Posted on 08/19/2008 1:01:58 PM PDT by jazusamo
When amateurs outperform professionals, there is something wrong with that profession.
If ordinary people, with no medical training, could perform surgery in their kitchens with steak knives, and get results that were better than those of surgeons in hospital operating rooms, the whole medical profession would be discredited.
Yet it is common for ordinary parents, with no training in education, to homeschool their children and consistently produce better academic results than those of children educated by teachers with Master's degrees and in schools spending upwards of $10,000 a year per student— which is to say, more than a million dollars to educate ten kids from K through 12.
Nevertheless, we continue to take seriously the pretensions of educators who fail to educate, but who put on airs of having "professional" expertise beyond the understanding of mere parents.
One of the most widespread and dramatic examples of amateurs outperforming professionals has been in economies that have had central planning directed by highly educated people, advised by experts and having at their disposal vast amounts of statistical data, not available and probably not understandable, by ordinary citizens.
Great things were expected from centrally planned economies. Their early failings were brushed aside as "the growing pains" of "a new society."
But, when centrally planned economies lagged behind free market economies for decade after decade, eventually even socialist and communist governments began to free their economies from many, if not most, of the government controls under central planning.
Almost invariably, these economies then took off with much higher economic growth rates— China and India being the most prominent examples.
But look at the implications of the failure of central planning and the success of letting "the market"— that is, millions of people who are nowhere close to being experts— make the decisions as to what is to be produced and by whom.
How can it be that people with postgraduate degrees, people backed by the power of government and drawing on experts of all sorts, failed to do as well as masses of people of the sort routinely disdained by intellectuals?
What could be the reason? And does that reason apply in other contexts besides the economy?
One easy to understand reason is that central planners in the days of the Soviet Union had to set over 24 million prices. Nobody is capable of setting and changing 24 million prices in a way that will direct resources and output in an efficient manner.
For that, each of the 24 million prices would have to be weighed and set against each of the other 24 million prices. in order to provide incentives for resources to go where they were most in demand by producers and output to go where it was most in demand by consumers.
In a market economy, however, nobody has to take on such an impossible task. Each producer and each consumer need only be concerned with the relatively few prices relevant to their own decisions, with coordination of the economy being left to supply and demand.
In short, amateurs were able to outperform professionals in the economy because the amateurs did not take on tasks beyond the capability of any human being or any manageable group of human beings.
Put differently, "expertise" includes only a small band of knowledge out of the vast spectrum of knowledge required for dealing with many real world complications.
Nothing is easier than for experts with that small band of knowledge to imagine that they are so much wiser than others. Central planning is only the most demonstrable failure of such thinking. The disasters from other kinds of social engineering involve much the same problem.
Surgeons succeed because they stick to surgery. But if we were to put surgeons in control of commodity speculation, criminal justice and rocket science, they would probably fail as disastrously as central planners.
IBTP!
Sowell rules!
You made it. :)
The same could be said about Freepers and the Pajamamedia outdoing “professional” journalists. Dan Rather wishes it weren’t true. Now some of us are focused on Obama’s birth certificate forgery and the MSM is in deep silence/whistling past the graveyard mode.
A child who is home schooled, on average, is a different kind of child than one who goes to government schools.
Most important, the child who is home schooled has highly motivated parents. The child shares the genetics and the values of the dedicated, hard-working parents. Many kids in the government schools, on the other hand, have absent and/or unmotivated parents.
It’s not necessarily the teachers who are bad, it’s the self-selection into homeschooling or into government schools that makes the difference.
“When amateurs outperform professionals, there is something wrong with that profession”
That is why acting is not a profession. If a 9 year old girl(Tatum O’Neil) or a first time actor practicing physician(Dith Prang)can win the ultimate of awards, how difficult is that “profession”.
Right on the money. It probably wouldn’t be that way if professional journalists were objective and honest, but...
There is obviously something wrong with the “professional” (ie, government) system if the parents who are dedicated and involved and care about their children’s education will not choose that system, often at great personal expense and sacrifice.
Excellent point. The overwhelming majority of home schooled kids have parents that really care and are willing to make that sacrifice. Those kids have a big advantage to start with over the kid whose parents use schools as day care.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the paradigm and geopolitical/culture under which the public education system was created and nurtured expired a LONG time ago.
Public schools are obsolete.
Radio killed the Rock Star and the Internet (supercharged by google) killed public schools. They just don’t know it yet.
>>The same could be said about Freepers and the Pajamamedia outdoing “professional” journalists.<<
When I first laid eyes on the thread title, that is what I though it was going to talk about.
Well, if the Oscars were based on actual acting craft, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company would win every year. They are a popularity contest for insiders, not a professional award.
So true, the internet makes home schooling much easier. I have the world at my fingertips. Computers in general help, too, with the tremendous variety of CD Roms available on each subject, video streaming, satellite schools. . .
I know a student who was majoring in chemistry and wanted to teach chemistry in high school. Despite having taken rigorous chemistry, math and physics classes for her chemistry major she was still required to take a bonehead science class for teachers in order to get her teaching degree. Sadly a student who only took this bonehead science class would be fully qualified to teach high school chemistry in many states.
No wonder our students do so poorly.
Many years ago it was easy for everyone to know who the best actors were without any awards, now I wonder if there are any good ones. :)
Yep. Imagine the government literally PAYING FOR a high speed internet connection to every home with school age children as well as a FREE COMPUTER and Base Station.
Instead of $10k a year, it would be around $1500 and the quality of education each child gets would be determined by the involvement of the parents, or lack thereof. This is putting responsibility and control back in the parents hands, where it belongs.
