Most of this is obvious, when you think about it, so why doesn't everybody recognize understand?
Because most of us don't think about most things. Instead we "study" them in school and assemble sets of beliefs which, as Keynes, Galbraith and others have observed, we may accept without question for the rest of our lives.
I call this problem "Aristotle's Authority." Born nearly 400 years before Christ Aristotle was a star student in Plato's Academy, and later founder of his own Lyceum. Among other things he taught that the planets and stars are supported on concentric crystal spheres that surround the earth.
Most of Aristotle's ideas were pure guesswork but, because he was the "authority," they were accepted as fact for more than 1,000 years. In the early 1500's Polish astronomer Copernicus studied the movements of the planets and proved that the Earth and other planets must orbit around the sun.
Mathematicians and astronomers accepted Copernicus' view because it made astronomical calculations work out right, but the Roman Catholic church still liked Aristotle's "crystal spheres." In 1533, nearly 100 years after Copernicus' death, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei was tried and sentenced to house arrest because he publicly disagreed with Aristotle.
Over the years most of Aristotle's misconceptions have been corrected but most established authority still resists new ideas. As a general rule, most of the attitudes and ideals of the power elite in any given organization are at least a generation behind the norm.
That's partly because it takes so long for an individual to join the elite. To start with a future leader gets his or her training in school, where students absorb the ideas of teachers. In most cases the teachers are people who themselves did well enough in school to get paper qualifications, but who were not good enough in the real world to join the elite.
After students have been programmed in school they go into the real world where, if they can ape the views and behavior of the current power elite, they may be accepted as "management trainees." If they go 20 or 30 years without challenging the views of the elite they may themselves join the group, but by then their ideas will be hopelessly stuck in the past.
And they may never change, because they think they are right. Before they can change they must be willing to admit that most of their lives have been based on a mistake, and that most of their past decisions were wrong. By Galileo's day no sane man could seriously believe that the stars were points of light on huge glass spheres that surrounded the earth, but church leaders who had never questioned Aristotle's ideas could not afford to admit how stupid they had been.
Even if he knows the truth, a member of the elite may find it convenient to support a falsehood. In The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith devotes a whole chapter to the concept of "conventional wisdom." In a nutshell, he argues that the man who tells people what they already believe will generally get more public approval than the man who tells them something new.[1] The man who spouts "conventional wisdom" may be wrong but, because he tells his audience what it wants and expects to hear, he will be approved. In the long run he may be proved wrong but, since he may be dead before that happens, it makes more sense for an authority figure to support an accepted falsehood than a novel truth.
Authoritarian thinking often maintains the superiority of the printed word over personal experience -- even the experience of experts. Monks who copied manuscripts in the middle ages often copied obvious mistakes in those manuscripts, because they were trained not to question the written word.
In the modern world a scientist who designed and tested cold weather clothing for the Canadian Armed Forces told me his wife would take the advice of a women's magazine over his laboratory results when she bought winter clothing for their children. The magazine's advice was based on advertisers' claims but, because it was in print, the woman thought it was more credible than her husband's research.
Millions of people will accept an advertiser's printed claim over the findings of a scientist and most "educated" people consider "education" more valid than real-life experience. We say a student who spends three years at university is "educated," but one who takes four years of classes and apprenticeship to become a mechanic is not.
We honor and reward education and we disdain practical knowledge but, in some cases, the workers with the practical knowledge have the more demanding jobs. Consider, for example, the difference between a medical doctor and an automobile mechanic. The doctor spends a long time in school but the mechanic's apprenticeship is more practical than the medical doctor's schooling, and it takes almost as long.
Doctors work with two basic models that have not changed for tens of thousands of years, that can tell you where they hurt and that will repair themselves if given half a chance. Mechanics work with dozens of models that change every year, that can't tell you what's wrong and that will not repair themselves.
Some modern doctors accomplish miracles but through much of European history most medical practitioners did more harm than good. In modern times we know that some totally un-trained people have been able to masquerade as qualified doctors and get away with it. Some mechanics probably fake their qualifications too, but it's easier for a doctor than for a mechanic to fake success.
Medicine is easy to fake because if a doctor's treatment makes you feel worse for a while you will feel better as the effects wear off, and you may think you are cured. We find it hard to tell because humans are almost infinitely adaptable, and we can get used to discomfort.
