Category: education

Jane Jacobs on College

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Jane Jacobs, the urban and economic theorist, wrote:

Only in stagnant economies does work stay docilely within given categories. And wherever it is forced to stay within prearranged categories — whether by zoning, by economic planning, or by guilds, associations or unions — the process of adding new work to old can occur little if at all.

In the case of college, the “work” is post-high-school education. College students are not forced to join a union but the need for credentials forces them to attend college, where, as Jacobs correctly predicts, a narrow range of subjects is taught in a narrow range of ways. Take my department (psychology at UC Berkeley). As one of my students, a psychology major, asked, why isn’t there a course about relationships? That’s what’s really important, he said. Yes, why not? There has never been such a course at Berkeley nor, to my knowledge, at any other elite university. What a curious omission. And why do practically all classes involve lectures, reading assignments, and tests? Aren’t there a thousand ways to teach and learn? I think Jacobs has the answer: Work has been forced to stay within prearranged categories — categories that seem increasingly outdated. The pattern of chapters in almost all introductory psychology textbooks (which cost about $100) derives from the 1950s!

An earlier post by me about college. Other people’s comments. Jane Jacobs on the food industry and scientific method.

The Trouble With College

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Yesterday I heard something — a very ordinary bit of info — that neatly summed up the trouble with college. Someone told me about a friend of hers who was a graduate student in English at Berkeley. Her friend taught a small class of freshman and sophomores. He was enthusiastic about what he was teaching, but his students were not. He couldn’t make them enthusiastic, even a little. They just sat there. When I started teaching at Berkeley, I had a similar experience. My first class was introductory psychology. Over the first few months, I came to see that my students, almost all of them, had different interests than me. I thought X and Y were fascinating; they didn’t.

No one is at fault here, of course. It’s perfectly okay that the grad student enthused about something that leaves his students cold. It is perfectly okay that I liked Research X and Y but Research X and Y bored my students. Nothing wrong with any of this — in fact, we need diversity of thought and knowledge, which grows from diversity of interests. We need diversity of thought and knowledge because we have many different problems to solve.

At fault is a system (Berkeley and similar colleges) that fails to value that diversity. (In fact, it doesn’t even notice the diversity, except in a one-dimensional way: how much students resemble their professor.) Even worse, the system tries to reduce diversity of thought because it tries to make students think like their professors. Why should the 20 (or 800) students in one class be forced to learn the same material? The students vary greatly. Forcing all of them to learn the exactly same stuff is like forcing all of them to wear exactly the same clothes. It can be done, especially if rewards and punishments (i.e., grades) are used, but it’s unwise. Just as feeding children a poor diet stunts physical growth, forcing college students to imitate their professors, instead of letting them (or even better, helping them) grow in all directions, stunts intellectual growth.

I wrote about these issues here and gave a related talk about human evolution. Aaron Swartz and I have ideas about a better way, and how to get there, which I will blog about. I will tell a 10-minute story about this as part of the Porchlight story-telling series on March 26 (Monday), 8:00 pm, Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market Street, San Francisco ($12 admission).

Bruce Springsteen on Education

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In an interview, Bruce Springsteen said:

I wasn’t quite suited for the educational system. One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive — very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure [get lost].

Yes! That’s what I’m saying here, here, and here. The quote is from David Shenk’s great new blog about talent and how to nurture it.

How Important is IQ?

Seth Roberts12 Comments

I teach at UC Berkeley. A few years ago I had an eye-opening experience about college teaching and evaluation. I was teaching an undergraduate seminar on depression. For the term project, I allowed/required students to do anything they wanted related to depression, so long as it was off campus and not library research. One student chose to give a talk to a high school class about depression. This would be unremarkable except that she had severe stage fright. The thought of speaking in front of any group terrified her. Every step of planning and doing the talk was very hard. But she managed to do it. In her term-project paper she wrote, “I learned that if I really wanted to, I could conquer my fear, and do what I needed to do” — among the most stirring words I have ever read.

