That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required.
Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable. The answer is to increase their value by increasing the amount of work required so that they will still be necessary to wade through it. I'm not sure how much this is sabotage and not just the result of electronic journals making this easier though, which is why the example in the paragraph above is far more relevant.
I am a math professor. This phenomenon of lengthening literature reviews doesn't exist in math, nor indeed have I ever seen mathematicians assign pointless busywork to sabotage others, or to inflate our own importance, or for any other reason.
Now the intrinsic value of research math as a whole may be debated, especially that of the bottom 90% of researchers (and I would not say I'm in the top 10%).
But I have really not observed math professors to be guilty of what you claim. Quite frankly, math itself is hard enough; there's no point in setting additional hoops for students to jump through. It would just make us look foolish, and waste our own time (in addition to that of others).
Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e).
That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipline wasn't anything scientific so needing math wasn't in my college curriculum (switched from business to psychology then to art and advertising). I took another class, Discrete Math, from the same teacher my senior year as an elective and absolutely loved it. I never skipped a day.
He was a great teacher, and the way his class was set up for grading and not really giving a shit about homework was perfect. If I were to ever teach math later, his format would be how I would do it.
"Math professor" probably means at the college or university level -- high school math is widely regarded as complete and utter BS.
I've taken... a rather significant pile of maths classes at this point (I'm majoring in it), and I've never felt like any of the college-level maths classes assigned busywork. I may not have liked the size of the workload (oh god, real analysis), but I've never felt it was unreasonable.
I think you're interpreting "math professor" as "school teacher", while others are talking about the tenured kind of professors. "Students" here are researchers, who do work potentially ostensibly for society, not just homework for their own education.
I worked at a government agency that circa 2005 was using paper timesheets. The timesheets were required to be printed on a specific shade of blue paper.
Hilarity ensued when some admin ordered "air force blue" paper instead of "power blue". The HR director decreed that only "power blue" would be accepted, and all other hues would be rejected. They probably spent 200 hours debating it.
Ok, I got to ask what exactly was HR's explanation for a particular shade of blue?
I've been part of something like this is a weird way. In the summer the humidity got too much for our HP4 printer and it would crinkle 20lb paper and get jammed. We found the 28 or 32 lb paper (long time ago / cannot remember exactly) would not jam and the printer worked fine.
So, in the summer, we changed to ordering the thicker paper. The gold paper was cheaper than the white paper at that weight. So, we order gold paper every summer.
Long after the building had air conditioning and the old printer was replaced, they still ordered gold paper every summer until the program closed.
" consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable."
I'm not sure I understand your conspiracy theory mumbo jumbo correctly, but I cannot help but take from this that you are saying that because finding literature has become faster due to electronic access to papers, the added value of the Phd supervisor has gone down. If this is so, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, a position for which I find additional evidence in your use of 'PHD' with all capitals which nobody in academia would do. Look, if you have something valuable to add to the discussion, please do; but if you're just going to make things up to fit your ideological predispositions, stay on Reddit.
I agree. If anything, the explosion of digital libraries and thus of available information would tend to make librarians and supervisors with deep domain knowledge even more essential to sort through all the noise.
If I had to guess, literature reviews are getting longer because us researchers are quickly going through the lower-hanging fruit and thus reaching discoveries that have more and more "dependencies".
And I'm only sort of being facetious. Sometime in the 1980's the humanities seemed to collectively decide that 'theory' was more important than the ability to think and communicate clearly. To my mind this has always been the point at which Academia as a class abdicated it's responsibilities to society at large in favor of internal power games and obscurantism.
Ah, but this trend was fought by another academic. Alan Sokal, NYU physicist, famously completely bullshitted an essay and got it published by Social Text, a leading postmodern sociology journal.
I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work?
Even if an academic is not explicitly sabotaging work, it's clear from the amount of time spent on grant applications and general bureaucracy that their useful production is being sabotaged.
To meet bureaucratic standards, researchers are often required to teach and educators are often required to publish... it's not effective production.
> I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work?
Thats why you have the reviewers declare no conflict of interest, have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary.
The continued existence of lecturing, 4 decades or more after it's been shown to be a poor use of time?
