Your post today has me thinking of two things. On apprenticeship, Brad Delong often describes how people being trained as early scribes or medieval monastic librarians were first trained to mix the clay and prepare the ink and that the writing came later. To me, this feels like a corollary to your point on apprenticeship and not letting total novices handle expensive or dangerous machinery or do brain surgery. The novice mixes the clay and learns to achieve the perfect consistency for the journeyman or master to then make the mark. The initiate monk prays and prepares the ink for the senior brother who illuminates the page.
But the larger connection I made was with Annie Abrams book about advanced placement, Short Changed. She traces the history of AP, the Jeffersonian liberalism that underpinned its origins and growing mid-century influence. Today, AP mostly serves as a way for students to *avoid* learning any more about a subject. The STEM kid takes AP Language or AP World History because she doesn't want to devote any time or effort to those subjects in college. This is part of the systemic architecture that reduces the concept of learning. Concomitant with AP as learning avoidance, the standards by which the College Board judges AP tests, especially essays, have become narrower and more formulaic. Compliance with the rubric is paramount and any quality writing or critical thinking is of secondary importance, at best. It is exactly as you quote from Kalaitzidis, "Successful students understand the game and play it well." This is what we are teaching successful high school students that college is all about. Hoops. Getting out of learning. Finding ways to go through school and university as efficiently (and cheaply?) as possible.
But another component that Abrams brings up is that the rise of AP is in part a political and legislative phenomenon with many states requiring all high schools to offer AP courses and requiring their public universities to give course credit for APs if the students score average or above. She reminds us that AP is a private curriculum developed by a company and that it's actually quite rare for governments to compel citizens to use and pay for private services. That these laws are more common in conservative states is also telling. Perhaps, though, we are about to see states mandating the use of AI products, too? Calls for AI literacy abound.
Higher education let itself fall gently into being an alibi offered by liberal politicians about access to social mobility and the post-New Deal labor market where the basic terms of the deal between universities and politicians is that we'd accept that we were the answer to social mobility and labor opportunities via our credentials and in turn we'd get a lot of funding. But as wealth inequality grew, the professions got put under the thumb of financialized capitalism, and corporations lost any interest in maintaining a stable workforce, this meant that universities became entirely a scapegoat for this failing order and that universities were in it too deep to shift the blame.
The result is precisely that we shifted to becoming an obstacle--a "game" to be played in order to get the credential, rather than an experience whose actual content was worth taking seriously in pursuit of more nebulous lifelong insights. And the requirement of an AP is characteristic of the unholy fruit of credentialization, of accepting that we are responsible for all the shortcomings of the American political economy, that we and we alone are producing a "skills gap" that governments will mandate that we remedy. So yes, I fully expect the mandated use of AI for the same reasons--to continue the argument that teacher unions, tenure, stubbornness, etc. are somehow holding Americans back from the perfect fit between their skills and the needs of capitalism that would otherwise lead them into the land of milk and honey.
The issue of critical thinking is an interesting one. The issue is that genuine critical thinking that's new is exceptionally difficult. Academics are, as a whole, pretty good and thoughtful about what they do. The vast majority of those who imagine that they have some piercing insight that an entire field hasn't grasped are pretty well distilled by Keynes: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
So I think if you put students in a position to ostensibly challenge some professional orthodoxy, odds are that you'll get a mildly dressed up version of the phlogiston theory of fire. Now, there are some genuinely innovative thinkers, and most of them tend to be young (because they aren't intellectually bound by the constraints of professional orthodoxy). But those young thinkers go on to win Nobel Prizes and such. And for everyone one of them, there are a few thousand of the former type.
So academia has, probably correctly, rewarded those that can understand and get comfortable with orthodox tools. And for decades those orthodox tools have more or less matched what workplaces require. But now the issue is that AI is likely to soon outstrip people's ability to use those orthodox tools. And we'll need to figure out what people will productively do going forward that a machine can't do just as well. As Paul Krugman put it, even if generative AI amounts to souped-up autocorrect (and Krugman seems to believe that's what it is), a lot of highly-paid white collar work also amounts to souped-up autocorrect.
Is the problem of "absurd luxuriousness and improvidence" you reference a problem created by neoliberalism, or is part of the issue that (absent a post-scarcity society, as you say) a four-year education that involves small-group interactions and thinking about deep questions was and is always only ever going to be a system for educating the children of elites? I want to be clear that I valued that experience (or as close as I got to it) for myself, and I am absolutely going to do the best I can to get it for my children, but I am not sure that in a just world I would be able to do that.
