One of my favorite passages in the Platonic Dialogues
appears in the Gorgias, at 490d. Callicles is trying to speak grandly about
his vision of the outstanding man, and Socrates asks him a series of apparently
trivial questions about farmers and cobblers and food and drink. Callicles becomes exasperated, and
exclaims: “You keep in saying the same
things, Socrates!” Socrates replies, “Yes,
Callicles, not only the same things, but about the same subjects.” The pathos of that reply is simply
exquisite. Callicles is striving for
novelty, originality, for the acclaim of the listeners, which means that he
just reach for more and more astonishing statements. Socrates is seeking truth, which never changes,
and so seems familiar, repetitive, even boring.
Whenever I read that passage, I think of Kierkegaard’s observation that
the essence of the aesthetic is novelty whereas the essence of the ethical is
repetition.
Which brings me to this:
I have been writing philosophy, as I understand it, for sixty-five
years. As I look over what I have
written, I find things I wrote ten or twenty or fifty or even sixty years ago, some
of which please me, as they succeed in saying what I wanted to say. Inasmuch as I believe they are true, or at
least worth reading, it occurs to me that I ought from time to time reproduce
them here, not at all pretending that I have just written them, but offering
them to those who are interested. Some
of these essays have actually appeared on this blog.
Accordingly, today I am going to reprint a speech I gave at
Teachers’ College, Columbia, some years ago.
I posted it here in 2011, which seems like yesterday to me, but is three
lifetimes in the blogosphere. I still
think it says something important.
Some Heretical Thoughts on
the Rat Race for the Top Jobs
Robert
Paul Wolff
A society is an articulated structure of roles occupied
by, and functions performed by, adult men and women. Every society, in order to continue in
existence, must endlessly reproduce itself by preparing the young to occupy or
perform those economic, governmental, religious, medical, legal, military roles
and functions, so that in time they can take the place of persons in their
parents’ generation. Some of this work
of social reproduction takes place in the family, some of it takes place in the
workplace, some of it is carried on by formal and informal social groupings and
organizations, and, especially in societies like ours, much of the work of
social reproduction is assigned to the schools.
In
an agricultural economy, young boys and girls learn to grow crops and tend
flocks. In a hunter/gatherer economy,
the young are taken along on foraging and hunting expeditions so that they can
acquire the skills necessary to obtain food.
In some societies, the young apprentice to carpenters, masons,
wheelwrights, or silversmiths. They
serve as pages to knights while they master the sword and mace. As acolytes, they learn the religious
mysteries of the temple. They are
articled to barristers so that they may be initiated into the arcana of the
law.
Now it happens, from time to time, that a young man or
woman comes along who has a special gift for one or another of the adult social
roles in his or her society. Some young
women take naturally to the sword; some young men have a special gift for
tending to the sick. Some people have
green thumbs. Others are able to craft
beautiful furniture with a chisel and saw. But no society can survive if it depends on a regular supply of outstandingly
talented young people. A little
reflection will make it clear that every society must define its adult social
and economic roles so that averagely
gifted young people can fill them.
How could it be otherwise? If the food supply were to depend on the
talents of outstanding agronomists, the society would likely starve before
those young Luther Burbanks appeared. If
the governance needed for survival absolutely required the gifts of a Thomas
Jefferson or an Elizabeth Tudor, then a society would be doomed, for even if
such a leader were to appear, he or she would not likely be followed by
another, and another, and another.
Sooner or later, and probably sooner, a Millard Fillmore or George W.
Bush would appear. The legal
institutions of a society must be so fashioned that lawyers of average ability
can manage their essential functions.
The society will of course celebrate an Oliver Wendell Holmes, should
one appear, but it cannot depend on a regular supply of jurisprudential giants.
The truth of these observations is reinforced by the fact
that almost every society systematically excludes large portions of its
population from whole ranges of adult roles and functions. Most societies before the present day
excluded women from the military, the law, medicine, government, and major
portions of the economy, and some still do.
Similar exclusions have regularly been imposed on groups identified by
race, class, religion, or ethnicity. The
effect of these exclusions is dramatically to decrease the pool from which young
people will be drawn to fill adult roles, thus making it ever more unlikely
that outstandingly talented boys and girls will be available. In effect, the more exclusionary a society
is, the more it depends on its institutions being manageable by average
talents.
