Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Scott Adams and the Education Complexity Shift

Scott Adams, the comic strip writer behind Dilbert, recently had an editorial in the WSJ and a follow-up blog post about something he calls the Education Complexity Shift. You can read the blog post here.

Now, I think he's wrong on several counts,  but the most important is crystallized by this sentence:
But if you compare teaching history with, for example, teaching a kid how to compare complicated financial alternatives, I'd always choose the skill that has the most practical value. 
Education has become increasingly concerned with things of "practical value". Where to find meaning in life, how to lead a rich and full life, and the difference between right and wrong will never have this so-called practical value. But from what I've seen, our world doesn't suffer from too few people trying to compare complicated financial alternatives (thank you Lehman Brothers, AIG, and most recently the people in the GE tax division) but from too few people trying to do what is best for their country and for their fellow citizens. That is what happens when you let science and progress define the terms of the debate on the merits of a liberal arts education. (And yes, the name of this blog is no mistake.) Specifically, I'm thinking of the way that modern-day Republicans are more intent on making Democrats look bad than on helping our economy grow again, but I also think there's a sense of entitlement in this country that is very disturbing, perhaps best characterized by this example.

But I think Adams is also wrong on a wider level, and it's obvious when he tries to talk about why education used to be important two hundred years ago:
you needed to make school artificially complicated to stretch a student's mind. Once a student's mind was expanded, stressed, stretched and challenged, it became a powerful tool when released back into the relatively simple "real world."
Even back then, the world was by no means simple. Morality and spirituality (and even politics) are the most complicated subjects known to man, and nothing about that has changed in the last two hundred years. That is why a solid education was and remains irreplaceable. But it has also been my experience that the real world is what is simple and it is school that is complex. In the jobs I've had, true, I have had to use many complex software and hardware packages that the schools I attended never had the money to purchase or train me on. But once I learned them, usually in about six months, I was done. I had mastered the job. Like planning the most efficient trip by plane, there was little about those packages that a child couldn't learn. In school, on the other hand, every six months I was freshly presented with a new set of four or five potentially very different classes which were attempts to study different aspects of reality in all its gory detail, dealing with situations both practical and impractical, but absolutely covering a much wider and more complex array of phenomenon than I would ever encounter in my jobs.

Now, I would agree that often in a modern university teachers are more interested in doing research than in teaching and often students don't take advantage of the opportunities for self-improvement presented to them. But these flaws are only going to get worse if people focus only on practical benefits.