But it's hard for a mechanic to fake a repair because our cars either work or they don't. A mechanic may inflate the price of parts or pad the bill but if my car does not start I will know it, if it burns too much gas I will know it, and so-forth. A lot of people take better care of their cars than they do of their bodies, possibly because we watch our cars from the outside and we are more aware of their performance.
Most people would say that an airline pilot has a more responsible job than a truck driver but, again, consider the facts.
Mechanics check the pilot's plane before every flight. He takes off and lands only from airports designed for his plane and, while he flies, supervisors and assistants track him on radar and warn him of problems. In a ten-hour flight the pilot has to be very careful for ten or fifteen minutes around take-off and landing, but he can relax and even sleep most of the rest of the time.
A truck driver has to check his own truck before each run, and he has no help on the road. He is in constant danger of being cut off or sideswiped and, even on a ten-hour drive, he can't afford to let his concentration slip for a minute.
I don't say that a mechanic deserves more respect and more pay than a doctor, or a truck driver more than a pilot, but I do suggest that our attitudes toward all of them could use some adjustment.
IMPORTANT JOBS
If you really want to judge what jobs are worth, think what happens when people don't do them.
Politicians go on vacation for months every year, and nobody notices. When Ontario civil servants went on strike for several weeks in the spring of 1996, few people were inconvenienced. When company presidents take time off the work goes on, but when junior clerks are sick, things go wrong.
When doctors go on strike people postpone cosmetic surgery and worry about what would happen if they have an emergency, but when garbage collectors go on strike we all have a serious health problem. If airline pilots strike tourists' vacations are interrupted, but if truck drivers strike our cities run out of food.
We depend on people with practical training to make our world work, but theoretical learning is still considered better than practical knowledge. It has been that way since before the dawn of civilization.
Some time in pre-history men and women who developed special skills in the technology of the day -- arrow making or flint knapping or basket weaving or whatever -- began to specialize in the work they did best. Most of them taught their trade to their children as they worked, and sometimes to other children who were interested.
Possibly about the same time other people began talking about gods. The artisans obviously contributed more to society than the priests, but the priests had more prestige because they interpreted the will of the gods. In most religions it seems that what the gods wanted most was for the people to support the priests in luxury.
The best hunters and warriors became soldiers and they held most of the real power, but priests had power too. In many cultures they studied the stars and developed a calendar to tell farmers when to plant their crops. In Egypt, Peru and other areas they developed surveying techniques and mathematics so they could supervise the construction of canals for irrigation. Priests told fortunes, learned to read and write, treated sick people and interpreted laws.
And they taught students -- originally priests-in-training and later the sons of the wealthy. Some of the illegitimate sons of nobles were taught enough to serve the priests as lay brothers or scribes.
All of them were privileged and, through most of history, students were an exclusive group. Partly because admission to school was restricted, education became a ticket to the elite. Anyone who could get an education could then get a soft job in the service of some noble. Because educated people shared exotic knowledge with other educated people they were entitled to well-paid positions in which they did not have to do much work.
But beyond reading and writing, education did not have to include any practical knowledge. Civic administrators in ancient China were chosen by an exam in which they were required to write a poem. Their work was judged on poetic quality and penmanship, neither of which is important to the job of administration but both of which are important to administrators who were themselves chosen for their poetry and penmanship.
Educational qualifications also filtered senior administrators in the British Empire, but in Britain the standards were slightly different. In most cases an applicant would be hired for a good job if he came from an exclusive school, and for a lesser job if he came from a lesser school.
The system made selection easy because relatively few people went to exclusive schools, and it worked because colonial rulers don't have to know or understand much. If actual knowledge is required, they have underlings to provide it.
Some workmen were well educated too. The stonemasons who built the cathedrals of the middle ages were brilliant engineers with an intimate understanding of mathematics and other sciences, but they learned their trade by apprenticeship rather than in school.
Possibly in a bid to gain prestige the masons developed arcane rituals -- some of which persist to this day in the fraternal order that grew out of the original guild -- but they never achieved the power or prestige of either the nobility or the church. They could not, because masons had to work for either the nobility or the church.