In American society in recent decades, formal education
has taken the place of almost every other social mechanism for preparing the
young for adult life. The legal,
medical, business, and military spheres have come to rely on schooling and the
associated credentials and degrees to prepare young people and determine which
among them shall be assigned to one or another adult role or function.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with society
choosing this way of reproducing itself, although listening to lectures and
taking written examinations is not always the best way to prepare for a
productive role in adult society. But
the process is powerfully warped and conditioned by an extraneous factor so
pervasive that many of us fail even to recognize it for what it is. I refer to the steeply pyramidal structure of
the rewards and privileges associated with the various roles our adult
society. To state the point simply, in
modern post-industrial societies, there are a relatively few really good jobs
with big salaries and great benefits, and lots of mediocre jobs with small
salaries and very few benefits. In a
society like ours here in America, the quality of life of a young person is
determined almost entirely by what sort of job he or she ends up in, and that,
in turn, is very considerably determined by the quantity of education he or she
obtains.
Now, the top jobs [corporate lawyer, corporate executive,
doctor, engineer, etc] are scarce, and their rewards are way out of proportion
to those associated with jobs lower down on the pyramid. Hence, there is a ferocious competition for
the scarce slots. Since we live in a
society that gives lip service to fairness, justice, and equality, those who
end up in the favored positions quite naturally tell themselves – and also tell
those who fail to make it – that their success is a reward for their extraordinary
accomplishment. Those at the top of the
pyramid, they tell themselves in self-congratulatory fashion, are the truly
gifted and exquisitely trained. But as
we observed above, this cannot possibly be true. No society, not even ours, can survive if it
must rely on finding an endless supply of outstanding lawyers, doctors, or CEOs
to fill its top positions. The simple
truth is that despite the ferocity of the competition, those in the favored
roles are, by and large, only averagely competent at them. [Many years ago, a British child psychiatrist
observed that nature only requires that women be “pretty good” mothers in order
for their children to survive and flourish.
This wise observation can be generalized to all of society’s
reproductive efforts.]
Enter “metrics” – Grades, the SAT ,
the LSAT, the GRE, the MCAT, and all the other impressively mathematical
devices for sifting and sorting young people, of allocating them to scarce
positions and justifying that allocation.
These measuring exercises play absolutely no role at all in preparing
young people for productive adult life. Indeed,
they do not even play any sort of role in preparing young people for the
education that is, in turn, supposed to prepare them for productive adult
life. Their sole purpose is to decide,
in an ostensibly objective and neutral fashion, which small number of boys and
girls will be allowed to ascend to the heights of the job pyramid.
Now, in a society that depends on sheepherding, all the
young boys and girls learn to herd sheep.
Some do it better than others, of course, but virtually all of them
learn how to tend sheep sufficiently well to become shepherds. If someone were to propose that the boys and
girls be tested every two years to determine their progress in sheepherding, he
would be laughed out of the village.
But in our society, every stage from infancy to young
adulthood is accompanied by batteries of “objective” [which is to say machine
graded] tests, and at crucial junctures – the completion of secondary school,
the transition to college, and later the transition to graduate study – success
on these tests, however that is defined, is treated as an absolute precondition
for advancement to the next, more exclusive, stage of education, and thus for
admission to the ever more lucrative jobs.
After this system has been in place for a while, it quite
naturally comes to be the case that the adults occupying the most favored
social roles turn out to be the ones who performed unusually well on the
various tests at each stage in their growing up. After all, since performance on the tests
determines whether they are admitted to the cushy jobs, it is self-evident that
those in the cushy jobs will be the ones who did well on the tests.
And now, by a
flagrant bit of circular logic, society concludes that success on those tests
is evidence of the outstanding ability absolutely required by the cushy jobs! This circular argument is virtually forced on
us by considerations of elementary fairness.
After all, if the cushy jobs do NOT require outstanding ability and
accomplishment, then how can we possibly justify their cushiness and their
scarcity? And if the tests do not
actually identify those special few capable of performing at the heights of the
economy and society, then how can we explain the fact that those at the top
have all done so well on the tests?
All of this is dangerous and arrant
nonsense. And it is the nonsense on
which our entire educational system rests.
