to me. There's also the Parable of the Talents to consider. Should the well-prepared twiddle their thumbs or develop their talents?

This is very much a Rohrschach test.

Cult of Smart, Chapters 7 and 8

 Chapter 7 explores educational discourse in light of Rawls' concept of the "Veil of Ignorance." Philosopher John Rawls argued that a just society is the sort that people would agree to live in if they viewed it from behind a "veil of ignorance", i.e. they had no idea what sort of station they'd occupy, or what sorts of abilities or limitations they'd have. People would want to live in a society where they know that if they are disabled they'll be cared for, if they're whatever race they won't be discriminated against, and if they're talented they'll get some benefit from doing what they do well (even while contributing to the care for the disabled, etc.). Rawls has been influential on the left, and Freddie's key point is that leftists have accepted an ethical philosophy built around the notion that some people might have different abilities.

Also, while Freddie makes his argument in a way that should appeal to people with many different perspectives, he doesn't hide the fact that he himself is very, very left-wing. And one staple of socialist thought is "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." It's not so different from the Parable of the Talents, in which Jesus says that those who have more should do more for all. Again, the key point is that it is perfectly possible to conceive of a charitable, egalitarian, and compassionate ethos that allows for differences in talent.

I like this quote on page 161:

Many people seem to believe that an assessment of academic potential necessarily involves an assessment of someone's overall human worth, despite the fact that the later does not at all follow from the former.

Indeed. Being bad at something can be a fact that does not diminish one's moral worth. I might be incapable of carrying a tune but that doesn't mean a musician needs to think less of me as a human. A musician might be terrible at physics but that doesn't mean I should think less of them.

Page 163:

When we look at a school system that we say is flawed, thanks to the impossible task that we've handed it, we are eeing our basic failure to really grapple with the reality of unequal human potential.

To be fair, Freddie is giving short shrift to the other inequalities that plague some school systems. If Chet McRitchie doesn't get the same high test scores as Rich Nobleford, the McRitchie parents might complain to the principal of their suburban high school, and the principal might need to take some headache medicine, but the higher level authorities are unlikely to strip away funding from the school. OTOH, if kids in an inner-city school get bad test scores (because of course they do), we know that authorities will continue to use that school as a canvas for their latest educational fad.

But, again, the fact that the task is hindered by nurture as much as nature does not make it any less impossible. What can a teacher do in the face of parents and neighborhoods and injustice and everything else that affects the kids in all the days and hours that they aren't in school?

Chapter 8 deals with Freddie's recommendations. I don't want to enumerate and address all of them. I just want to look at a few that interest me, because I blog books for fun, not for work.

Page 169, regarding whether it's a good idea to provide preschool and daycare and after school programs and other things for kids whose parents have to work and don't have good access to safe, enriching environments outside of school:

To constantly harp on the supposed academic advantages that these programs confer is to leave them vulnerable: they can then only be defended so long as those academic advantages actually assert themselves. As I've said, the research record for these programs is mixed at best, running to poor. If we make test scores and related indicators our primary argument, then we preemptively disarm ourselves in this fight.

Indeed. What if the "only" effect of afterschool programs or pre-K or whatever is that kids have a warm, safe, fun thing to do when their parents are working? What if the only effect of helping people is some human comfort but not an educational miracle? I actually see that as wholly consistent with my insistence that kids who do badly in physics shouldn't major in physics. What if the effect of them changing majors is that we don't solve a systemic issue but some people do spend 4 years actually learning something and experiencing the satisfaction of success? That doesn't guarantee a particular long-term outcome for them, but it won't hurt, and it will make 4 years of life genuinely good. Is that not good in and of itself?

Also, Freddie addresses and basically concurs with the argument made by Andrew Hacker in The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions. I like Freddie's version better because he makes it clear that he's totally fine with closing down some paths early on. He's considered all of the dark possibilities of our educational system and he accepts that some paths and tracks should be closed off early.

A few links: There must be some way out of here

I'm still trying to work up a post on Dewey, but Dewey is a heavy read and finishing up the academic year is absorbing all of my mental energy.  In the meantime, a few links on the general sense that something is wrong in the world.