After the industrial/scientific revolution, practical knowledge had more meaning. A lord could tell a peasant what crops to plant and a priest could tell him when to plant them, but both had to bow to a working mechanic's knowledge of machines.
That must have hurt the pride of churchmen and aristocrats -- especially since many of the early English technicians were religious dissenters who studied technology because they were forbidden to hold a post in local government, the civil service or a university.
But the upper class still held the power and they set the standards. The lower classes might learn useful things and understand the world, but the people who owned the world did not feel any need to understand it. Many of them flaunted their ignorance of technical matters.
In later years some students at the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge were allowed to study science, but it was understood that they would never put it to practical use.
CANADIAN SCHOOLS
As a colony Canada was never meant to develop an independent economy and the Canadian school system was set up to educate the sons of colonial administrators and of the local elite. Because graduates were not expected to do manual work, they did not need practical skills.
And the colonial administration did not want Canadians to learn too many skills because Canada was supposed to be a servant of England, not a competitor. We were expected to learn enough technology to prepare raw materials for shipment to England, but not enough to manufacture finished goods.
In the last century we developed enough industry to help England through two world wars. We also built a few technical schools but, with a steady supply of trained immigrants from Europe, we didn't need much technical training and we didn't get much.
Then came the fall of 1957 and the first Russian Sputnik satellite. It proved that Russians were winning the space race, and frantic politicians decided that it was because they had better schools. The United States set out to catch up and, as a junior partner in the cold war, Canada followed suit.
But the education gap was in technical schools, and we opened liberal arts colleges. That's hard to justify, but not hard to understand.
Technical schools need expensive equipment and they are expensive to run because anyone qualified to teach in a technical school can take his choice of well-paid jobs in the real world.
Arts colleges need only classrooms and a library, and teachers are cheap because they require no specific skills. Almost any arts graduate can teach arts courses, and teaching is about the best job many arts graduates can hope for.
And to a politician or an administrator, one school is as good as another. Because they don't need any technical training themselves they don't recognize the difference between training and education, and all schools look the same when they are just promises in an election campaign or entries in a balance sheet. Because we could open arts colleges cheaper and faster than technical schools we did -- nine new universities in Ontario alone, within a few years.[2]
We had no economic use for most of the graduates they turned out but, as often happens in the modern world, the supply created the demand. As more and more Canadians received degrees, a degree became a basic requirement for more and more jobs.
The change came about partly because many big companies hired personnel officers who held degrees.
The new personnel officers were "specialists" who had been trained as personnel officers. Because they were specialized as personnel officers they didn't know much about the company they worked for or about the jobs they hired people for, so they could not test applicants for relevant skills. What they could do was look at paper qualifications and, by considering only candidates who held degrees, they could make their own jobs easier.
It's illegal to discriminate by race or sex, even when these may make a difference on the job. It is not illegal to discriminate by education, or even to demand education that is not required or appropriate to the job.
Like the ancient Chinese who hired administrators on the strength of their handwriting and poetry, big-company personnel officers chose employees on the qualifications they understood -- university degrees -- whether the degrees were relevant to the job or not.
By the late 1960's the continued need for technical schools was obvious and the federal and provincial governments tried to correct it by opening "community colleges" to teach technology. That might have worked but the community colleges lost their chance when educators agreed that a community college diploma was not equal to a university degree.
That made the colleges second-rate -- for losers only -- and ever since they have been trying to break away from the technological role they were intended to fill. They are now called "Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology" and most of them now emphasize courses in arts or some form of administration.
Most arts courses are of little use but some teachers claim that they "teach you to think." Most students, on the other hand, know that the way to get good marks is to show how one can rationalize the teachers' conclusions from the teachers' premises. All students know that it is not wise to question either the premises or the conclusions, and many of the "best" students actually believe them.
Even if students do not learn anything useful our tradition promises graduates soft and well-paid jobs. Trudeau's and later governments filled the need by "creating" jobs with grants, and by expanding the federal and provincial governments.
That was a political decision and many of the jobs were an up-scale form of workfare, planned to fit the training of the people who needed jobs rather than the needs of the economy. Unfortunately, most of the students had been trained to produce cost goods.
Now we know that we can no longer afford make-work jobs but politicians still promise "job creation" and young Canadians still go to university for educations they hope will launch them into management, even though we have very little to manage.
