Gosh. Your posts are always so thought provoking Daisy. I’d hate to get into an argument with you as I feel I’d come off looking like the amateur that I am. Knowledge is King (or Queen). As a retired teacher still very much interested in the education of young people, I sometimes read something about the curriculum or PISA results and I think, “but what would Daisy say?” You are inspiring. Keep thinking, keep writing, keep pushing.
I have always been a big fan of the Northcote-Trevelyan report on meritocratic and anti-corruption grounds, but this post has made me re-examine some of my assumptions!
As a slight counterpoint, I would observe that I once read the Indian Civil Service exams from the late 19th century, and while there was some Greek in there, there were also questions on Hinduism, the history of India and so forth. And the modern Fast Stream assessments do seek to assess skills in policy making and similar.
In the next few posts I will write a lot more about how N-T was implemented. I have been very influenced by Michael Coolican's book, No Tradesmen and Women.
Daisy’s post sent me to look at fast stream assessments today. The ones that are online are so bland and content-thin that they actually made me long for some Thucydides! :)
This is absolutely fascinating and made me think a lot about the current exam system. As someone who excelled at passing exams at school and early university, and has not excelled at anything at all, ever in the real world ever since, I learned the hard way that passing exams is not a life-skill.
H L Mencken wrote a piece pouring scorn on the then-new requirement that police officers in Baltimore take a civil service exam to be hired. He remarked that in his youthful days as a police reporter, he had never met a cop who could spell, then proceeded to describe the complex skills that an officer had to master and exercise daily in order to police the Baltimore waterfront. It was yet another case in his ongoing campaign of contempt for the fecklessness of educated do-gooders who could not even conceive of those skills, much less hope to exercise them. I learned this myself working in a butcher shop as a teenager in the mid-sized Midwestern city where I grew up. As was explained to me by a colleague who had lost two fingers in the exercise of his chosen profession, “school-smart ain’t everything”. Half a century later, It is a lesson that has endured even as all my trigonometry and calculus has faded away.
I agree with your conclusions that knowledge is important and that transferable skills might not be as transferable as people think. That said, I think your presentation of the logic behind the civil service exam slightly misses the point its proponents were making. I think they were arguing, in essence, that if you get everyone to study the same thing, and if that thing is a proxy for general intelligence and diligence, then whoever is best at it is likely to be the most intelligent and/or diligent and is therefore likely to be the best person to employ in a role that makes demands on general intelligence and diligence. That’s true as far as it goes. Where that falters, however, is that being “the best” in those circumstances doesn’t necessarily equate to being “good” at the job you go on to do. If everyone competes for the acquisition of falsehoods (e.g. alchemy) then even the best are sub-optimally trained for whatever life in the civil service might throw at them, but maybe their intellect and application will see them through better than the next candidate precisely because s/he is equally sub-optimally trained. As you point out, if a cohort emerges that is studying something different and more useful, this logic breaks down, which I think is why its proponents insisted on everyone studying the same thing.
Apologies for nit-picking, especially as I fully agree with you about the importance of knowledge. While general intelligence exists, how it is harnessed matters, and skills are dependent on knowledge for their useful application. Training our best young minds in the acquisition of Cherokee, for example, would be an enormous missed opportunity to teach them knowledge that would be far more useful to them in the lives they go on to lead.
I started work in engineering and later moved into computing. I used to say to people that Latin (which I did to O Level) was a better preparation for computing than maths, which usually got me some weird stares. But I stand by that view. On the other hand, Latin didn’t help me at all with engineering whereas maths did. Some things have unexpected relevance in other fields, but it doesn’t mean that the Classics are a general superpower, any more than are the sciences.
The liberal arts were conceived as leadership training for well-born Romans whose function in life was to be commanders of men, administrators of provinces, and effective participants in republican government filled with aggressive and unscrupulous peers. Saint Augustine had this education as a young man, before he became one of history’s deepest philosophers, so when the Vandals came to the walls of his city in his old age, he was the one to go out and persuade them not to sack the place. This education is valuable for formation of the mind, but also domain knowledge.
