Re-constructing our System of Higher Education - updated

This is the Age of the Internet. There is no reason for people to shoulder huge debts in order to be trained in group-think in our universities when there is a world of useful, intellectually rigorous and interesting information available. The world view in many of our elite universities is so monolithic that a lot of nonsense goes without serious challenge.

It's not that there is a complete lack of relatively moderate professors in higher education. There are even a few conservatives. It's that "progressives" of the type who were burning down university buildings in the late 1960s are still dominant in university leadership. University policies and curricula reflect this. The truly radical progressives are much more conspicuous and vocal than moderates and much more likely to inject their politics into their teaching. They also reinforce each other.

I like this satire which takes academic group-think to a logical conclusion. It's from the Clinton-era "vacation from history" when academics were really emotional about disdain for western civilization. Their focus may evolve some over time, but there seems to be a lot of herd-like movement among liberal arts professors as they react to topics of the day.

Some educational values we have lost

The hard sciences are a partial exception to self-reinforcing group-think in academia, but "Post-Normal Science" is making inroads even there. Glance through the comment threads on the two links above for a few examples. Hard sciences are one field where universities still offer important advantages in education. But vigilance even in the hard sciences is necessary to keep ideology from putting a damper on unpopular areas of scientific enquiry, and to keep it from dumbing down higher education.

If you are contemplating a university education for yourself or your child, here are seven questions to ask the candidate universities first. You could probably think of a few more. Prager remembers a time, when he was in high school and earlier, when most people were not college-educated but were more curious about the world, continuing their self-education into adulthood.

For example, as the percentage of college-educated adults increased, the number of serious political journals decreased (even before the internet age). Not long ago Prager was interviewing the editor of the liberal (not radical) political journal "The New Republic". which Prager read even when in high school. He suggested to the editor that the lack of growth in subscriptions to this journal (despite the demise of similar journals, greater population and a rising number of college graduates who should be more attuned to serious political thought) was an indictment against our system of higher education. The editor had never considered this idea before. (Prager also recognized the power of television in decreasing interest in serious intellectual pursuits, and also in the simplification and dumbing-down of content in our weekly news magazines).

Group-think in higher education filters down to earlier grade levels, which now feature a lot of bored students. While substitute teaching, I have been impressed by the boring nature of textbooks, compared to when I was in school. The most challenging vocabulary seems to be in math textbooks, rather than in English books.

Another worrisome aspect of today's academia is the lack of emphasis on logic. They say that many college graduates cannot now follow the arguments in a newspaper editorial. Our attention spans are getting shorter. People who retain the attention span to read actual books are still the people who tend to become leaders in our society. This is an area which deserves attention.

Some steps we could take to lower costs and improved quality of education

We can do better. Many reading books for the lowest grade levels are delightful now. This reflect the current concern with teaching kids to read early. We can make similar improvements for older children. As kids get older, the typical ideologically-oriented textbooks suffer in comparison with what they can access on the Web. Learning through the web can either be much worse, though more interesting, than their schoolwork or both better and more interesting than their schoolwork.

We need to address issues involving technology-enhanced vs. traditional education carefully. Exposure to TV, computers, etc. at the youngest ages may hamper childrens' future ability to concentrate, to be at ease in nature and to learn from real-life experiences. Psychiatrists are now reporting a dramatic new malady: teens and young adults who are chronically bored with real life - who are ill at ease without constant input from their machines.

But there's no good reason I can think of to cut off school models which get much better results than the most sclerotic, dangerous public schools.

We need to promote lower-cost alternative resources for people who want an old-fashioned, classically liberal education. This is the kind of education which is now called "conservative". More importantly in terms of our country's financial mess, at a time when just about everyone is expected to get some higher education, various forms of self-education which recognize the differing learning styles and aptitudes of individuals become more important.

At the most extreme end of the spectrum of inefficient college instruction, we could modify the practice of keeping people with serious learning difficulties - people who have little hope of success in regular college classes - in college far longer than the typical college student. Currently, many such students stay in special college classes year after year primarily as a way of supporting themselves through scholarships. More rational programs could encourage earlier entry into the workforce for many of these people.

How about credentials similar to a CPA instead of a university degree? It would make a lot of sense in many fields. How about resources to help people use more effectively the resources of public libraries? I even like the idea of emphasizing learning for the joy of learning. I am not confident that giving Washington bureaucrats more power to direct and to choose between educational programs is going to help much to increase the quality or decrease the costs of our educational system. Some of the programs offered on the internet look better to me than the government-supported alternatives, at least for older children, teens and adults. Maybe an Army of Davids approach can help at this time in history.