Her work until then — class participation, writing assignments — had put her in the bottom half of the class. Yet her term project showed her to be resourceful (using the term project assignment in a useful way) and courageous (making herself do something that scared her). She chose the assignment that revealed these qualities. Ved Mehta, the writer, who is blind, spent his early years almost entirely within a small school compound. One day he was taken to the beach. He was astonished how freely he could run around. “The school compound . . . suddenly shrank in my mind, like a woollen sock . . . which became so small after [the housekeeper] washed it that I could scarcely get my hand in it,” he wrote in Vedi. As I read my student’s description of what she had done, I saw how narrow and restricted my usual assignments and my usual way of evaluating students had been.

I am sorry that Charles Murray, Bell Curve coauthor, has apparently never had a similar experience. In an op-ed (“Aztecs vs Greeks”) in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, alas, he made clear his belief that persons with a high IQ are more important economically and culturally than persons with a lower IQ. “We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted,” he wrote — “gifted” meaning “high IQ.” He used the phrase the gifted. The gifted? If there are thirty or fifty or a thousand different useful sets of abilities, to single out one of them — the one that produces a high score on an IQ test — makes no sense. It’s like referring to the sentence. That makes no sense. There are many useful sentences. We need all of them.

Persons with a high IQ do better at certain jobs, no doubt; but Murray fails to realize that such jobs are a tiny fraction of our economy and that discrimination against any group — failure to help any group develop their skills — is economically damaging because it reduces economic diversity (Jane Jacobs’ point). Murray thinks we should treat high-IQ kids better. He fails to see that it is not people with high IQs who are under-served by the present system; it is everyone else — everyone with other gifts. Plenty of jobs demand resourcefulness and courage, for example, qualities that are probably uncorrelated with IQ, as my student emphasized to me. Both resourcefulness and courage are required to start a new business, which is the most economically important job of all.

Andrew Gelman’s reaction to similar ideas. More about Charles Murray, IQ, and education. A paper of mine about encouraging diversity in learning.

Charles Murray vs. Charles Murray

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The Bell Curve (1994) by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which argued that IQ is destiny, was the most IQ-glorifying book since . . . well, ever. Now Mr. Murray has taken a big step away from his position in that book, yet he continues to glorify IQ.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mr. Murray wrote an op-ed piece (“What’s wrong with vocational school?”) with which I mostly agree. His main point is that for most students, college is a waste of time. As a college teacher (at Berkeley), I have seen that all too clearly. Mr. Murray has an unfortunate way of stating his position. “A four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.” I’d put it differently: A four-year college education teaches analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the interest of most people. I am sure that if my students or anyone’s students were more interested in the material, they would learn it better. That most college students are not interested in the same things as most college professors is a good thing, economically speaking. A healthy economy is a diverse economy; a diverse economy requires a wide range of skills and knowledge, much wider than the narrow skills and knowledge possessed and taught by college teachers. But it is a bad thing for the students and teachers, who are trapped. They have to be there. I feel worse for the students, of course — they are paying to be there.

It isn’t complicated: IQ tests were designed to predict school performance. They do. People with higher IQs do better in school. To believe in the value of IQ is to believe in the school system it reflects. To glorify one is to glorify the other. Now Mr. Murray has taken a step away from one (the school system) but not the other (IQ). Well, nobody’s perfect.

Were I grading The Bell Curve, I would give it a B. The sad truth is that its basic conclusion, that a high IQ is really helpful, is entirely correct. A better book would have replaced the wacky genetic chapter with an attempt to understand why IQ matters so much. In a world where we place less weight on successful completion of college — the world that Murray now advocates — IQ will matter less.

In The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs pointed to the stultifying effects of discrimination. “Macho cultures typically have pitiful, weak economies,” she wrote. “Half their population, doing economically important types of work, such as cooking and food processing . . . are excluded from taking initiatives to develop all that work [e.g., open a restaurant] — and nobody else does it, either.” IQ discrimination is also stultifying. If our society did a better job of helping students who are not good at college — helping them find jobs where their abilities shine, instead of wasting four precious years of their lives — the entire economy would benefit.