Interesting! How come? Because Latin was taught as a formal system, just like programming? I'm going to guess you weren't taught stuff like (say) axiomatic Euclidean geometry or axiomatic set theory?
I should really write an article on this at some point: I don’t want to drag the comments here off-topic. My reasoning is that Latin has a lot of rules, but also a lot of exceptions, which you have to memorise and not get tripped up by. Most common programming languages are similar. Because computing literally means “calculation”, there’s an assumption that it has a mathematical basis, and courses in it tend to be housed in science faculties. In practice, you don’t need higher maths to be able to write programs in the line-of-business arena. It is a relatively young field, and many of the people in it, until recently, have moved to it from other jobs, not all with a technical or numerical background, and people from either source can do well in it. I should point out that I’m in my 5th year of retirement, and I don’t really know how the use of AI (which hadn’t got started when I was working) has affected this.
Putting the question “Does the existence of polymaths (those who display remarkable expertise across seemingly unrelated areas) suggest that there’s something of value in skills transferability ideas?” to ChatGPT returned this:
“The existence of polymaths suggests that education should develop both substantial domain knowledge and the capacity to recognise and exploit connections between domains.
However, the transfer of expertise is not guaranteed by teaching generic thinking skills, since effective transfer often depends on possessing the specific knowledge needed to recognise when a familiar method can be successfully applied in a new context.
The practical implication is not to choose between knowledge and transferable skills. It is to teach knowledge deeply enough that people can recognise underlying structures, then deliberately practise applying what they have learned in new but intellectually meaningful contexts”
It then goes on to suggest that "Structural Analogy" (A sort of “where have I seen this before?”- for example biology’s natural selection compared to evolution of a technology) could be explicitly taught in secondary schools as a separate unit and a few other suggestions that are already partially implemented in schools – if the aim is borrow from the polymath.
Really interesting article and I agree with most of it. However, within the civil service policy profession, I do think there is a specific set of knowledge and skills that can be employed across a range of policy areas (eg: knowledge of government finance, understanding the Government decision making process, different levers to deliver policy outcomes). I would not describe these as transferable skills. Of course, domain knowledge is important too!
I have a masters degree in all of these things and this education was very useful in understanding the environment I worked in when I subsequently became a manager in
government service. At the same time, some of the most effective and admirable people I worked with had none of this background. I particularly think of one who had been a Catholic priest, who had designed, funded, and administered an evidence-based lead abatement program through which he saved the lives of little children every day. I did good work that I’m proud of, but it seems rather insignificant by comparison.
As another fan of NT I am also having to reconsider. I will say that the current civil service we have is reflective of how we run government. Expertise is not valued because very few departments directly run services. Other countries have a more independent civil service with less direct ministerial contro but more accountability for civil servantsl. Also, from the government's perspective, failed experiments like NHS England seem to show the limits of cultivating expertise in specialist organisations. Excited to read the rest of your series!
Re the coloured hammers : Straw Man fallacy masquerading as reductio ad absurdum. The interesting issue is where the distinction lies between what sorts of things are transferable and what is not. It’s clearly not at “none” or “all”. The general belief is that it’s nearer the “lots” end of the spectrum than the “few” end. But I think this is not true.
Sorting always risks adverse selection (e.g., my father is bright but shouldn't be allowed to work with electricity), moral hazard (labeling leads to entitlement), and unintended consequences (lack of relevant knowledge). More pragmatically, the technocracy tends to be arrogant by nature (take your pick from McNamara, Fauci, etc.). Until they run into the Peter Principle.
How to combine humility with real critical thinking, which is where training in logic and evidence gathering analysis comes in, and the recognition of the need to make decisions under uncertainty and time pressure? Instead we get politicians doing shade tree social engineering that skips the pilot stage and mandarin bureaucrats serving their own ideology or plain old empire building. As my general counsel said, "You can't teach judgement." Maybe, and maybe through practice or starting them on small-stakes decisions and seeing who makes good decisions.
