Who Exactly is Obsolete?

Elon Musk has recently expressed the opinion that soon, thanks to AI, engineers and programmers with be obsolete. 

It stands to reason. These are jobs involving systematic reasoning. Thinking in a straight line. That’s what computers do best, and better than humans.

I believe that, truth told, medical doctors are already obsolete. AI can diagnose more reliably than any human. And that is what doctors, other than surgeons, do.

Accounting, too, is systematic reasoning and surely easily automated.

So what does this mean to all those parents, and all those government and other organizations, who have been pushing STEM?

A dead end. As usual, the experts were wrong.

The one thing AI cannot do, and will, I warrant, never be able to do, is to think creatively. It can only reshuffle what is already there.

What we need are the humanities, the fields that tell us why and where we ought to be going. We want philosophers and ethicists and people who know the lessons of history at the controls, asking the right questions and keeping AI on a leash to ensure it serves humanity.

And beyond that, it is the creatives, the artists, poets, inventors and entrepreneurs, who will inherit the earth.

Root and STEM

 

When I taught in China back in the early 90s, I was appalled to learn that the university had no Department of Humanities. Purely a mechanistic view of the cosmos and of human life, it seemed. When the Berlin Wall fell, the countries of Eastern Europe understood the problem: their scholars rushed to the West to get a grounding in the Humanities. Unfortunately, they were disappointed.

I am alarmed to see that Humanities is now also no longer taught in high schools in Tennessee. A list of subject areas ESL students must be prepared for gives Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Science. 

A disease is spreading, and it is deadly. It is deadly not just to democracy, but to civilization itself.

If our culture were sane, Humanities would be the entire high school curriculum.

After the basic skills of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, taught to mastery in elementary school, the Humanities is the one thing everyone needs to study. It is the reason and grounding for everything else. If you do not pass it on, individuals despair and civilization dies.

Today, we waste our students’ time for four to six years, years when they are full of energy and desperate to learn. Many turn off at just this point. 

Math? It is a common observation, a truism, that we never use our high school algebra, trigonometry, or calculus again. So what is the justification for teaching it? Geometry would be useful—to teach logic. But it is never presented in those terms; just as a set of axioms that obviously do not relate to the real world.

Science as taught in the schools is the antithesis of science. It is taught as a body of knowledge; stuff to memorize. This specific knowledge, taught as certain in high school, is probably false and will probably be shown by science to be false in time. Much of it is already known to be false while the textbook is still in circulation. The essence of science is to doubt you know anything, and to test everything; it is the scientific method. That is not taught. If experiments are done, the result is always predetermined. Anyone genuinely likely to excel in science is only likely to be turned off it in high school.

Language Arts? The grammar of English should have already been learned in elementary school. As to other languages, if it is a matter of learning to speak them—our current emphasis—the classroom is the worst place to do so. The place to learn a language is by speaking it regularly, something the classroom is designed to prevent. Language, when taught as a Humanity, is an exercise in logic: the old grammar-translation method. It is no longer taught in such terms.

Social Science? A mathematician back in the fifties made the observation that anything that has ever been discovered by the Social Sciences is either trivial, or it is wrong. This is still true, and will forever be true. Rather than adding to our knowledge, the social sciences have subtracted from it, by introducing serious errors to the popular mind. Human beings are not objects, and cannot be studied as objects. Even if this were possible, it would be morally offensive. And teaching Social Science is therefore teaching immorality.

The wealthy and the upper classes pay huge sums to educate their own children at private schools that do concentrate on the Humanities: on logic, philosophy, rhetoric, debate, history, classical literature. They know what they are doing. The British Empire was built on the quality of its private schools. The modern public school systems of North America were intentionally designed, in the early twentieth century, to produce cogs for the industrial machine. What they teach is submission and acceptance. The Humanities teach leadership; for they teach how to think. As Confucius said, “a superior man is not a tool.” Without the Humanities, the schools are turning out workers, meant as a means, not an end.

The world may need more STEM. But the problem with STEM is that whatever is taught today is obsolete tomorrow. To teach it at the high school level is a waste of time. Even to teach it later, at university, when specialization is possible, is probably too soon. It needs to be taught continually, over one’s professional career. Something now entirely possible, with distance education.

