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.
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.
We use the internet constantly in homeschooling. For example, when the children read about a place in a book, they can then see it on a map, find out its population, review photos and so on.
It’s wonderful.
I have met strange kids who go to public school.
My “goth” god-daughter comes to mind.
I’m sure you can find examples of “strange” most anywhere you look.
I think the future paradigm will be that people will go to universities to get “shingles”, and people will read (hard and soft data) on their own to get educated.
Actually, my favorite professor taught only one economics class two days a week. The rest of the week he was at his real job.
My wife teaches high school, but it is more by accident than anything else. She got a double major in violin performance and illustration (yeah, I know, music and art?). When she graduated her uncle mentioned an art teacher opening at the best high school in the area. She took in her portfolio and they hired her with the condition that she got her master’s degree in education.
She never did any “how to teach” classes until her master’s, but she’s more qualified to teach art than the two other art teachers already at the school. I think having the skill trumps having the degree. Thankfully she’s not a liberal artist nor musician.
She thought it was sweet that I wanted to listen to her play and see her artwork when we first started dating. She had never had a boyfriend who was interested in her work. She later found out that I was just seeing if she had skill or if she was just another hack artist. I wouldn’t date one of those, but she passed the test!
More important even than that is the ability to see the truth without filtering it excessively through one's preconceived notions. Some filtering is necessary, since truly seeing everything would drive a person insane, but many people develop significant blind spots which make it impossible for them to approach certain issues in a way that is rational in the real world.
Absolutely correct. Our daughter recently finished a BS in education. When she used my computer to do her "teacher certification" application, I was appalled at the seemingly endless list of "fees" (hundreds of $$) that she was required to pay. The whole NEA-strangled "education 'profession'" is a total ripoff!
I think that's at least in part, a sad offshoot of a capitalist cum consumerist society, and it impacts a lot of true professionals outside of academia as well...it's all about salesmanship and marketing rather than the actual performance of the product.
We are at the point where people who would like to learn about basket weaving would rather consult a professor with a laundry list of academic credential and publications than speak to an actual basket weaver who has earned their living that way for decades. Certainly we should celebrate achievement and advanced degrees in any field represent just that; however, we have lost perspective and cede them a lot more authority than they truly merit in the big picture.
To put the matter in perspective, if you got home tonight and your toilet was leaking all over the floor, would you call a plumber who has been dealing with exactly such matters for 10+ years, or your neighbor who just finished the last 10 years in academia and has a PhD in Hydraulic Engineering?
There are people who are content to simply do things and do them well, and others who feel the need to spend most of their time telling you how well they do things, and even more of their time accumulating paperwork to prove it!
Amateurs outperforming professionals might mean thatIn 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.
(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.
First, I'd note that Sowell's discussion of the "professionals in the economy" referred in part to the socialist planners who presumed to dictate priorities to the people in the sense of setting tens of millions of prices. Do you think yourself, or anyone you have ever heard of, to be smart enough to know the relative difficulty of making 20 million different goods? "The market" sets those prices by an ongoing bidding process - the man who is most confident in his ability to make copper efficiently is the one who sets the limit on the price of copper, in conjunction with the man who wants the most copper. The man who is most confident in his ability to make steel and the man who wants the most steel, likewise - and so on and so forth throughout the economy. The "professional" assays to set the prices as fixed quantities - if only because he doesn't have the capability to do anything else - but the market prices may, depending on the commodity or good, fluctuate quite uncomfortably based on news.Sowell also did talk about homeschooling. I think we can agree that nobody can teach much of anything to any person who doesn't have a motive to learn. And the motivation to learn tends to correlate very powerfully with parental involvement in education. The notorious "inner city" schools have notoriously bad results because so many of the students' parents didn't like school themselves, and don't establish expectations that their children will like it any better or will excel in learning anything. OTOH the very definition of homeschooling parent is an adult who expects his (or mostly her) children to do very well (at least in the context of their handicaps, if applicable) in learning.
If professional teachers can't teach without parental involvement, and if homeschooling parents are the epitome of parental involvement, the pedagogical virtues of suppressing homeschooling are, it seems to me, close to entirely illusory. A parent who is not actually competent to teach a subject almost certainly will know it. And if they know it, they will arrange for some other teaching of that subject - or abandon the homeschooling project itself. If they abandon the project, they presumably will have learned more respect for the professional.
This article brings up a discussion I continually have with my mom (who is a professor of education, but a brilliant, conservative, highly dedicated, and extremely experienced one who does it for the love of teaching not for status). My position is that teaching should by design be a career option only after you've gone out and done something else in the world. Just because you've taken four years of college classes and done a semester of student teaching doesn't mean you actually know enough in life to be competent to be a teacher. You just have book knowledge, no real world experience.
She argues with me, because she went directly into teaching out of undergrad, but she taught elementary kids where specific topical experience isn't as necessary.
. . .my mom spent years in schools teaching kids before she got her doctorette in education while most of the people in her department went straight on through school and have never set foot in a classroom. They write utterly worthless research papers and are tenured; she is not, but was rated the second best professor in a school of 35,000.
The irony being that, from the POV of teaching teachers, experience at teaching elementary school is itself the experience base you would want, by your own theory, to require.
“Take a hike, fatso.”
As a matter of fact, one of the things we have noticed with some of these kids is a habit of making ad hominem attacks against those they disagree with. I wonder where they get that from.
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