Doctors seem to diagnose what they know, so find out what they know before you ask them whats wrong with you.

Roger Schank

I have written before about the problems that learning outcomes fail to deal with (Jorge Luis Borges and learning outcomes), but there is another cognate issue that bugs me from time to time. The following is a quote from The Undercover Economist in the FT

Should the rules and targets we set up be precise, clear and sophisticated? Or should they be vague, ambiguous and crude? I used to think that the answer was obvious — who would favour ambiguity over clarity? Now I am not so sure. Ponder the scandal that engulfed Volkswagen in late 2015, when it emerged that the company had been cheating on US emissions tests. What made such cheating possible was the fact that the tests were absurdly predictable — a series of pre-determined manoeuvres on a treadmill.

I think there is a very clear downside to making too precise what it is that students should learn. I actually think we need noise in the system, simply because assessment methods are imperfect and unnatural, and the more you seek particular psychometric qualities the greater the distance between what is important and what and how you test. This is not a popular position to take, and I confess I am one of the worst offenders in terms of producing tightly defined content. But if:

assessment drives learning

the I would add, to make a couplet

assessment wrecks learning

At a lecture following the publication of his book, Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air, he was assailed by an angry environmentalist who asked him why he was “so hostile” to wind power. [Prof David] MacKay smiled sweetly and replied: “I’m not hostile to anything. I’m just in favour of arithmetic.”

I remember reading this awhile back, but came across it again on Memex

From an obituary of George Klein in Nature. If you have ever thought about cancer, his thoughts have touched yours.

In 1957, a chair was created for him in tumour biology, a research field that he had helped to establish. The department of tumour biology that ensued was international and influential. Most of today’s leading cancer researchers who are over 50 have had some interaction with George and his department. Seven secretaries wrangled his large correspondence. He invented social media before the technology existed.

A telling phrase:

His last book, Resistance (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2015; published in Swedish), won the prestigious Gerard Bonnier prize for the best essay collection of that year. It deals with resistance to extremism and to cancer. Throughout his life, George was preoccupied with the thin borders between evil and good, and health and disease.

Here. But your knew this already. This is not about truth, or doing the right thing, but about power and the imposition of an ideology in which the natural world has to be subservient to a dogma. Most of all, this is not about improving education, but of an expansion of power and patronage. And money.

[Or see what Martin Wolf of the FT, has been saying in this week’s Time Higher]

Nice piece in ‘Science’ with the title: ‘No easy answers: What does it mean to ask whether a prekindergarten math program “works”?’ Geoff Norman, many years ago, used the term RCT in the context of medical education to stand for Randomised, Confounded and Trivial. Research into what works and what does not work in education is hard, and most studies (IMHO) fail to inform. Education isn’t a product like a drugs is, and gee it is hard to demonstrate when and where most drugs will work if you do not have an understanding of the biology and large effects to play with and outcomes that need to be measured over the long term.

I think about this a lot, but have no easy rules to guide action. Which is, of course, exactly the problem.

As one Credit Suisse analyst looking at the $35 billion industry put it, “it’s hard not to make a profit” in the for-profit education sector. The stock prices of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) reflected that; they rose more than 460 percent between 2000 and 2003 with much support from public subsidies. Their promotional budgets rose, too—Apollo recently spent more on marketing than Apple, the world’s richest company.

But education, sadly, did not benefit. As A.J. Angulo outlines in his detailed history of the for-profit sector, Diploma Mills, that’s because such schools [for profits] spend a large majority of their budgets not on teaching but on raising money and distributing it to investors. In 2009, for example, thirty leading FPCUs spent 17 percent of their budget on instruction and 42 percent on marketing to new students and paying out existing investors. Is it any wonder, then, that investigations into the industry from 2010 to 2012 found that while it represented only 12 percent of the post-secondary student population, it received a quarter of all federal aid disbursements and was responsible for 44 percent of all loan defaults, many of them by working-class students who either couldn’t afford to graduate or, once they did, found their degrees were largely useless in the marketplace?

NYRB

Employers outside academia place no financial value on skills or training acquired through a postdoc position, the study says.

Quoted in Nature

Remember the jokes about the only way to run an efficient hospital is to have one without any sick people? Well just read this, from an editorial by Martin McKee and colleagues in the BMJ. The context is what might be involved in any trade deals with the US and what US corporations would require:

They can be expected to look abroad, making the UK, with a struggling NHS, a tempting target. The UK prime minister, Theresa May, has not excluded the possibility of opening the NHS even further to them. At present, US corporations struggle to make a profit in the NHS. They would be unlikely to agree any deal that limited their ability to press for changes that would generate profits, such as excluding poor and ill people.

Not so long ago, at an internal meeting, the message was ‘things are tough for this year, and next, but after that all the tightening and discipline will pay off, and things will get back to normal’. I doubted that at the time, and stick to my conviction that things are going to get a lot worse for much Higher Education in the UK. There is plenty of blame to go around: institutions have preferred their own propaganda to reality; they have allowed their business (sic) to grow fat on subsidies; and they have lost touch with the academic ideal. Most of all, they have failed to keep with up the rate of societal and technological change — ironic, since this is a world that universities, more than any other institutions, created. As we can see so bluntly in medical education (for an egregious example, just read this recent editorial in the BMJ),  governments view universities not as meaningful components of a healthy society, but as providers who are required to do contract work for the government. The more the students have to pay for their own training rather than their own education, the better. The independence of many or most universities is illusory. They are like temporary post-docs, jumping from grant to grant, doomed to follow the ideas of others: renters not home owners. The institutional question remains: where do you position yourself? And how.

(Wonke has a little on some vibrations — aka shocks — that will only become bigger)