[FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

Thu Jul 30 16:23:22 EDT 2020

Eric,

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it?  

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know! 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Hi, Eric, 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest.  

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.” 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with. 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com <mailto:merlelefkoff at gmail.com> > wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com <mailto:merlelefkoff at gmail.com> > wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com> > wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

All this was 54 years ago.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org <http://emergentdiplomacy.org> 

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mobile:  (303) 859-5609
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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org <http://emergentdiplomacy.org> 

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

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