Jerry Pournelle on Education

I'm a great fan of Jerry's blog, especially his views on how America is sliding from being a republic to an empire, and the lively exchanges and interesting links in his Current Mail. But he also hits some big nails squarely on the head in a recent mini-essay ("The Education Problem: Preliminary Analysis") on what's wrong in America's education system. Here's the beginning:

Letters in another conference stimulated me to write a mini-essay on education. It doesn't deserve to be called a real essay because this was essentially first draft, poured out in one sitting (as some of my old InfoWorld columns did back in the days of weekly deadlines).

Clearly what must happen is a recognition that brains matter, but so do other things; and that different people have different needs. That sounds as trivial as Aristotle's observation that injustice consists of treating equal things differently and different things equally, but it does not seem to have penetrated to the decision makers. Probably because carried to its conclusion it looks racist.

It is not only well known, but intuitively obvious that 'training of skills' and 'education' form a spectrum, and the higher the IQ the more boring skill training becomes, while the lower the IQ the more useless education becomes. I define 'education' as being taught how to learn; skill training as being taught a specific skill. Education benefits from some skill sets, like knowing the addition and multiplication tables which are best taught by rote; education then takes over in understanding what these rote memorized identities like 6 times 7 is 42 actually imply.

But the more abstract the reasoning, the more difficult it becomes for the lower IQ people. This may be deplorable, but it seems to be the way the Universe works, whether by Design, or random evolution, or the whim of Ghu, and this seems to be a confirmable hypothesis. The lower the IQ the more need for skill training.

Now this is all obvious at the ends of the spectrum. No one would send an IQ 85 teenager to an actual college for real education. Political correctness might insist that the manual trades or home economics school to which we send this lad or lassie be named a "college", but no one in his right mind would dream of making it a place for abstract education in the principles of physics, or even teaching algebra there. What IQ 85 needs is intensive drill in certain employable skills. Given that a useful citizen can emerge. Teaching such a person Latin and Greek wouldn't be much use nor would any other kind of education in abstract principles.

At the other end, you don't take an IQ 180 and send him (or her, but at that extreme it's more likely to be him, an unpalatable truth but a quite confirmable hypothesis) to a labor camp -- at least we don't generally approve of regimes that do that. One may recall that one part of The Triumph Of The Will was seeing a brigade of workers doing a manual of arms with a shovel, while the voiceover promised that one day both Classes and Masses would enjoy the benefits of such manual training. Pol Pot also comes to mind.

IQ 180 types don't skill training they need education. Given decent education they can in fact learn most of the things that the lower IQ people learn through skill training. The story of the absent minded professor is ubiquitous, but my observation has been that most smart people can learn to be plumbers and carpenters at need, and rather quickly at that. It was harder to learn to be a lumberjack before chain saws, but even that profession is no longer closed to the physically able smart types, and some even engage in such things as a hobby. Smart people decently educated can, at need, learn to do almost anything; another example of the fundamental unfairness of the universe.

Make sure to read the rest.