An article I recently read (written only 30 years ago) attributed a lot of this to the academic's ego enjoying the feel of being an expert, when a printed sheet of paper, written by someone else would have a bigger impact on the students attending the lecture.
It seems self-evident that lecturing is a hugely inefficient and ineffective way of teaching people.
But I don't think it's about stroking the academic's ego as much as maintaining academic jobs. Remove the unnecessarily labour-intensive lecturing component and, unfortunately, it's far harder to justify large state subsidies and tuition fees that pay for universities. Universities are strongly incentivised to continue lecturing busy-work.
I would also guess that while lectures themselves are horrible, the structures, routines and environments created around lecturing are extremely valuable to students. You can't replace lectures with nothing. That's why MOOCs and textbooks, for all their virtues, are not an adequate replacement.
Even so, I've long wished someone would invest in creating videos that present university-level lecture material with television production values. I think you could create a format that is far more engaging and memorable than the typical lecture, you could have hosts with presentation and communication skills rather than academics, and a team of writers with expertise in the subject and education could spend time doing research to find the best way of teaching a subject and ensuring clarity, accuracy and understanding. Why not have Calculus II with Ryan Seacrest?
"It seems self-evident that lecturing is a hugely inefficient and ineffective way of teaching people."
Is it possible that only poor lecturers give hugely inefficient and ineffective lectures?
It seems to me the point of lectures isn't to transmit information - that can be done using a book. Rather it is, or ought to be, a demonstration of how a master deals with a problem or answers a question.
I teach basic maths to adults and teenagers (the latter tend to be the ones at the back of the class in compulsory education). One of my big projects in the first part of the year (before the exams loom over the horizon) is to encourage students to read the textbook themselves. In the rare classes where this becomes accepted, I can use the lessons more like seminars and get the students moved up the problem solving ladder.
Given that we have had reliable maths textbooks since around 1215, and printed ones since roughly 1580, the difficulty of achieving this always surprises me.
Well, ok, I was thinking of arithmetic and algorithmic methods in number. I'll let you have Euclid, although it would be heavy going now to use that as a textbook...
It's only been about a century since it was fair to assume that every educated person had read it. I think the fact that we wouldn't be able to use it as a textbook in schools today is a really bad sign.
Er - not so sure about Euclid being read widely as recently as 1913. Definitions of 'educated person' were very narrow then in England. 'Mechanics institutes' taught 'practical mechanics' far more than abstract geometry to working people.
Euclid is a small part of mathematics, although a powerful example of logical reasoning. If I could encourage my Level 2 students to a level where they could read and understand (say) Chapter 8 of Silver's The Signal and The Noise we might be getting somewhere.
(Yes, this is part II. I got interested in the topic.)
I empathize with the difficulty of defining 'educated person.' As you rightly point out, there are different threads in what an "education" means. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/chapter03.html goes into the three main groups - 'public educators', 'industrial trainers', and 'old humanists' - which participated in that debate, ending "The curriculum which evolved during the 19th century was 'a compromise between all three groups, but with the industrial trainers predominant' (Williams 1961:142). This was 'damaging both to general education and to the new kinds of vocational training' (Williams 1961:143).
For purposes of this discussion, I think it's reasonable to refine the meaning of "educated person" specifically to "expected from someone who has graduated from a liberal arts college." I think this definition works for most of the last 500 years of having liberal arts colleges, up until the mid-1900s.
My definition specifically excludes religious and industrial education, which I think is appropriate for the intent.
Now, I noted that the Elements book I pointed to was meant for "elementary" students. I think that means up to age 12 or so. It's definitely no later than what the 1868 Taunton Report proposed:
> first-grade schools with a leaving age of 18 or 19 would provide a 'liberal education' - including Latin and Greek - to prepare upper and upper-middle class boys for the universities and the older professions;
(vs. second- and third-grade educations meant for the middle classes and lower.)
So the two pieces of evidence I have, for why someone in 1913 with a liberal arts education (an 'educated person') would have likely studied the Elements is first, the two forewords for a text book meant for 'elementary' students, and second, the number of reprintings of the text book, which implies that many were published.
> The whole journey by rail from Merawi to Dakhesh occupied four days, whereas General Hunter with his flying column had taken eight—a fact which proves that, in certain circumstances which Euclid could not have foreseen, two sides of a triangle are together shorter than the third side.
