Education is not (or was not) training, although the distinction is fuzzy. Private colleges and universities were once the place for a few good men and even fewer good women. They were where we went to be sequestered from physical work, to learn, to mature, to develop communication skills and leadership confidence. Everyone else got calluses. No mammalian species could afford to take more than a few of its offspring, at the height of their fecundity and physical prowess, and isolate them to study Greek. In the 19th century, many didn\u2019t live much beyond 50. Had we sequestered significant numbers from the age of 18 to 26 to pursue a doctoral degree in 1850, this would have converted their value proposition into an unsustainable expense. The popular terminal degree into the early 20th century was an eighth-grade diploma and for a very good reason. Families needed pairs of hands and strong backs. Colleges and universities did not drive the economy, but rather were able to expand as the result of industrialization and mechanized agriculture which improved the output of labor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yep, the world has changed; about 1% of the population grows our food these days, rather than the 98+% of 300 years ago. More of what we do to earn a living requires an “education” – which can mean anything from “literacy” to\u00a0“training” to “developing a working understanding of a complex field” to, in some cases, “learning broadly and deeply about a range of disciplines and areas of human knowledge”.<\/p>\n
But the article notes something that, when you read about most of mankind’s great advances, beats you over the head; academic credentials and major leaps in achievement aren’t especially correlated:<\/p>\n
In just over 150 years, the likes of Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Steve Jobs changed the world, but they were far from credentialed scholars. Still today, the innovation economy is driven as much by enthusiastic, stubborn and impatient dropouts as by the credentialed. The imaginative and courageous accomplish more. The credentialed often check boxes in a regulatory role or debate rather than do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Birth Of The Modern,by the great British historian Paul Johnson, examines the number of things that make up what we call the modern world – everything from pants, the internal combustion engine, mass production, the repeating firearm, yellow paint and the hard-top road to motorized travel, the true “mass media” and the steam engine and true representative democracy – that started in the period between 1815 and 1845.<\/p>\n
And in those societies – which were if anything more dominated by social and academic elites than they are today (for now, anyway), the things that defined what we call “modernity” were predominantly achieved by…<\/p>\n
…the self-taught, hard-working, brought-up-by-their-bootstraps people with little formal education but great inspiration, intellect, and the ability to tie many disciplines together to make things happen.<\/p>\n
Side note: in a world where arts academics avoid hard sciences and hard-science people sneer at arts majors, it’s amazing how cross-displinary the great achievers truly were. In 1820, a great engineer like Robert Fulton or James Watt had to be a talented artist and communicator; artists like Robert Turner were highly versed in the physical world.<\/p>\n
Which is something modern academia beats out of the rare academic that tries to practice it.<\/p>\n
At any rate – the conclusion?<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s the problem? One problem is recognizing that academia follows the economy and doesn\u2019t lead it…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And creating an economy with too many academics with too little academic work to do merely devalues academia itself. You get situations like in Greece and Spain, where college graduates find themselves lucky to get 10 hours a week as a barrista – or like in the US, where chemistry professors sit for years tweeting about politics while worthy younger academics shuttle around between non-tenure-track make-work jobs, eternally…<\/p>\n
…while the real work of innovating and building goes on elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the Minnesota establishment’s favorite fall-back lines is that our putatively-excellent education system drives the economy. The evidence shows that it’s actually quite the opposite; a strong economy creates a niche for academics. Education is not (or was not) training, although the distinction is fuzzy. Private colleges and universities were once the place for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36995"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37002,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36995\/revisions\/37002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}