1) From The American Conservative, Is The West Spiritually Impoverished?

2) Writer Jacob Siegel, whom I'd not encountered previously, takes up the issue of how hollow the modern left and right are.  Being an academic I of course like what he says about Evergreen State, but that's not all that I like. Something is hollow and the center cannot hold.

3) Michael Lind wrote this article last year on the realignments taking place in our political parties.  I must quibble with this part:

From the Reagan era until recently, the GOP’s economic policies have been formulated by libertarians, whose views are at odds with those of most Republican voters.

GOP economic policies were not always formulated by libertarians.  Libertarians (or facsimiles thereof) formulated GOP economic rhetoric.  There's a difference.

4) From The Hedgehog Review: I want to agree with this lament about the fall of general education, but then I get to this part:

In that first meeting, my colleagues and I from the School of Arts and Sciences quickly came to the same conclusion as my class. Our students shared less a curricular life than an extracurricular one. What bound them together was not their classroom experiences, their chemistry labs, or the books they read, but, rather, the clubs they led, the basketball games they worshipfully attended, and the parties for which they diligently planned.

I'm not much of a fan of NCAA Division 1 football and basketball, but I'm a huge fan of extracurricular activities, and I think that college sports other than D1 football and basketball are excellent for developing character and teamwork.  In fact, I think that half of what I got from my university was a culture of networking and extracurricular activities that has served me well in my career.

Also, the author makes a point about research universities eclipsing colleges as the crown jewels of US higher education:

To answer that question, we must go back to the late nineteenth century, when the research university eclipsed the college as the most important institution of higher learning in the United States. Throughout the 1880s and ’90s, as research universities such as the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Cornell grew in national and international prominence, their critics and advocates alike began to worry that a coherent and morally edifying body of knowledge was missing from American higher education.

While his point is factually correct, it's worth noting that the universities in Europe and other industrialized countries are even less undergraduate-focused than US institutions, and have even fewer (if any) general education requirements than US institutions.  If we've lost something, we've at least retained more than anyone else.

5) Also from The Hedgehog Review, a nice article on guilt in our modern secular world.  I like this part:

Notwithstanding all claims about our living in a post-Christian world devoid of censorious public morality, we in fact live in a world that carries around an enormous and growing burden of guilt, and yearns—sometimes even demands—to be free of it. About this, Bruckner could not have been more right. And that burden is always looking for an opportunity to discharge itself. Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate how many of the deeds of individual men and women can be traced back to the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves to be “right with the world.” One would be right to expect that such a powerful need, nearly as powerful as the merely physical ones, would continue to find ways to manifest itself, even if it had to do so in odd and perverse ways.

Much of what maddens me about the modern academy could probably be traced to modern secularists lacking traditional outlets for guilt.  Interestingly, a colleague recently accused me of posing as a saint when I invoked the Parable of the Talents to explain some of my views on academic work and duty.

I also like this bit, regarding people who posed as victims of the Holocaust or other tragic events:

What these authors have appropriated is suffering, and the identification they pursue is an identification not with certifiable heroes but with certifiable victims. It is a particular and peculiar kind of identity theft. How do we account for it? What motivates it? Why would comfortable and privileged people want to identify with victims? And why would their efforts appeal to a substantial reading public? 

Or, to pose the question even more generally, in a way that I think goes straight to the heart of our dilemma: How can one account for the rise of the extraordinary prestige of victims, as a category, in the contemporary world? 

I believe that the explanation can be traced back to the extraordinary weight of guilt in our time, the pervasive need to find innocence through moral absolution and somehow discharge one’s moral burden, and the fact that the conventional means of finding that absolution—or even of keeping the range of one’s responsibility for one’s sins within some kind of reasonable boundaries—are no longer generally available. Making a claim to the status of certified victim, or identifying with victims, however, offers itself as a substitute means by which the moral burden of sin can be shifted, and one’s innocence affirmed. Recognition of this substitution may operate with particular strength in certain individuals, such as De Wael and her fellow hoaxing memoirists. But the strangeness of the phenomenon suggests a larger shift of sensibility, which represents a change in the moral economy of sin. And almost none of it has occurred consciously. It is not something as simple as hypocrisy that we are seeing. Instead, it is a story of people working out their salvation in fear and trembling.