There is very little evidence that success in pre-school, in elementary
school, in high school, on SAT
exams, in college, on GRE exams, and in graduate school is intimately linked
with the ability actually to perform well the jobs that are won by these strings of
successes. It is of course true that the
senior partners of the most prestigious law firms graduated from the most
prestigious law schools. How could it be
otherwise? Those are the schools from
which the law firm’s young associates are recruited. But has anyone ever done an objective,
double-blind evaluation of the work of such lawyers and of their counterparts
at less prestigious firms who graduated from less prestigious law schools? We are no better able to carry out such
evaluations of the performance of lawyers, doctors, and corporate executives
than we are to evaluate the performance of auto mechanics. In the end, the “evidence” of the superiority
of those in the privileged positions is the fact that they accumulated all the
grades, degrees, and other markers that we have chosen to use as filters in
allocating scarce desirable positions to an excess of applicants.
Since all of this flies in the face of received wisdom that
is as firmly entrenched in the collective mind of our society as the truth of
the theory of the bodily humours once was, I want to spend a few moments
elaborating on what I have just said.
Suppose, to continue my example, we wish to test the hypothesis that a
high score on the LSAT, admission to one of the prestigious law schools, and
academic success in one's legal education are all good predictors of one's
eventual successful performance as a lawyer.
How would we actually test that hypothesis?
Well, the first thing we would have to do -- this is
absolutely fundamental to any scientific test -- is to define objective
measures of successful legal performance that are logically independent of the
LSAT scores, law school admission, and law school grades whose relationship to
that success we are trying to measure.
How could we do that? One thing
we might do is select a group of graduates of Harvard Law School now working at
prestigious New York or Washington law firms, all of whom, we may suppose, are former
clerks of Federal District or Appeals Court judges or Supreme Court Justices,
and count their percentage of successes in the multi-billion dollar corporate
law suits they have prosecuted. Then we
could collect the same figures for a comparison group of graduates of Suffolk
Law School working at small low-prestige Boston law firms. If the first group has a significantly higher
success rate than the second group, that might tell us something about the
objective merits of the LSAT and the prestigious law schools in identifying or
producing legal excellence.
There
are two difficulties with assembling this body of data. The first is that on any big multi-billion
dollar corporate law suit, there are hordes of lawyers on each side, so that it
is really virtually impossible to identify the measurable contribution of a
single lawyer. The second problem is
that graduates of Suffolk Law School working at small low-prestige Boston firms
don't ever get to try multi-billion dollar corporate law suits, because the
corporations demand a team of lawyers from the most prestigious and expensive
law firm staffed by graduates of the most prestigious law schools, all of whom,
of course, have done very well indeed on the LSAT. I leave it to you to work out on your own the
comparable tests that would be required to measure the relevance of SATs, GREs,
MCATs, Ivy League degrees, and all the other markers by which we select young
men and women for the best paying jobs.
Let me repeat what
I have been asserting: Virtually all of
the boys and girls in our society are capable of learning how to perform
well-compensated jobs in a perfectly adequate fashion, and most of them could
perform creditably in even the most demanding jobs, if given half a chance and the
proper preparation.
I know that this is educational heresy in modern America,
so let me pull together the strands of my argument with two stories from my own
life. The first is an experience I had
not in education, where I have spent my entire life, but on active duty in the
Army, where I spent six months, more than fifty years ago. I am of the generation that faced a military
draft, and I chose to satisfy my obligation by six years in the Army National
Guard. The first six months of those
years were spent on active duty, and the first eight weeks of that were devoted
to what the Army calls Basic Training. As
the name implies, this is the time during which the Army teaches young men [and
now young women] to march, salute, polish their boots and make their beds,
disassemble and assemble a rifle, even to shoot it a bit at targets, and
generally to become soldiers. I did my Basic Training at Fort Dix in New
Jersey.
On the first day of Basic, an angry, mean-looking
sergeant started to yell at me and he pretty much kept on yelling for the entire
eight weeks. Everything I did was
wrong. I marched out of step, my salute
was feeble, my fatigues were messy, my shoes were not properly shined, my bed
was not made tight enough to bounce a quarter, and I did not stand up
straight. He threatened to make me get
up at three a.m. to GI the barracks if things were out of place, to clean the
latrines with a toothbrush, and to march me until I dropped. He was not yelling only at me, of
course. He said he had never seen a
sorrier collection of recruits, and he doubted that any of us would make it to
the end of the eight weeks.
Somehow, miraculously, and to my great relief, I made it
through Basic, and so did every single
one of the men in my company! What is more, virtually every man and woman in
every eight week cycle in every year of the modern Army’s existence makes it
through Basic. You can count on the
fingers of one hand the recruits in any cycle who actually are drummed out of
the Army for failing to meet its strenuous, rigorous standards.