That said, within organizations the problems do all seem to be very similar, whether for-profit, non-profit (a tax status), or government (add guns), plus managers have both carrot and stick, and natural selection is in effect. The problem comes when we try to push nature, including human nature, or society around. As a general manager, I would use the technique of the "go-round" to ensure I got everyone's perspective, and I always thought very hard before I did anything that affected the whole company, had contingency plans (Risks & Mitigants), and quickly changed course when I made a mistake. How do we learn? The hard way :-)
Anybody arguing against transfer has to deal with the fact that their view has fundamentally absurd implications.
And furthermore most people have an agenda. The agenda of Thorndike and the progressives was to destroy the academic curriculum. They succeeded.
Now anti transfer proponents have their sights aimed at the progressives themselves and their higher order skills which were exactly the things they pushed to replace the academic curriculum.
This is ironic. But an extreme anti transfer argument is both incoherent and a kind of educational version of nihilism. If you really believe it education is pointless.
Given the massive success of the British civil service in ruling the world and the failure of Americans it appears there is something to the idea of transferable skills.
Maybe translating texts in Latin is a good idea. But teaching so called critical thinking isn't.
I don't think we suddenly got worse at it as a result of these reforms; the Empire lasted another 100 years and the events that ended it were the World Wars and withdrawal of US support after Suez. More on topic, you could argue (as I think Orwell did) that the way the British establishment was educated hindered their ability to wage war effectively in the modern age ( "modern" as in "before I was born" 🙂) Also, I think the USA is, as a nation of rebel colonists, inherently against imperial governance and doesn't like sticking around to clear up after involving itself in civil wars in other countries.
As an American, I reflect that we are indeed clumsy imperialists, but good at other things that seem to have been found valuable to others. The Pax Americana is ending now, so it will be up to the historians to judge it in the wider perspective terms of what comes after.
Fascinating read. It is even worse in high education/PhD when the current system not only do not train them appropriately, but deliberately blunt the students and desensitize them to the real world
Gosh. Your posts are always so thought provoking Daisy. I’d hate to get into an argument with you as I feel I’d come off looking like the amateur that I am. Knowledge is King (or Queen). As a retired teacher still very much interested in the education of young people, I sometimes read something about the curriculum or PISA results and I think, “but what would Daisy say?” You are inspiring. Keep thinking, keep writing, keep pushing.
Thank you!
I have always been a big fan of the Northcote-Trevelyan report on meritocratic and anti-corruption grounds, but this post has made me re-examine some of my assumptions!
As a slight counterpoint, I would observe that I once read the Indian Civil Service exams from the late 19th century, and while there was some Greek in there, there were also questions on Hinduism, the history of India and so forth. And the modern Fast Stream assessments do seek to assess skills in policy making and similar.
In the next few posts I will write a lot more about how N-T was implemented. I have been very influenced by Michael Coolican's book, No Tradesmen and Women.
Daisy’s post sent me to look at fast stream assessments today. The ones that are online are so bland and content-thin that they actually made me long for some Thucydides! :)
https://www.civil-service-careers.gov.uk/fast-stream/fs-how-to-apply/fs-online-tests
This is absolutely fascinating and made me think a lot about the current exam system. As someone who excelled at passing exams at school and early university, and has not excelled at anything at all, ever in the real world ever since, I learned the hard way that passing exams is not a life-skill.
In other words, Macaulay discovered IQ and conscientiousness before those were a thing.
H L Mencken wrote a piece pouring scorn on the then-new requirement that police officers in Baltimore take a civil service exam to be hired. He remarked that in his youthful days as a police reporter, he had never met a cop who could spell, then proceeded to describe the complex skills that an officer had to master and exercise daily in order to police the Baltimore waterfront. It was yet another case in his ongoing campaign of contempt for the fecklessness of educated do-gooders who could not even conceive of those skills, much less hope to exercise them. I learned this myself working in a butcher shop as a teenager in the mid-sized Midwestern city where I grew up. As was explained to me by a colleague who had lost two fingers in the exercise of his chosen profession, “school-smart ain’t everything”. Half a century later, It is a lesson that has endured even as all my trigonometry and calculus has faded away.