But what is needed even more than STEM, and all the more so in times of rapid change,  is minds that are adaptable, have initiative, and know the ultimate goal.

Scientism

 

A traditional unsympathetic portrait of the Qin emperor.

Most of the horrors of the modern world can be traced to scientism.

Do not misunderstand me; scientism is not science. But science is rarely heard from in popular culture. Scientism is the pseudo-religion that considers science the source of meaning and reality. It is the dominant faith of our age, and its consequences are profoundly destructive. Not least to science.

When people claim that doubting climate change is “anti-science,” or that “the science is settled” on any given issue, this is scientism, not science.  True science is based on skepticism and taking nothing on authority. Science makes no truth claims; it is a method of inquiry, not a set of dogmas. 

Besides the damage to science, scientism is, for example, the foundation of all racism. If we can agree that racism is a problem, rejecting scientism is the way to solve it. Before science sought to classify humans as if they were animals, the concept of race did not exist. The ancient Romans, or the Medieval Christians, knew nothing of race, and would have considered it as senseless to discriminate against someone due to their skin colour as due to their hair colour or eye colour. This is why both Roman citizenship and Christian baptism was open to all, without discrimination of birth.

Marxism, and all the mass murders it has produced, is also based on scientism. Marxism wanted to reduce all human life to material, and scientific, terms. It defined itself as “scientific socialism,” and was and is, of course, aggressively atheist. People were merely objects, means rather than ends.

Nazism is also directly based on scientism—it is Darwinism applied to the human species.

Everything we today experience as “mental illness” can, I think, also be attributed to scientism, which strips the world of its meaning. It is a striking fact that, before Freud, “mental illness,” melancholy, was generally considered transitory and curable. Now it is multiplying like an epidemic, and is incurable in all its forms. It is still highly curable in non-Western societies.

A Chinese student of mine, without anything being assigned, chose to write and submit an essay arguing for the need for society to support the Humanities. This looks to me like an appeal: Chinese schools and universities, like those in the old Soviet Bloc, do not teach the Humanities. There are no Humanities departments. There are only the STEM fields, and Marxist ideology.

She contends in her essay that this is why the Soviet Bloc fell—history shows, she writes, that any society that neglects the Humanities must fall in time. She cites, along with Eastern Europe, an earlier example from Chinese history, the Qin Dynasty. The Qin unified China in 221 BC under the banner of “legalism,” which emphasized social order as the only value. Books were collected and burned. 

The dynasty lasted only 15 years. It collapsed as the leaders, guided by no principle but power, began executing one another.

A point we are coming to, I fear, in our current societies. Humanities give us morals and meaning. Without the Humanities, there is no “why.” 

My student is not alone in her perception that scientism is a fatal flaw. When the Berlin Wall fell, the new democratic regimes of Eastern Europe thought the same, and sent their academics to the West to bring back knowledge of the Humanities.

Sadly, they discovered that the West, too, had largely abandoned them, in everything but name. Instead they had themselves been concocting and distilling the poisoned Kool-Ade of scientism. 

It has only gotten worse since.

Now the West seems to be falling apart, just as China is falling apart; from the same poison.

The difference is perhaps that there are more people in China who realize the problem. Chinese culture may recover first.

The Poison of Credentialism

Our current society is afflicted with the disease of credentialism and professionalism. More and more specialized education is being demanded generation by generation for almost any job.

I have long thought this was mostly due to the GI Bill and its equivalents in the years after the Second World War. At about that point, going to college developed a huge new cachet.

But it occurs to me, in the recent controversy about private care homes in Canada, that there is a second factor, at least as important. The influence of the GI bill, after all, should have subsided in a generation or two. But credentialism and higher ed has only grown and grown.

I think a second factor, perhaps a more important factor, is the growth of government. And not just government growth, but the growing attractiveness of government work. This seems to me to have kicked off, in Canada, in the Sixties, when the Pearson government allowed government workers to unionize and to strike, and started giving them big pay raises at regular intervals. Similar things seemed to happen at about the same time in the US and UK.