High school graduates go to university because teachers tell them they need degrees. Vocational guidance teachers are supposed to advise students but many teachers have no technical or practical skills themselves, and are not qualified to advise anyone about the real world. Raised to respect university degrees they encourage students to plan for a university education, in the fond hope that civil service sinecures will again become available some time in the future.
A few years ago I met a young English truck driver whose family owned a fleet of about 40 big trucks and several warehouses. When he quit school at 16 to work as a truck driver his teacher tried to convince him to stay.[3]
Because a teen-ager can not legally drive a big truck in England the company bought a specially-made medium truck that would drive like a big one -- and that cost about as much as three years' board and tuition in an a good private university -- for the boy to start with. When he went to work young Paul began a course of on-the-job training that was virtually guaranteed to land him in top management of a company worth quite a few million dollars, but all the teacher could see was that he was going to drive a truck.
He could have finished his "education" and then gone to work for the family company but, had he done that, he would not have learned anything about trucking or warehousing. By starting as a truck driver he began to learn the business from the ground up, and to earn the respect of the men who now work for his father and grandfather and who will someday work for him.
And he has earned respect. A few years after Paul started work he won a national "tarping and roping" contest, in which drivers compete to tie a load safely to a truck and cover it with a secure tarpaulin. He's also an expert driver and while I was visiting an older driver came with us on one trip to see how Paul could weave a big truck through a very narrow and winding lane. The older driver had more time on the job, but Paul was known to be one of the few who could take a truck through this particular lane.
If Paul had a degree from Oxford no trucker would listen to anything he said about any aspect of trucking. Because he learned from the ground up, and because he is an acknowledged expert, even old hands trust his judgment.
With a pretense of facing reality Canadian university students are now switching from general arts to commerce and business administration courses -- but what will they administer? If there are no trained workers to work in factories, there will be no factories to run.
Now the big deal in education is computers, and we all hear about the lack of computer-trained craftsmen. That's a half truth.
We hear there is a lack of machinists to run numerical-controlled machines, for example, and the promoters of "education" tell us we need more computer training. They miss the point that the need is for machinists, not for computer programmers.
We have lots of unemployed programmers, but very few unemployed machinists. Many modern machine tools can be controlled by computers but they are still machine tools and the man who programs the computers must know what the tools can do, and how they do it. He must, in other words, be capable of running the machine himself.
If the programmer can't do the job himself he can't program a machine to do it, but a man who can run the machine can learn to program it. Some industrial robots are programmed by "walking" them through the job they are to do. In a "walk through" a man who knows the job guides the robot, and the robot memorizes the moves. The man must know the job very well, but he doesn't have to know anything about programming.
Industries are founded and built by people who can make things, not by administrators. Henry Ford, Louis Chevrolet, Walter Chrysler and other giants of the automotive history were all machinists and mechanics first, and businessmen second. The Wright brothers never finished high school but they learned to make and repair bicycles, and they hand-built the engine that powered their first airplane.
Vic De Zen, founder of the billion-dollar Royal Plastics group that now spreads around the world, is a tool and die maker. So is Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International with 24,000 employees and sales of more than $4.5 billion a year. Thomas Edison had only three months of schooling.
None of these men had much "education" and if they had to lead a Greek army through Asia they would probably make the same mistakes Alexander the Great did. On the other hand, most modern students could learn more by studying their lives than by reading about kings and conquerors.
USELESS TRIVIA
My parents spent a small fortune to send me to an exclusive private boarding school, and the money was a total waste.
When I left school I knew nothing much that was useful and I had a lot of dumb ideas that were worse than useless. Among the lessons I learned at school I think the most important, and the most harmful, was that I learned to procrastinate. The teachers called it "paying attention" but what they taught was that anything I considered interesting or important had to be put off while I fiddled with the dreary trivia they afflicted me with.
Even though I wound up working as a journalist, which is very much like being a student, I would have learned more if I had apprenticed for a trade than I did as a student in school.
Working as an education writer and dealing with people who study education I learned that the most important part of our education is informal inter-action between peers, and the way we model on adults.
The boarding school I went to was expensive and most of the students were the sons of successful men. If they had stayed home their adult male models would have been men who understood the world and, in many cases, the men who control it.