I agree with your conclusions that knowledge is important and that transferable skills might not be as transferable as people think. That said, I think your presentation of the logic behind the civil service exam slightly misses the point its proponents were making. I think they were arguing, in essence, that if you get everyone to study the same thing, and if that thing is a proxy for general intelligence and diligence, then whoever is best at it is likely to be the most intelligent and/or diligent and is therefore likely to be the best person to employ in a role that makes demands on general intelligence and diligence. That’s true as far as it goes. Where that falters, however, is that being “the best” in those circumstances doesn’t necessarily equate to being “good” at the job you go on to do. If everyone competes for the acquisition of falsehoods (e.g. alchemy) then even the best are sub-optimally trained for whatever life in the civil service might throw at them, but maybe their intellect and application will see them through better than the next candidate precisely because s/he is equally sub-optimally trained. As you point out, if a cohort emerges that is studying something different and more useful, this logic breaks down, which I think is why its proponents insisted on everyone studying the same thing.
Apologies for nit-picking, especially as I fully agree with you about the importance of knowledge. While general intelligence exists, how it is harnessed matters, and skills are dependent on knowledge for their useful application. Training our best young minds in the acquisition of Cherokee, for example, would be an enormous missed opportunity to teach them knowledge that would be far more useful to them in the lives they go on to lead.
I started work in engineering and later moved into computing. I used to say to people that Latin (which I did to O Level) was a better preparation for computing than maths, which usually got me some weird stares. But I stand by that view. On the other hand, Latin didn’t help me at all with engineering whereas maths did. Some things have unexpected relevance in other fields, but it doesn’t mean that the Classics are a general superpower, any more than are the sciences.
The liberal arts were conceived as leadership training for well-born Romans whose function in life was to be commanders of men, administrators of provinces, and effective participants in republican government filled with aggressive and unscrupulous peers. Saint Augustine had this education as a young man, before he became one of history’s deepest philosophers, so when the Vandals came to the walls of his city in his old age, he was the one to go out and persuade them not to sack the place. This education is valuable for formation of the mind, but also domain knowledge.
Interesting! How come? Because Latin was taught as a formal system, just like programming? I'm going to guess you weren't taught stuff like (say) axiomatic Euclidean geometry or axiomatic set theory?
I should really write an article on this at some point: I don’t want to drag the comments here off-topic. My reasoning is that Latin has a lot of rules, but also a lot of exceptions, which you have to memorise and not get tripped up by. Most common programming languages are similar. Because computing literally means “calculation”, there’s an assumption that it has a mathematical basis, and courses in it tend to be housed in science faculties. In practice, you don’t need higher maths to be able to write programs in the line-of-business arena. It is a relatively young field, and many of the people in it, until recently, have moved to it from other jobs, not all with a technical or numerical background, and people from either source can do well in it. I should point out that I’m in my 5th year of retirement, and I don’t really know how the use of AI (which hadn’t got started when I was working) has affected this.
Putting the question “Does the existence of polymaths (those who display remarkable expertise across seemingly unrelated areas) suggest that there’s something of value in skills transferability ideas?” to ChatGPT returned this:
“The existence of polymaths suggests that education should develop both substantial domain knowledge and the capacity to recognise and exploit connections between domains.
However, the transfer of expertise is not guaranteed by teaching generic thinking skills, since effective transfer often depends on possessing the specific knowledge needed to recognise when a familiar method can be successfully applied in a new context.
The practical implication is not to choose between knowledge and transferable skills. It is to teach knowledge deeply enough that people can recognise underlying structures, then deliberately practise applying what they have learned in new but intellectually meaningful contexts”
It then goes on to suggest that "Structural Analogy" (A sort of “where have I seen this before?”- for example biology’s natural selection compared to evolution of a technology) could be explicitly taught in secondary schools as a separate unit and a few other suggestions that are already partially implemented in schools – if the aim is borrow from the polymath.
Really interesting article and I agree with most of it. However, within the civil service policy profession, I do think there is a specific set of knowledge and skills that can be employed across a range of policy areas (eg: knowledge of government finance, understanding the Government decision making process, different levers to deliver policy outcomes). I would not describe these as transferable skills. Of course, domain knowledge is important too!