The explanation of this astonishing record of success, so
dramatically in contrast to the rather poor record of our country’s educational
institutions, is two-fold. First of all,
the Army, in its great wisdom, demands of its recruits only what long
experience has shown they are capable of.
Despite all my sergeant’s threats and harangues, all of his brow-beating
and chest-thumping, the tasks in Basic are aimed roughly at the lower end of
what is average for the recruits. The
Army’s task is to motivate us to do what it already knows we are capable of
doing, and to make us feel good about achieving what is, after all, an average
performance.
The second reason for an almost perfect rate of success
is that the Army holds those in charge responsible for the successful
performance of the men they command. If
recruits start dropping out of a Basic Training company, the Company commander
will get a black mark on his record that will effectively ruin his career. That angry sergeant yelling at me will be
raked over the coals by his commanding officer if I fail to do the requisite
number of push-ups. The result, of
course, is that those in charge do everything in their power to ensure the
adequate performance of those whom they command.
My second experience, which stands in complete contrast
to the first, occurred twenty-five years ago in South Africa, at the University
of Durban-Westville, an historically Black university which I visited regularly
in conjunction with a scholarship organization that I started called University
Scholarships for South African Students.
I was meeting with a self-assured, rather smug young White man who
chaired the university’s Economics Department and taught their big first year
introductory course. Data I had obtained
from the Registrar showed that in the previous year, only eleven percent of the
students taking the course had passed. I
expressed dismay at this appalling performance, and he agreed sadly, saying
that the Black students were very poorly prepared. I asked him what made him think he was a
teacher, if only one in ten of his students could pass his course. He was genuinely astonished at the suggestion
that he had any responsibility to help his students master the material. I suggested that if he were the head of a
hospital in which ninety percent of the patients died, he would be brought up
on charges as a quack, but he remained thoroughly unrepentant.
The lesson I glean from these two stories, and from a
lifetime in the Academy, is very simply this:
Any group of averagely intelligent young boys and girls, given the
proper support, socialization, assistance, and opportunity, can prepare
themselves to fill successfully one of the good jobs in American society. If a large proportion of the young people of
some racial, ethnic, religious, or gendered group are failing to do this, the
fault lies with the society, not with the boys and girls. Performance on so-called objective tests is neither
evidence of, nor a prerequisite for, the ability to succeed in contemporary
society. The boys and girls of every
city, town, or village in every society in the world are capable of becoming
averagely competent and productive members of their adult world. If they are failing to do so, it is the fault
of the adults in the society. With
attention, guidance, and with the
unshakable conviction on our part that they are going to succeed, they in
fact will succeed in becoming
averagely successful.
Our job as educators is to prepare young people to take
their place in the adult world -- all young people, not merely those who score
well on SATs or get high grades or attend prestigious and expensive schools. It is not our job to weed out the unfit, nor
is it our job to raise the national scores on tests designed to satisfy the
ignorant prejudices of reactionary politicians.
If our students fail, it is our fault, and our responsibility. In our professional lives as educators, we
must act like Basic Training sergeants [without the yelling], not like the
Chair of the Durban-Westville Economics Department.
What does this mean, concretely? Since, as you will have gathered by now, I am
an inveterate story teller, I will end these remarks with two more stories that
suggest, anecdotally, how we ought to act toward our students. The first concerns a very promising young man
in the University of Massachusetts Afro-American Studies doctoral program that
I ran for its first dozen years. This
young man had done some extensive,, solid archival research, but was simply
unable to turn it into a dissertation. I
called him into my office, after several unproductive years had gone by, and
told him to bring me everything he had written.
He produced a hundred pages or so of alternative drafts of bits and
snatches of this and that chapter. I sat
him down and spent an hour or so sorting out the narrative structure of the
project, dividing it into chapters and cutting it off at about the halfway
mark, since what he had originally imagined was a long book, not a doctoral
dissertation. When all of this was
clear, I said to him: "I want you
to go home right now and write page one of chapter one. When you are done, send it to me as an email
attachment. I will read it and send back
any comments or corrections. Tomorrow,
you will send me page two, and I will respond in the same way. You will send me one page a day, every day of
the week, from now until you have a complete dissertation. If you start wandering off course, I will
alert you to that fact. If you are
getting ahead of your story, I will slow you down. One page a day is 30 pages a month. In eight months, you will be done." And so he was. He now holds a tenured teaching job, and is about
to publish an enlarged and revised version of his dissertation. That is the sort of commitment to our
students that I have in mind.
