In response to several comments about the irrationality or inefficiency of having the faculties of elite universities teach elementary linguistic skills to unprepared students, I should like to refer you all to a paper that I have posted on “my stuff” which is reachable by the long URL at the top of my main page. The paper is called “The Pimple on Adonis’s Nose.” Despite the unlikely title, it speaks directly to this question.
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Some of your papers are pdfs which most anyone can read. The word docs are another matter.
After looking at this (I was able to read the word doc), I now remember it from its having been posted here at one point. It makes some striking points, albeit in a deliberately provocative way.
Perhaps the elite universities should re-tool so that they can serve those in need of remedial work as well as the already educationally advantaged. Or maybe serve the disadvantaged to the exclusion of everyone else. But the story ignores what happens in the educational system before the applicants arrive at the university. That's a large part of the overall story, I think.
Also, let's imagine that your proposed "inversion" had been in place when you were applying to college. As one of the educationally already advantaged (relatively speaking), you would not have been admitted to the schools to which you applied. So you would not have studied with Quine, would not have taken C.I. Lewis's Kant course or Aiken's Hume course. Maybe you would have read Kant and Hume anyway, either on your own or otherwise, but maybe not. You likely would not have become a philosophy professor, would not be blogging, and would not have the opportunity to put your thoughts, including the "pimple" essay, before an audience of the sort you now have.
Also, as admittedly very much a side point, consider whether the elite institutions are actually removing educational pimples from the noses of Adonises, or whether they are, rather, taking people whose visage is only somewhat better, if that, than the proverbial Everyman's and maybe, in many cases, just combing their hair a little bit but leaving many facial blemishes untouched.
Last night I was watching, on my computer, a program in which one of the characters recites parts of the Shakespeare speech that includes the line "our revels now are ended." I thought it was from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Of course, it is not. An educational institution that effectively removes pimples from the noses of Adonises should not have graduated someone who gets A Midsummer Night's Dream mixed up, in this case, with The Tempest.
p.s. Maybe you will answer that Harvard when you applied was taking 75 percent of applicants, so wasn't being very selective, so the point of the story is not applicable. But even in c.1950, it was making some judgments. And it was not taking the semi-literate, to use your phrase from the story. So in a true "inversion," it would have been looking for different kinds of applicants and you might still have fallen into the class of the advantaged that it was not looking to serve.
Some people are more intelligent than others.
High schools should work hard to separate those who are more intelligent, especially those who come from culturally deprived backgrounds, from those who are not.
There's absolutely no point in having the non-intelligent to study Hume because they wouldn't understand him.
It's strange that people who are willing to accept that some people have more athletic ability than others are unable to accept that some people are more intelligent.
I used to correspond with a woman in France who was interested in leftwing Chilean politics and she explained to me that she came from a totally culturally deprived background (like what you read in Zola, she explained) and the academically rigorous French system tracked her to the university and she became a successful librarian and leftwing activist. I like that kind of system.
A Google search found this pdf as a link (opens a pdf file when you click on it):
The Pimple on Adonis's Nose
Sorry, haven't been following most of the discussion, so this will probably be tangential at best, but s. wallerstein's comment caught my eye just now: "There's absolutely no point in having the non-intelligent to study Hume because they wouldn't understand him."
I would want to qualify this statement just a bit. Many, probably most, classics of philosophical literature (as well as the other disciplines) are largely impenetrable, or at minimum profoundly unappealing, to many/most people. But to some extent, I think this is because the authors haven't struggled enough (understandably, as it's no small task!) or simply don't have a knack for getting through to and connecting with a larger variety of readers. Not that there isn't a place for advanced specialist studies; I simply think there's something to philosophy itself in particular that just about any typical human being can tap into - one doesn't have to be "special."
There's a distinction between philosophizing itself, as a natural human activity, and philosophizing as wrestling with the works of Kant or whomever. Children can do the former. Most people I think are at least latently philosophical; one need only have some sense of wonder or existential sensitivity or puzzlement ("Where did all this come from? What am I here for?" etc.) or enjoyment of conceptual play - which seems key to having a sense of humor. In my experience, this sort of thing comes especially naturally to children, but of course people often lose these qualities as they age, as they become more practical-minded and dogmatic, as they are socialized out of them, etc. Good teachers can reawaken them. (I was never a good teacher.)
