A Ray Peat newsletter, December 1990.

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Years ago, I was told by our state Superintendent of Public Instruction that “what students know has nothing to do with education.” Since then I have occasionally wondered how many other people with responsibility for education have such a clear awareness of their social function. Many teachers and professors, who emphatically claim that education has something to do with knowledge, nevertheless will claim that there is no objective way to measure knowledge. Many of these teachers will base their students' grades on examinations, yet it is rare for a school or college to allow a student to take those same exams for full credit without enrolling in the course. Several professions require an examination to qualify for a license to practice, yet will administer the test only to people who have the appropriate degrees, as if the examination (which excludes a fair number of degree-holding applicants) were unable to exclude those with inadequate knowledge.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has done another study, this time showing that U.S. college seniors generally don't know very much. In their earlier study, they found that the average young person in the U.S. knew less about the world than people of the same age in Mexico, Italy, and all the other nations studied. I suppose this country spends at least 50 times as much on “education” as Mexico does. Dr. Koop has pointed out that “health care” in the U.S. is deteriorating, at the same time that its cost is increasing. Just as he proposes that medicine should adopt the serious and objective concern for performance that exists in baseball, I would propose the same for education.

The fear of objectivity in education and in the professions has to do with power. When a professor has secret criteria, his judgment can't be challenged. If his assumptions are unfounded, a student could embarrass him by examining them. But, in a system which requires an accumulation of course-credits, good students quickly learn what is expected of them, and after a few years of learning not to question the assumptions of their “discipline,” they are ready to become like their teacher.

Listening to an expert talk about a subject is often a good way to learn, but having your understanding judged by that same expert is very likely to inhibit a spirit of objective inquiry. Separating evaluation from instruction can make a tremendous difference in education. Students and teachers can disagree, and still have a sense of working together. Venerable dogmas and stylish trends can remain in the curriculum, but their mystique is likely to evaporate. Even textbooks are likely to change, because they are now designed to serve the teachers (who select them) rather than the students who use them. Whether the subject is music, or math, or language, or physics, textbooks are likely to be instruments for maintaining a mystique, rather than for directly communicating an understanding of the subject. Vague or fragmentary definitions of terms and symbols often make the subject seem more mysterious than it is.

I have seen teachers present in a day the material that they would normally teach in a semester or two, and it seemed that their students grasped the subject as a whole more clearly than the conventional students who attended dozens of lectures. This was in the early 1960s, at Blake College. This school has been described as a prototype for the experimental college movement of the 1960s, but my intention in creating it was to demonstrate what can happen when students are not required to conform to the cultishly departmentalized attitudes toward knowledge which dominate most schools and universities. Simply by letting the students know that professionalism was not sacred, they were allowed to see how easy it is to master the information which is normally so laboriously and pompously inculcated.

In a miniature way, my composition class at Montana State (1965–66) demonstrated the same process. The department “required” each instructor of freshman composition to grade according to department rules, subtracting so many points for misuse of a comma, or for using the wrong part of speech, or misspelling, etc., with the result that 50% of the students failed the course. A few weeks into winter quarter, I decided that the procedure was just too pointless and degrading, for both students and teachers, and I told my classes that I was going to ignore their grammar and spelling and punctuation when I decided on grades for their papers (though I still pointed out the conventional errors), but that I was going to grade on the content of what they said. If they communicated something of interest, they would get a good grade, but if they kept writing on the level of a grade-school child (which they did in an effort to keep the mechanics of writing simple, hoping to minimize errors) I would give them an F. They immediately started to write more interestingly and more complexly, and the errors in grammar dropped sharply, so that nearly all of them were passing even by the stupid departmental requirements. That spring, the university solicited grant applications for research projects to improve education, so I submitted a description of my class, with before-and-after examples of the student's writing, to demonstrate the dramatic improvement. Only one other person, out of the 40 teachers in the department, would talk about the idea of writing for content; I'm sure that the department chairman didn't forward my proposal to the committee that had solicited research proposals, since so many of the old-timers in the department were committed to the idea that the department's “standards” would be lowered if they didn't fail half of the freshmen. (Incidentally, the courses were called “Communication 121,” etc., so I argued that it was proper to grade the students on the basis of communication, rather than form.) Since then, I have heard many people justify various “educational” ordeals, by saying “that would be like a child trying to learn to speak before learning the alphabet,” or something to that effect. Their examples usually make exactly the point they oppose; for example, it would be a seriously distorted child who learned the alphabet before learning to speak. And much of our educational system, at various levels, is devoted to just that kind of distortion.

Unless the dogmatic power of “the authorities” is replaced by some objective standards of knowledge and skill, public knowledge will continue to deteriorate. Our interactions with the environment, with each other, and with other nations will continue to deteriorate. Public health and the standard of living will deteriorate, unless knowledge is treated with the same seriousness as the skill of athletes.