I have a masters degree in all of these things and this education was very useful in understanding the environment I worked in when I subsequently became a manager in
government service. At the same time, some of the most effective and admirable people I worked with had none of this background. I particularly think of one who had been a Catholic priest, who had designed, funded, and administered an evidence-based lead abatement program through which he saved the lives of little children every day. I did good work that I’m proud of, but it seems rather insignificant by comparison.
As another fan of NT I am also having to reconsider. I will say that the current civil service we have is reflective of how we run government. Expertise is not valued because very few departments directly run services. Other countries have a more independent civil service with less direct ministerial contro but more accountability for civil servantsl. Also, from the government's perspective, failed experiments like NHS England seem to show the limits of cultivating expertise in specialist organisations. Excited to read the rest of your series!
Re the coloured hammers : Straw Man fallacy masquerading as reductio ad absurdum. The interesting issue is where the distinction lies between what sorts of things are transferable and what is not. It’s clearly not at “none” or “all”. The general belief is that it’s nearer the “lots” end of the spectrum than the “few” end. But I think this is not true.
Macaulay was clearly just making a neo-Caplanian argument about signalling 😋
Sorting always risks adverse selection (e.g., my father is bright but shouldn't be allowed to work with electricity), moral hazard (labeling leads to entitlement), and unintended consequences (lack of relevant knowledge). More pragmatically, the technocracy tends to be arrogant by nature (take your pick from McNamara, Fauci, etc.). Until they run into the Peter Principle.
How to combine humility with real critical thinking, which is where training in logic and evidence gathering analysis comes in, and the recognition of the need to make decisions under uncertainty and time pressure? Instead we get politicians doing shade tree social engineering that skips the pilot stage and mandarin bureaucrats serving their own ideology or plain old empire building. As my general counsel said, "You can't teach judgement." Maybe, and maybe through practice or starting them on small-stakes decisions and seeing who makes good decisions.
That said, within organizations the problems do all seem to be very similar, whether for-profit, non-profit (a tax status), or government (add guns), plus managers have both carrot and stick, and natural selection is in effect. The problem comes when we try to push nature, including human nature, or society around. As a general manager, I would use the technique of the "go-round" to ensure I got everyone's perspective, and I always thought very hard before I did anything that affected the whole company, had contingency plans (Risks & Mitigants), and quickly changed course when I made a mistake. How do we learn? The hard way :-)
Anybody arguing against transfer has to deal with the fact that their view has fundamentally absurd implications.
And furthermore most people have an agenda. The agenda of Thorndike and the progressives was to destroy the academic curriculum. They succeeded.
Now anti transfer proponents have their sights aimed at the progressives themselves and their higher order skills which were exactly the things they pushed to replace the academic curriculum.
This is ironic. But an extreme anti transfer argument is both incoherent and a kind of educational version of nihilism. If you really believe it education is pointless.
Given the massive success of the British civil service in ruling the world and the failure of Americans it appears there is something to the idea of transferable skills.
Maybe translating texts in Latin is a good idea. But teaching so called critical thinking isn't.
Do you think post 1854 Britain was massively successful at ruling the world?
I don't think we suddenly got worse at it as a result of these reforms; the Empire lasted another 100 years and the events that ended it were the World Wars and withdrawal of US support after Suez. More on topic, you could argue (as I think Orwell did) that the way the British establishment was educated hindered their ability to wage war effectively in the modern age ( "modern" as in "before I was born" 🙂) Also, I think the USA is, as a nation of rebel colonists, inherently against imperial governance and doesn't like sticking around to clear up after involving itself in civil wars in other countries.
As an American, I reflect that we are indeed clumsy imperialists, but good at other things that seem to have been found valuable to others. The Pax Americana is ending now, so it will be up to the historians to judge it in the wider perspective terms of what comes after.
Fascinating read. It is even worse in high education/PhD when the current system not only do not train them appropriately, but deliberately blunt the students and desensitize them to the real world