At school their adult models were teachers, some of whom had very good paper qualifications but most of whom had chosen a dead-end career as a teacher over active participation in the real world.
We had a couple of teachers who stayed only a couple of years and moved on -- one to become a multi-millionaire businessman and a Premiere of Ontario -- but because they moved on they never got much seniority in the school. The most senior teachers and the most dominant role models were those who had chosen the dead end for themselves.
Some schools pretend to teach "practical" subjects but I question the wisdom of trying to learn any practical subject in school.
If we want to study ancient Greek literature we go to school, because there is no practical use for a knowledge of ancient Greek literature and scholars who know nothing else have no way to make a living but to teach school.
But the study of -- for example -- marketing is quite different. Anyone who is good at marketing can make much more money in private industry than he can as a school-teacher. Because of that we have to assume that people who teach marketing in schools probably do it because they are not good enough to succeed in real-life marketing.
The school won't know about that, of course, because teachers are hired by administrators who check paper but may not themselves understand the subject to be taught and who are not qualified to judge the teacher's qualifications. Some students may realize that their teacher does not know what he's talking about, but if they want to pass the course they will pretend to respect him.
Even if the teacher was once good enough to make it in a real world he is not in the mainstream of the business and I have to assume he is not current.
It is also possible that a teacher knows marketing well but there are no jobs for marketing grads, so he has to teach school. When we have a surplus of "experts" the ones who can't get jobs may become teachers and turn out more "experts."
That really does happen. Nearly ten years ago a friend of mine who already had a degree in computer science was "re-trained," at government expense, as an "instrument mechanic." There was a need for instrument mechanics but none of the 20 students in my friend's class got jobs after graduation, because the type of instruments they were trained to service were obsolete before the course began. One technician who had not been able to keep up with the industry had found a way to recycle his outmoded skill.
In most cases we could learn more and better as apprentices or understudies than as students. If I want to learn marketing, for example, do I want to spend three years studying it under a teacher who may not be good enough at marketing to get a job in it himself?
I would do better to start as a trainee in a good marketing firm or in the marketing department of a big company. If the company is willing to hire me I know they think there will be work for me as a marketer. Because I will see my teachers' success as marketers in the real world I will know how well they understand marketing.
That's the ideal but when 20 people apply for one opening in a marketing firm and nineteen of them have degrees in marketing, the one that has no degree is not likely to get the job. That's a pity because he might have the best natural talent and the 19 who have degrees may have learned nothing useful. In fact the school may have given them misconceptions and wrong ideas which could make them less useful than someone with no training at all.
A former accountant told me about the students she used to hire. In most cases, she said, high school students were brighter, showed more initiative and learned faster than students who were part way through courses in accounting.
As a journalist I have been personally appalled by the trend to specialized schooling for reporters. In days gone by most newspapers and magazines trained their own reporters, on the job. There wasn't much unemployment among journalists in those days because newspapers trained only the reporters they could use, and the supply of trained reporters generally matched the jobs available.
Now reporters are trained in schools of journalism. With government and tuition paying the bills the schools can and will train all the students they can lure into a course, and between them they graduate far more "trained" journalists than newspapers can hire.
Most journalism grads will never get jobs in "their" field, and most of those who do will work for low wages. As a reporter on a small-city newspaper more than 30 years ago, I was able to buy a house for slightly less than one year's salary. Now, a young reporter on a small-city paper would be hard-pressed to buy a new car on one year's salary.
In a perfect world the schools would train only enough students to fill the need, but that's obviously impossible. As long as schools offer free choice of courses we have to expect students to sign up for the courses they think will lead to the top jobs.
And even if we could limit the openings in school no-one knows exactly how many jobs and what kind of jobs are open now, let alone what will be open three or four years in the future.
Some Canadians think Manpower Canada tracks jobs as part of its function as the national employment agency, but that is an illusion. In fact Manpower Canada knows only about jobs that are hired through its own offices, and most private business does not deal with it. Manpower Canada never listed more than about 25% of all the jobs in Canada, and at times the level drops as low as 10%.[4]
Governments and government contractors have to hire through Manpower and that may help to create the illusion that there are more jobs for people with academic training than for people with practical skills. Like the Chinese administrators who were hired on the basis of poetry and penmanship, Canadian civil servants are not chosen for either practical knowledge or useful skills.