This violated an ancient principle of democratic government. The traditional understanding was that, if you joined the government service, you were sacrificing the chance of high pay in return for job security. A fair enough trade.

As of Confederation, civil servants were actually not permitted to vote. To allow this was seen as self-dealing. Now they were not just allowed to vote, but allowed to set their own pay levels. For both sides at any negotiating table within the civil service are civil servants, and both benefit from a pay raise. In private industry, the employers will resist because they may lose profits, or market share. In government, there is no such annoying friction.

As a result, it has over the years since become significantly more profitable to work for the civil service than in the private sector. The civil service has become, in effect, the ruling class.

Traditionally, government jobs, not depending on meeting any customer’s or client’s needs, as private operations must, tend instead to hire based on “qualifications.” This is seemingly inevitable, and honourable: in ancient China, it produced the Confucian examination system. It is the way to hire on merit.

But it has produced its own problems, now that government work is so attractive. Since the pay is much higher, everyone wants to work for government, and so qualifications, and higher and higher qualifications, become greatly valued, even in the private sector. Because in any sector, people will still hold out hope for that possible government job.

As a result, for many jobs, perhaps virtually all, the required qualifications far exceed what is actually needed to competently do the job.

What happens in the case of a job, like caregiver in a rest home, for which any training of real practical value would take perhaps four weeks, yet the competition for the best jobs, those working in government-run homes, prompts the requirement for a two-year diploma or a four-year degree or more?

Several things. First, in the colleges and universities offering such formal qualifications, you must stretch four weeks of content over two years. You are therefore consistently pitching the job to the least naturally talented in the field. You are weeding out the more competent.

Second, and often as an alternative, you find the need to pad out the curriculum with irrelevancies. But what irrelevancies? Politics is the natural remedy. The politics of the field. Since those designing the curriculum will be those already in the field, this is what will seem most useful to them. Most of the trainee’s time in class may therefore be spent on an ideological indoctrination, into positions that favour the interests of that occupational group. Into class consciousness, and an awareness of class interests.

This is what is known elsewhere as a cartel, a conspiracy against the interests of the general public. Just putting two tradesmen together in a room, Adam Smith observes, is going to produce such schemes. Imagine putting hundreds together in a classroom for several years.

Third, the cost of getting an unnecessary education tends to exclude the poor from the given field. Not only do the poor therefore get poorer, while the rich get richer; this also means that the field is selecting not on competence, but on inherited privilege. The public suffers poorer service.

This is surely a problem in any profession. It is an especially serious problem in professions that in reality require special talents rather than significant formal training: in the vocations. For example, professionalizing has been visibly devastating for journalism. In the old days, kids became journalists out of high school, because they were independent-minded and could write. And they were worth reading. Now these bright poor kids have nowhere to go, and the rest of us have nothing to read worth reading.

Professionalism has been equally devastating to teaching. The ability to teach, like the ability to write, is not something that can be taught. It is a gift of the spirit.

I expect the same is happening with nursing and caregiving. Compassion cannot be learned in a classroom.

Medical doctors no doubt need their specialized knowledge; but perhaps nowhere is creeping professionalism more damaging than among the social sciences. Among social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like.

Happily, there are definite signs that the high-tech revolution is breaking this pervasive form of priestcraft. At the same time, it seems necessary to end the right to strike within the civil service, and have civil service pay rates set by an independent panel to be a fixed percentage of private sector salaries for the same job description.

Down with STEM

Improving the quality of teachers is not the only thing we need to do to improve the schools. The curriculum is also a problem, and as much of a problem. We are endlessly perverse in what we choose to teach.

I know there will be howls of protest over this, but the truth is, we waste kids' time in teaching them so much science and math. Everyone but the kids loves STEM. But STEM is not the way to go.

Yes, these fields are important for a lot of good jobs; and important for the advancement of our physical comfort. But for the majority of students who will not go on to STEM careers, it is pretty much a waste of their time. As the old saw goes, how much of your high school algebra did you use today? When today did you need to work out the circumference of a circle? Yet the time lost studying these things kept you away from learning things that might have been important to you in your real life and real career.