I think that if we could think about what that Year 1 looks like, there's a version of it that doesn't have to be locked up inside of expensive, elite universities. I think we could take the lead on designing it, but it could become a project that flourished across civil society--sort of like the "One Book, One City" project, or a 21st C. Chautauqua. The study-in-depth that follows that Year 1 is another story--it's necessarily expensive and necessarily tied to credentialization etc.
Tons to chew on here—thank you! I teach a “Writing About Music” course for first-year Masters of Music students, and we spend considerable time with “what are your big questions about music? What are you curious about?” Sometimes, it is a struggle for them to name their curiosities, either because they can’t recall them or they have been so conditioned toward “compliant outcomes” that they have this (dangerous, depressing), fear of the unknown. I throw them into the deep end of the pool (“You can write about ANYTHING having to do with music, it doesn’t have to be related to your specialty”) and some of them doggie-paddle, and others swim a confident freestyle. But I loathe that they might turn to AI just to formulate the questions. I appreciate your critique of “critical thinking” a lot—I felt that way when I first encountered “deconstruction” in grad school. Your hourglass model is helpful as well, even on a more microlevel in the writing process: Start big, go narrow, go big again.
I do think this is a big challenge with the idea of a Year 1 that is about the big questions. First, that K-12 education even before the Age of Trump taught all students at all levels to be deeply suspicious of any invitation to think broadly, share their thoughts, speculate, etc., and most of them are going to think any such invitation in college is a trap too. Second, at least some of my response to Claude's list is a result not of having talked about those big questions directly a lot--my professional and intellectual life is in some ways as impoverished as that of my students in this respect, and I think that would be true for many professors--but of my familiarity with where each of those questions comes from and where it points towards AND the fact that at the age of sixty, I have some experiences that speak to or generate those questions. At 18, the questions that are experiential may be coming from somewhere else, they may be narrower in scope, etc. and thus the exercise would have to avoid forcing the big questions that an older body and mind may feel and think more acutely or urgently.
Your post today has me thinking of two things. On apprenticeship, Brad Delong often describes how people being trained as early scribes or medieval monastic librarians were first trained to mix the clay and prepare the ink and that the writing came later. To me, this feels like a corollary to your point on apprenticeship and not letting total novices handle expensive or dangerous machinery or do brain surgery. The novice mixes the clay and learns to achieve the perfect consistency for the journeyman or master to then make the mark. The initiate monk prays and prepares the ink for the senior brother who illuminates the page.
But the larger connection I made was with Annie Abrams book about advanced placement, Short Changed. She traces the history of AP, the Jeffersonian liberalism that underpinned its origins and growing mid-century influence. Today, AP mostly serves as a way for students to *avoid* learning any more about a subject. The STEM kid takes AP Language or AP World History because she doesn't want to devote any time or effort to those subjects in college. This is part of the systemic architecture that reduces the concept of learning. Concomitant with AP as learning avoidance, the standards by which the College Board judges AP tests, especially essays, have become narrower and more formulaic. Compliance with the rubric is paramount and any quality writing or critical thinking is of secondary importance, at best. It is exactly as you quote from Kalaitzidis, "Successful students understand the game and play it well." This is what we are teaching successful high school students that college is all about. Hoops. Getting out of learning. Finding ways to go through school and university as efficiently (and cheaply?) as possible.
But another component that Abrams brings up is that the rise of AP is in part a political and legislative phenomenon with many states requiring all high schools to offer AP courses and requiring their public universities to give course credit for APs if the students score average or above. She reminds us that AP is a private curriculum developed by a company and that it's actually quite rare for governments to compel citizens to use and pay for private services. That these laws are more common in conservative states is also telling. Perhaps, though, we are about to see states mandating the use of AI products, too? Calls for AI literacy abound.
Higher education let itself fall gently into being an alibi offered by liberal politicians about access to social mobility and the post-New Deal labor market where the basic terms of the deal between universities and politicians is that we'd accept that we were the answer to social mobility and labor opportunities via our credentials and in turn we'd get a lot of funding. But as wealth inequality grew, the professions got put under the thumb of financialized capitalism, and corporations lost any interest in maintaining a stable workforce, this meant that universities became entirely a scapegoat for this failing order and that universities were in it too deep to shift the blame.