Why would Churchill use this reference if the readers, educated in the mid- to late-1800s, are not expected to understand it?
There was a big debate in the UK in and around 1902 about the teaching of Euclid.
In Google Scholar's preview for "SOME RECENT DISCUSSION ON THE TEACHING OF MATHEMATICS", WW Beman - School Science and Mathematics, 1903 - Wiley Online Library "I may add that the address was given in full in the Educational Review for February, 1902. This discussion of the teaching of mathematics in England particularly with regard to the retention of Euclid as a test-book of geometry is by no means a new one." See also a letter in Nature http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1902Natur..66..103S pointing out that Schopenhauer was also critical. And a 1903 Nature followup at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1903Natur..68R...7P saying "I WILL not deny that some reformers desire to abolish Euclid and establish another sequence of propositions in abstract geometry for schoolboys .. Two per cent. of schoolboys take to abstract reasoning as ducks take to water, and they ought not to be discouraged from the study of Euclid, but they and all the other boys ought to study geometry experimentally, logic entering into the study just as it enters into other parts of experimental physics. If the best modern books have a fault, it lies in the absurd assumption that an experimental sequence ought to have some connection with the Euclidean sequence."
In http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3603959?uid=3738984&ui... I read a page from a 1901 paper for the Mathematical Gazette (London) saying "(ii) The question of the retention of Euclid as a text-book was again raised. It was urged with considerable force that our retention of a book discarded by other nations had at any rate a presumption against it, and that it was wrong to sacrifice the interests of education to the east of the examiner. (iii) More than one speaker pointed out that if the experimental or intuitional method of introducing the truths of Mathematics, and especially of Geometry, were used from the lowest classes of our schools upwards, the strictly deductive course would not lose but gain in effectiveness."
So, it looks like the end of the 1800s was the death-knell for Euclid's Elements, but it was in the UK where it hung around the longest, perhaps for another 20 years.
I'll agree with thesis that it wasn't uncommon about 100 years ago as a standard text, and agree that that was about when it stopped being common.
If you read the preface to the 1888 version, you'll see: "From first to last we have kept in mind the undoubted fact that a very small proportion of those who study Elementary Geometry, and student it with profit, are destined to become mathematicians in any special sense; and that, to a large majority of students, Euclid is intended to serve not so much as a first lesson in mathematical reasoning, as the first, and sometimes the only, model of formal argument presented in an elementary education."
In the forward to the new edition, it again refers to "elementary teachers." According to http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/chapter03.html "the Elementary School Code of 1860 had fixed the leaving age for elementary schools at 12." This is in the UK. I don't know if the teaching of the Elements only for upper and upper-middle class students, or if it included a wider range of students.
"The overwhelming outcome of all this work is that there is no significant difference between lecturing and a host of other methods in their ability to enable students to learn factual material. Lectures are as effective as many other methods, but not more so. There are indications that lecturing is less effective, even for imparting information, than certain methods, notably unsupervised reading. (In fact unsupervised reading may have the edge over all face-to-face teaching methods for factual mastery)." (In case this sounds overly positive about lecturing, note that the author considers factual transfer to be lecturing's strongest feature)
It's only a broad review of what was considered fairly obvious research conclusions, he specifically says that he's not writing to present new evidence just to note that despite the evidence no change in behaviour has occurred, and as I say, it was written 30 years ago, but I'm not aware of anything more recent overturning these results.
It's not clear but I believe his source for this particular claim is the Bligh book which is cited explicitly elsewhere in the text, which summarizes hundreds of studies comparing the effectiveness of lecturing with other techniques in his book "What's the use of lectures".
(Amusing aside: The review snippet of Bligh's book on Google books is as follows: "A large portion of this book is dedicated to presenting research on why and how lectures fail. You really have to wade through a lot of material to get to any help in putting a lecture together". I think that neatly encapsulates the mental resistance to abandoning lectures by people who give them)
One peer reviewed paper a year. Regardless of quality. Wittgenstein - a philosopher with a major influence on modern life after he died published two short works in a lifetime.
Can you provide an example of an academic sabotaging useful production in order to prove his or her value?