If, on the other hand, you do need these bits of knowledge in your job or your life later on, you have almost certainly forgotten them by then. You must pick them up again on the fly anyway—which, fortunately, is easy enough, when and if they are important to you.

Teaching science is an even worse time sink; at least the way we teach it now. We teach it as a set of known facts and “laws.” This is really the antithesis of science, which relies on taking nothing on authority. Inevitably, a significant portion of the “facts” and “laws” the typical student learns in public school are disproven a few years later—sometimes before the text goes to press. The student then wastes his time not just filling his head with useless information, but with things he will later need to laboriously unlearn, or look a fool.

We ought to teach the history of science, to show what science really is: a method, not a set of conclusions. And, of course, we ought to teach the scientific method. We claim to do that sometimes now, but we really never do. We will assign the class an experiment with a known, pre-ordained conclusion. Then, if the experiment does not produce the intended results, we require the student to explain why it failed. This is still teaching the opposite of the scientific method. Moreover, it seems deliberately pointless and boring.

At the same time, there are a lot of essential things, things everyone needs, that we do not teach. Most important among them are ethics and religion. They are, and have always been understood to be, the essence of an education. Unless you understand your goal, nothing else makes any sense.

But these are things we cannot teach in public schools. We do not want government teaching ethics and religion: that way totalitarianism lies. The only solution seems to be either funding all denominational schools, or school vouchers.

Aside from this, we need to teach basic skills: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Which we do, but not very well. Unfortunately, the best way to teach such basic skills is through direct instruction, or as teachers currently call it disparagingly, “drill and kill.” Memorization is itself an invaluable skill, and we ought to teach it deliberately: the practice of memorizing things is of value over and above the value of the things memorized. Unfortunately, far from teaching it, we currently tend to prohibit it.

Beyond and after this, we need to teach rhetoric, parliamentary procedure, and logic, which we do not currently teach at all. For any position in life, it is important to be able to think, to persuade, and to avoid being conned or manipulated. And it is important to be able to work in groups. Yes, we currently make students work in groups, endlessly, but then we do not show them how—or more often, we set up the groups so that they will not work. They become no more than tools for conformity and bullying. Kids need to learn how to run a meeting.

We need to teach basic bookkeeping—vital to any business, but also vital to anyone else, for personal finance.

On top of this, as I think E.D. Hirsch has demonstrated, there is a good case that we need to teach a core of shared cultural knowledge. Without it, you are left outside the cultural dialogue. You cannot read a good newspaper or a college text. This is where history and literature, in particular, come in. And that does not mean some recent book by a “minority” author, for the sake of supposed diversity. And it does not mean the history of some “minority” group. By the logic of the need, that means looking at the most familiar and established authors, and the aspects of history everybody has been most familiar with over the past generations. All those dead white males. Otherwise the exercise is pointless, and another huge waste of students' time.

Teaching a second language might be a good idea, but certainly not the way we teach it now. Growing up in Quebec, we all studied French from grade 3 through high school. And I doubt anyone ever became fluent in French as a result.

The problem was with the goal. It is crazy to try for conversational fluency in a classroom. Conversational fluency comes with speaking practice. It is almost impossible to manage this in a classroom. At best, it is a wildly inefficient use of student time and resources. If you want fluency, you get it on the streets, in the playgrounds, watching TV, hanging out with friends, shopping in the stores. In a classroom, the only useful approach is the old, now always disparaged and condemned “grammar-translation method.” It is universally condemned because it will never make you fluent in the language. True enough, it that is what you want. But it will give you a reading knowledge. This gives you access to all the most important thoughts and all the most important conversations in that language. That is not such a small thing in itself. More importantly, in having to analyse grammar, it will teach you how language works. And to understand how language works is to understand how thought works.

For the same reason, even apart from its own utility, and perhaps even as a suitable replacement, it would be immensely valuable to teach all students how to program. Unlike geometry or algebra, programming skills have an immediate practical payoff. You can make things, right away.

These are the things that everyone can benefit from knowing. If a student then decides to go into some STEM field, that is the time to learn what is specific to that field.

Of course, we are all charging full steam ahead in the opposite direction.