But even if the schools knew what jobs would be open when their students graduated, on-the-job training would still have the advantage that it would sort out mistakes faster. When I went to work on a newspaper I started as a reporter, and I discovered very quickly what the job was like. As it turned out I enjoyed it, and I did well enough that the newspaper I started with -- and later other newspapers -- were willing to keep me.
Most journalism schools have their own make-believe newspapers but they are school papers, not the real thing. After three or four years of school, journalism students have three or four years' experience as students but none as journalists.
That's a shame because the students have invested three years of their lives in the training and they still don't know if they will like journalism or if they are suited for it. All they know is that they like school, and that they can pass courses.
But they are not trained journalists, and the quality of many modern papers proves it. One important difference is that students get through school by believing what they are told, but a good journalist knows that many "sources" will distort a story for their own ends.
Another difference is that students who run school papers learn to bow to the dictates of teachers and school officials. That may be one reason why so many modern newspapers bow so submissively to the demands of government officials, and of advertisers.
With cheap education almost any student can train for almost any job and most students like to think they will get the jobs they train for. That's a nice dream but the sad fact is that there are not enough soft and "interesting" jobs to go round, especially in an economy that is failing for lack of productive workers.
Personally, I would like to be president of General Motors. Dozens of schools offer training that might qualify me for the job but, unfortunately, General Motors already has a president.
Hundreds of Canadian companies need skilled workers but they're hard to find because most of our schools are training people to be company presidents. If General Motors and other manufacturers did their own training things would be different, because students would face reality much earlier.
In the present world you can spend three years and tens of thousands of dollars training to be president of GM before you find out they already have a president -- and by the time you face reality it may be too late to retrain.
In a world of apprenticeship training you could wait until they are ready to hire a trainee for the president's job, or you could start work tomorrow as an apprentice machinist.
The training you get as an apprentice may be better than you would get in school because schoolwork is always make-believe but the training of an apprentice is real. Students in school don't have to be serious about either their projects or their choices because most of what they learn in school has little bearing on real life and in many courses they can fake their way through exams. For some, at least, the habit of faking things persist. Apprentices work and learn in the real world, and the decisions they make in training are real.
In a vital economy training as a machinist could lead to the president's office -- as it did for Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers and others. In his book Adventures of a Bystander management guru Peter Drucker reports that in the 1930's, 40's and 50's -- when General Motors was the world's leading car-maker -- most GM executives started as factory workers. The few who had university degrees did not talk about them.[5]
But in a world of formal schooling, practical training is a dead end. If university graduates control management they will make sure no non-graduate rises to their level.
And we maintain the myth that our unemployment problems are caused by lack of education. If everybody had a degree, school promoters say, we would not have unemployment.
Maybe so, but in October of 1997 a survey of universities by The Economist magazine found that in 1995 about 40% of Canadians went on to post secondary education compared with about 35% in the States, 25% in France and 10% in Germany. From 1985 to 1994 the percentage of Canadians who got post secondary education rose from about 30% to nearly 40% but in Sweden it kept steady at about 18% and in Germany it dropped.[6]
And how does our "educational advantage" show up in wages? The Canadian Labor Congress defines "low pay" as less than two thirds of the median wage for a full time job. According to a survey by the CLC 23.7% of Canadians and 25% of Americans are "low paid," but only 13.3% of Germans and 5.2% of Swedes. Somehow, the co-relation between university education and high wages does not seem to work the way it's supposed to.[7]
So where do we get the idea that more education leads to higher wages? We learn it in school!
One result of the over-education and under-training of Canadians is the so-called brain drain to the United States. Because we have more educated people than jobs for them in Canada, and because wages for educated people here are relatively low, we now have a flood of expensively-educated Canadians moving to jobs in the US. According to a story in Time Magazine Don Devoretz, an economist from Simon Fraser University who has been hired by the C.D. Howe Institute to study the problem, says that over-education creates a "long-term competitive disadvantage" for Canadian industry.[8]
He says our situation is equivalent to "having one major university in the business of exclusively training students for the U.S."
Education is big business and the Numbers Game makes it look like an important part of our economy, but many of the people who have contributed most to our real wealth have had relatively little formal education. Educators tell us that education is a good thing, but the evidence of the real world shows that, in many cases, practical training is better.