But what ever would we do without those professional politicians selflessly guiding us through our pathetic, hum-drum little lives?
I love to read Dr. Sowell’s columns regarding educators and the elitism that exists in higher learning, he pulls no punches.
Agreed, it is the DUTY of the parents to educate their children.
And if the burden of an improperly educated child fell on the parents, as it should, and as it would without our welfare/social safety hammock,
children would be educated.
Sounds like a very good example of the elitism that exists in education.
Not surprising. I tend to think that parents have been gifted by God to teach their own kids. That’s pretty tough to compete with, professionally trained or not.
We homeschool. We can do in a couple of hours what takes a government school all day.
This is fun: http://www.fredoneverything.net/Indians.shtml
And this is even better. And it is eight years old!
http://www.equaljustice.ca/cgi-bin/forum.cgi/noframes/read/11645
Exactly...Many many politicians would be up the creek without the enemedia, the Net is slowly changing some of that now. :)
Authorized, equipped, and commanded to.
Deu 11:18-21
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 20 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, 21 so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth.
My daughter has home schooled her three and she fortunately lives in a district that assists in home schooling, it kind of makes it the best of both worlds.
Great article. Reminds me of 1 Corinthians 12:21.
“And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.”
I would disagree with Sowell on this. The reason the millions of individuals, firms and families do better than central planners is the individuals, firms and familiers are much greater experts on their tastes, income and profits than any central planner could possibly be.
So the experts are right in this case, it is more matter of confusing who the experts are. Central planners can not possibly be more expert in your life or firm than you are.
The goal of central planning is not to provide the individual with what they want.
On the contrary, it is to force choices onto the individual that the planners deem to be superior to the choices that the individual would make if free to do so.
Road to Serfdom - FA Hayek
LOL! So true, so true and well put by you in re Mr. Sowell.
Without hesitation I would agree.
Great editorial!
(a) professionals do so poorly, it isn't hard to best them.Which one do you think is the case? Homeschooling children not just for minimum standards but for excellence and high achievement is a task that is nearly beyond the capability of a family with two wage earners. Homeschooling that feeds on an "I can do it myself" attitude may easily deprive itself of one of the lessons of economics that even Sowell must know very well: division of labor.
(b) amateurs do so well, making professionals obsolete.
The best professors I had made their money in the real world, then taught as an afterthought. They knew when to throw theory in the textbooks out the window.
Most of the home schooled kids my family has met have been very strange kids. Their academic attainments vary but I would guess that as a group they are significantly better than average.
The social weirdness is another thing, but maybe it sorts itself out when the child becomes an adult and enters the world of work and society.
I think home schoolers probably learn better because of the lack of harmful peer influence, but not all peer influence is harmful and some may even be essential in developing a normal personality.
See my post #29. I’ve met some of my grandkids friends and there hasn’t been any weirdness that I’ve noticed, of course this isn’t straight home schooling.
That is one of the ways economics has moved past Hayek. And really this is a way Smith showed more understanding than Hayek. Really I suspect despite that quote, Hayek would agree with what I said here.
As Smith showed the economy does best when the experts, ie individuals, families and firms make the choices. That is when the baker seeks his own self interest. It is not a matter of whether the planners are good or bad. The planners just don’t have the information that thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of individual decision makers have.
You can see sort of the same thing on the First 48 on the A&E Network. Though usually not the case, the murderer may be smarter than each individual cop on the case as the planner may be smarter than every other individual in society. But all it takes is two or three investigators looking at the murderers story before holes start croppng up in it. Similarly as I said above, no matter how smart the planner, they do not have the expertise of the millions of experts on their family, their tastes, their firms.
The basic premise of “Knowledge and Decisions.” Everyone should read this book.
What you say is true, but does nothing to refute Sowell’s point: that is, that “professionals” and “experts” does not invariably, or even more frequently, lead to better results than those achievable by “amateurs.”
For example, most of the children who are homeschooled would also achieve well in government schools-—for the reasons you stated (highly motivated parents, genetics (IQ), values and so on). Yes, they probably end up with an excellent, tailored education through homeschooling, but they also would have done well in public school.
IOW, the “expertise” of a “professional” teacher was not determinative of whether the child became educated.
All that said, however, I did not take Sowell as saying government teachers are necessarily bad. The larger idea was that when a huge task, such as educating all society’s children, is addressed, there’s no way it can be done as well by a central planning committee as opposed to having the local market (supply and demand) manage it.
The traditional sit on you butt on campus for 4-5 years college education is obsolete as well. They just don’t know it yet.
I read a history of higher education. It developed as it did mostly because of the inability to transmit knowledge except in person. That fact required knowledgeable people to gather in one place so that, for efficiency, many people could learn from them at once (professors, lectures, classes). It also required that books, which were not published in unlimited quantities and were very expensive, be gathered together in one place (great university libraries) as that was the only way many people who wanted to learn from those books could have access to them.
Nobody needs to go anywhere these days to have access to someone knowledgeable in any field imaginable. A kid in Kansas can learn Polish online, from a school in Poland if he wants.
Nobody needs to go anywhere these days to have access to books necessary to learn any field of knowledge. Indeed, before long most books that are out of copyright will be online for free.
Sure, there may be a continued value to getting together with people studying in your field. But there need not be a university or college setting to make that happen.
I think within the next 20-50 years, the on-campus college “education” will become more and more discredited and anachronistic. Bright people will pursue online and other types of distance learning that will be developed to truly educate them.
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