Yep.  But I would go farther and offer that offering oneself as a victim in need of sympathy also provides a service to those who are looking for an outlet for their own guilt.  One person shifts the burden of guilt and in the process provides another person with a means of discharging their own burden.  If we don't need to actually work to improve the material conditions of others, but only express the right sympathies and throw administrative budgets (which never come out of our own pockets) at the proper events and displays, then sins can be forgiven on the cheap.

So what's to be done?  Well, science offers no hope:

Where then does this analysis of our broken moral economy leave us? The progress of our scientific and technological knowledge in the West, and of the culture of mastery that has come along with it, has worked to displace the cultural centrality of Christianity and Judaism, the great historical religions of the West. But it has not been able to replace them. For all its achievements, modern science has left us with at least two overwhelmingly important, and seemingly insoluble, problems for the conduct of human life. First, modern science cannot instruct us in how to live, since it cannot provide us with the ordering ends according to which our human strivings should be oriented. In a word, it cannot tell us what we should live for, let alone what we should be willing to sacrifice for, or die for. 

And second, science cannot do anything to relieve the guilt weighing down our souls, a weight to which it has added appreciably, precisely by rendering us able to be in control of, and therefore accountable for, more and more elements in our lives—responsibility being the fertile seedbed of guilt. That growing weight seeks opportunities for release, seeks transactional outlets, but finds no obvious or straightforward ones in the secular dispensation. Instead, more often than not we are left to flail about, seeking some semblance of absolution in an incoherent post-Christian moral economy that has not entirely abandoned the concept of sin but lacks the transactional power of absolution or expiation without which no moral system can be bearable.

Science has done so much for us but we remain who and what we are and were.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

In which I quote the Gospels

In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus tells the story of people who are given bundles of money ("talents", from an old Greek word) by their master; some invest it and make more and give their master the profit, while others simply save it away and when their master returns they give back what they were given without increase.  The master is angry at the one who did nothing with what he was given, and is pleased at the ones who made much of what they were given.  This is not a parable about stock markets (Jesus wasn't a fan of the moneylenders) but rather a parable about the duty to use what you are given. But progressive education is based on the idea that the most important thing we can do is lower the bar to admit everyone, which essentially demands that the best students twiddle their thumbs for the benefit of their less-advantaged peers.  Their talents are not to be developed.

Now, that idea is not without defensible motivations, even if they are mistaken motivations.  The following section of the Gospel of Matthew is about those who serve the least of Christ's people; you are blessed when you help them, because by helping them you help Him.  It is believed among those who teach in non-elite institutions that we are doing what Christ commanded, but I do not believe that collecting tuition checks in furtherance of credential inflation serves the disadvantaged, and I do not believe that it dignifies the less intellectually gifted to water down a Bachelor's degree.  What is wrong with getting vocational training and then getting a productive job? I would rather dignify the work that they can do, and embrace the ethos that all productive work is noble, than hold up a particular credential as the most respectable path for everyone.  At the same time, I would rather empower those who have talent, and help them make the most of what they have.

Of course, there is nothing worse than hypocrisy, and I do put my actions where my words are.  I've invested quite a bit of time in helping students network for jobs, including students who are not necessarily from the most privileged backgrounds.  I have done a lot of resume critiques and spent a lot of time helping students prepare for interviews and career fairs.  Indeed, this week I will be helping somebody go over a presentation for a technical interview.  So I do act as I speak.  And I believe that if I can empower disadvantaged but talented students to get jobs, I can help them to help the communities from which they hail.  But this requires recognizing that human variability is a thing, and that we must develop those who have talents rather than expecting them to sit back while we focus on those who are least-prepared for what we have to offer.

As an aside, an interesting thing about the word "talent" is that the modern English usage (meaning "ability" or "aptitude") is derived from the Parable of the Talents.  In older language it referred to a unit of weight used in regard to money (i.e. the money that the Master gave in the parable).