The result is precisely that we shifted to becoming an obstacle--a "game" to be played in order to get the credential, rather than an experience whose actual content was worth taking seriously in pursuit of more nebulous lifelong insights. And the requirement of an AP is characteristic of the unholy fruit of credentialization, of accepting that we are responsible for all the shortcomings of the American political economy, that we and we alone are producing a "skills gap" that governments will mandate that we remedy. So yes, I fully expect the mandated use of AI for the same reasons--to continue the argument that teacher unions, tenure, stubbornness, etc. are somehow holding Americans back from the perfect fit between their skills and the needs of capitalism that would otherwise lead them into the land of milk and honey.
The issue of critical thinking is an interesting one. The issue is that genuine critical thinking that's new is exceptionally difficult. Academics are, as a whole, pretty good and thoughtful about what they do. The vast majority of those who imagine that they have some piercing insight that an entire field hasn't grasped are pretty well distilled by Keynes: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
So I think if you put students in a position to ostensibly challenge some professional orthodoxy, odds are that you'll get a mildly dressed up version of the phlogiston theory of fire. Now, there are some genuinely innovative thinkers, and most of them tend to be young (because they aren't intellectually bound by the constraints of professional orthodoxy). But those young thinkers go on to win Nobel Prizes and such. And for everyone one of them, there are a few thousand of the former type.
So academia has, probably correctly, rewarded those that can understand and get comfortable with orthodox tools. And for decades those orthodox tools have more or less matched what workplaces require. But now the issue is that AI is likely to soon outstrip people's ability to use those orthodox tools. And we'll need to figure out what people will productively do going forward that a machine can't do just as well. As Paul Krugman put it, even if generative AI amounts to souped-up autocorrect (and Krugman seems to believe that's what it is), a lot of highly-paid white collar work also amounts to souped-up autocorrect.
Is the problem of "absurd luxuriousness and improvidence" you reference a problem created by neoliberalism, or is part of the issue that (absent a post-scarcity society, as you say) a four-year education that involves small-group interactions and thinking about deep questions was and is always only ever going to be a system for educating the children of elites? I want to be clear that I valued that experience (or as close as I got to it) for myself, and I am absolutely going to do the best I can to get it for my children, but I am not sure that in a just world I would be able to do that.
I think that if we could think about what that Year 1 looks like, there's a version of it that doesn't have to be locked up inside of expensive, elite universities. I think we could take the lead on designing it, but it could become a project that flourished across civil society--sort of like the "One Book, One City" project, or a 21st C. Chautauqua. The study-in-depth that follows that Year 1 is another story--it's necessarily expensive and necessarily tied to credentialization etc.
Tons to chew on here—thank you! I teach a “Writing About Music” course for first-year Masters of Music students, and we spend considerable time with “what are your big questions about music? What are you curious about?” Sometimes, it is a struggle for them to name their curiosities, either because they can’t recall them or they have been so conditioned toward “compliant outcomes” that they have this (dangerous, depressing), fear of the unknown. I throw them into the deep end of the pool (“You can write about ANYTHING having to do with music, it doesn’t have to be related to your specialty”) and some of them doggie-paddle, and others swim a confident freestyle. But I loathe that they might turn to AI just to formulate the questions. I appreciate your critique of “critical thinking” a lot—I felt that way when I first encountered “deconstruction” in grad school. Your hourglass model is helpful as well, even on a more microlevel in the writing process: Start big, go narrow, go big again.
I do think this is a big challenge with the idea of a Year 1 that is about the big questions. First, that K-12 education even before the Age of Trump taught all students at all levels to be deeply suspicious of any invitation to think broadly, share their thoughts, speculate, etc., and most of them are going to think any such invitation in college is a trap too. Second, at least some of my response to Claude's list is a result not of having talked about those big questions directly a lot--my professional and intellectual life is in some ways as impoverished as that of my students in this respect, and I think that would be true for many professors--but of my familiarity with where each of those questions comes from and where it points towards AND the fact that at the age of sixty, I have some experiences that speak to or generate those questions. At 18, the questions that are experiential may be coming from somewhere else, they may be narrower in scope, etc. and thus the exercise would have to avoid forcing the big questions that an older body and mind may feel and think more acutely or urgently.