Michael,
I used the example of Hume because he writes clearly. I intentionally did not use the example of Kant because Kant is well over my head. You need Professor Wolff's IQ to understand Kant.
I don't want to get into an argument with s.w. (or anyone else especially), but I want to distance myself from s.w.'s comments.
First, I am somewhat skeptical of the notion of "intelligence" and second, I'm even more skeptical of the suggestion that some people "can't understand" certain things. (Ok, I'm not going to understand quantum physics or advanced neurobiology etc., but I think most people could understand most pieces of prose if they have decent reading skills.)
Anyway, if you read "The Pimple on Adonis's Nose," the issues have nothing to do with intelligence. Rather, the question is whether elite universities should serve those with educational "emergencies" -- people who have, through disadvantage rather than lack of intelligence, failed to learn some basic skills, just as hospitals and emergency rooms treat medical emergencies. You don't go to an emergency room because you have a pimple on your nose because that's not how medical resources are or shd be allocated. Similarly, you shouldn't go to an elite university if you're already reasonably well educated, because that's not the way educational resources shd be allocated. That's the nub of the argument of the allegorical story in that paper. (I'm simplifying and compressing of course.)
“If a U.S. college degree appears to be useless, it is by design,” he said, arguing that liberal arts degrees amount to “training for upper class free men (liber) who were above having a profession.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb
source: Middle-Class Parents Were "Tricked & Fleeced" - Nassim 'Black Swan' Taleb Blasts Biden's Student-Loan Bailout
Another example of how educational systems can and should select bright kids at an early age.
A Chilean girl (now about 50) was in exile in Cuba with her mother during the Pinochet dictatorship. Her mother was poor, not well educated but very bright. Her father had been disappeared by the dictatorship and I never met him.
The Cubans noticed her intelligence at a very early age and put in her in special science classes and trained her in chess.
When her family returned to Chile, because of her class situation she went to a working class high school where the education was deficit, but she wanted to go to the university and a group of us paid college entrance exam preparation classes for her and she studied
biology. Since she was the daughter of a disappeared person (we're now in democracy), she got a full scholarship.
International solidarity got her a scholarship to do graduate work in Italy where she got a doctorate and then a post doctorate, etc.
It all started with the Cubans noticing her intelligence and putting her in special classes at a very early age.
Elite universities should train the intellectual elite just as the New York Yankees should and will train people with talent in baseball, not me.
(emphasis in the original)
Now this one is a stunner:
The college income premium—the extra income earned by a family headed by a college graduate over an otherwise similar family without a bachelor’s degree—remains positive but has declined for recent graduates. The college wealth premium (extra wealth) has declined more noticeably among all cohorts born after 1940. Among non-Hispanic white family heads born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium is at a historic low; among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero [emphasis added]. Using variables available for the first time in the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that controlling for the education of one’s parents reduces our estimates of college and postgraduate income and wealth premiums by 8 to 18 percent. Controlling also for measures of a respondent’s financial acumen—which may be partly innate—, our estimates of the value added by college and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment. We explore a variety of explanations and conclude that falling college wealth premiums may be due to the luck of when you were born, financial liberalization and the rising cost of higher education.
—Economist Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution University)
There is a link to the paper in the source.
source: Is the college wealth premium *zero*?
Don't have time now to say very much.
There was a discussion of this back in March 2021, in response to Prof Wolff's post "A Response to Jerry Brown."
I still believe what I said in the comments at the time (starting at 12:00pm).
(Incidentally, that discussion also touched on the Harvard affirmative action case.)
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2021/03/a-response-to-jerry-brown.html
(Oops - I suppose I should mention that Prof Wolff had posted his Pimple essay on the blog just a day before, "Last Golden Oldie," so the discussion was in that context)
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2021/03/last-golden-oldie.html
Ah, the good old days (for certain values of "good") when "Samuel Chase" was commenting.
I'm not sure now why I was using two different commenting handles, but whatever... no point revisiting it (i.e., the reason).
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