The second story, with which I will end, is about one of
my very favorite people, Esther Terry.
When these events occurred, Esther was the Chair of the Afro-American
Studies Department in which I was the Graduate Program Director. It was she who invited me to join the
department in 1990. Esther was a student
at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina when she and other students
from Bennett and NC A&T carried out the famous Woolworth's Lunch Counter
sit-in that started the modern Civil Rights Movement.
One semester, Esther and our colleague Steve Tracy
co-taught an undergraduate course on Southern Literature. I happened to wander into Esther's office
just after the first class in the course had ended. While we were chatting, a young Black man
knocked on the open door. "Dr.
Terry," he said, "I was just in your class." "Yes," Esther said, "I
know." "I am afraid I am not
going to be able to take the course," he went on. "Why not?" Esther asked. "Because you have assigned a lot of
books and I just don't have the money to buy them." Without missing a beat, Esther said,
"Now look, young man, I want you to stay in the course. I have just had a fence put up around my
house. I want you to show up this
afternoon and start painting it. I will
pay you, and then you will be able to buy the books." With that, she took out some money as an advance
on his wages, and sent him off to by the first book they were to read in the
course.
Esther is a very shy woman, and does not like me to tell
that story. Indeed, if I had not been
there when it happened, I would never have known about it. But she did things like that for forty years,
unbidden, without expecting or seeking recognition. She simply viewed it as a normal part of her
role as teacher. She is my model for
what a university professor should be, and it would make me very happy if she
were to become yours as well.
6 comments:
would you say there is variation within an individual as to the jobs he or she is suited by temperament or skill?
Your son might make a better law professor than you, John Updike was better, I think, at fiction than poetry and the same person might be better suited at work as a fireman than at policeman.
Once you admit variation within a person, you admit differences between people
Granted of course, maybe all jobs can be performed, or most, adequately by anybody,
but don't we want the best?
I'd say the educational system is perhaps a scam, in that way and others, but it is more that the public needs some "objective" standard than anything else.
People need some sense of order external to themselves to guide their rudder, don't they?
A book came out this year entitled 'Against Meritocracy,' which, if the author is the same person who compiled a list of empirical data against meritocracy, makes (inter alia) your points.
I agree with you about the metrics.
I got excellent SAT and even better GRE scores, but I haven't had a "productive adult life" nor, to be frank, did I try very hard to have one.
I dislike contemporary society so deeply and did so from such an early age that my only real goal in my life was to subvert it, at first out of pure perversity, then with the idea that a more just society would emerge as a result of my subversion, and now in my old age from a shifting mixture of perversity and of longing for a juster and more rational social order.
Of course one could ask whether most so-called "productive social roles" are really "productive". Do corporate lawyers and Wall St. bankers produce anything except "injustice", "irrationality" and the inflation of their own egos?
The psychoanalyst and social critic Erich Fromm uses the word "productivity" to refer to those who affirm values of life, love and justice. There's something to be said for that point of view, and if we accept that point of view, most so-called "productive work" is more destructive than productive.
A woman friend of mine from my university days, over 50 years ago, became a lawyer. She once told me that she had never defended a client who could afford to pay her. That's productive work in my book.
What, then, is a promising young woman or man? What's the promise? That, she or he will get closer than most others to the apex of the pyramid? If one deconstructs (!) the pyramid, then all the talk about promise, or "so much potential" too, ought to go away? N'est pas?
Not so, Andrew. One of the lovely things about parenthood, as you know, is that one takes pride in the accomplishments of one's child, even if the child's performance is average.
I don't disagree with your claim that, "Virtually all of the boys and girls in our society are capable of learning how to perform well-compensated jobs in a perfectly adequate fashion, and most of them could perform creditably in even the most demanding jobs, if given half a chance and the proper preparation." However, I'd like to suggest a further difficulty that will arguably afflict attempts to correlate high Ivy League school admission, high LSAT, GRE, MCAT scores, and the like with success in cushy jobs. If we take the underappreciated, and fundamentally tragic, Peter principle seriously, and we should in hierarchical business corporations and the military, we know that individuals in both groups that we’re trying to compare have mostly risen to their level of incompetence – what Laurence J. Peter darkly called their “Final Placement.” If that’s the case, we’ll want to edit our comparison groups to eliminate most of the members at the very top of each group – they are, almost by definition, incompetent at their jobs.
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