ARISTOTLE'S AUTHORITY

Most of this is obvious, when you stop to think about it, so why doesn't everybody recognize it?

Probably because most of us don't think about most things. Instead we "study" them in school and learn attitudes which we accept without question for the rest of our lives.

John Maynard Keynes knew that most people accept one set of ideas when they are young, and that they often refuse to consider new points of view in later life. In his {General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money} he wrote ---

"There are not many who are influenced by new ideas or theories after they are twenty five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest."

American economist John Kenneth Galbraith also recognized the problem. In the forward to the third edition of his famous {The New Industrial State} he refers to ---

"a sizable group of economists who unhesitatingly associate whatever they have been told to believe in their youth with absolute scholarship.Anything alien to such installed belief is deficient."

I call this problem "Aristotle's Authority". Born nearly 400 years before Christ Aristotle was a star student in Plato's Academy who later founded 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". Nearly 100 years after Copernicus's death the Italian scientist Galileo was arrested 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 initial preparation 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 have absorbed the views of the current power elite, they may be accepted as "management trainees". If they can 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 prelates who had publicly accepted Aristotle's ideas without thinking about them could not afford to admit how stupid they had been.

Authoritarian thinking also maintains the superiority of the printed word over personal experience -- even the experience of experts. Monks who copied manuscripts in the middle ages copied the mistakes too, because they were trained not to question the written word.

In the modern world a scientist who 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.

The same kind of attitude values "education" over real-life experience, and defines "education" as a collection of abstract ideas rather than practical knowledge. 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.

A student who can spell Aristotle's name in Greek is "educated", but a technician who understands how computers work is not. A man who reads books about nature is "educated" but one who knows nature at first hand is not.

I find it amusing to compare the education of a 21-year old English-speaking white Canadian girl with the training of an 18-year old Indian girl from several hundred years ago. We'll assume the white girl is an upper middle class WASP, and the Indian is a typical member of almost any North American tribe.

The white girl can read and write and she may have a university education but unless she has a master's degree or better, the Indian girl is better educated.

Consider her accomplishments. North American Indians used at least 1,500 different plants for food and hundreds more for other purposes. Not all tribes knew all plants, of course, but by the time a girl was considered fit to marry she would know how to identify several hundred plants, where to find or how to grow them, and how to use all the different parts.

That itself is a lot of learning because most tribes had multiple uses for each plant. Consider the common bulrush. In spring you can eat the stalk, raw, or the head raw or cooked in batter. In fall you can grind the head into a kind of flour, which can be baked into cakes, and at any time of year you can dry the roots, grind them up and use the powder to make a drink something like coffee.

In addition to the plants an Indian girl would be expected to know almost all the animals that live in her area. She would know where and how they live, how they can be hunted or trapped, and their anatomy in detail. Given a dead animal she could skin it and tan the hide, butcher the animal and preserve or cook the meat, make thread or string from the tendons, household tools from the bones and so forth.

She would also know how to make all the clothes she, her husband and their children would require, how to make several different types of shelter, how to braid ropes, bowstrings and other fiber products, how to weave baskets and perhaps blankets, and how to make most of the tools, weapons and implements people need to live in comfort.

Most of the white girl's knowledge, on the other hand, is superficial. She knows of modern machines but she probably does not know how to use many of them, or how any of them work. She may know the names of some dead kings and Greek philosophers, but the Indian girl is just as likely to know the legends of her tribe.

The white girl may speak a second language but the Indian girl may also speak a second language. The white girl may know how to use or even to program a computer, but she probably does not know how to find or prepare her own food, clothing or shelter.

The Indian girl's knowledge is different from the white girl's, but is more useful and more extensive.

The ultimate test is the ease of conversion from one culture to another and primitive men and women around the world have proved that they can easily absorb the knowledge required to live in our culture. When they do have problems it is usually with social or emotional issues. Few people from our culture, on the other hand, can learn to take care of themselves without the help of civilization.

I also find it amusing to compare the training, responsibilities, pay and prestige of different groups of workers within our culture. 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 training is more practical than the medical doctor's, and it takes almost as long.

The biggest difference is that 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 and 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 qualifications too, but it's easier for a doctor than for a mechanic to fake success.

If a doctor gives you something that 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 anything because our cars either work or they don't. A mechanic may 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.

I don't say that a mechanic deserves more respect and more pay than a doctor but I do suggest that our attitudes toward both of them could use some adjustment.

If you really want to know what jobs are worth, consider 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, nobody noticed.

When doctors go on strike people postpone cosmetic surgery and worry about what would happen if they had 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 and it has been 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 -- were able to drop out of the daily grind and 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 cultures 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.

But 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. If a commoner could get an education he could probably get a soft job in the service of some noble. Because educated people shared exotic knowledge with other educated people they were entitled to soft and/or 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 information. 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.

Probably in a bid to gain prestige the masons developed arcane rituals. Some of them 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.

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.

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 useful work, they did not need useful skills.

And the colonial administration did not want Canadians to learn useful skills. Canada was supposed to be a market for British manufacturers, not a competitor, and we were expected to learn enough technology to process 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 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 it was because they had better schools. The U.S.A. 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 technical equipment, and they are expensive to run because anyone qualified to teach in a technical school can take his choice of well-paid jobs outside the school system.

Arts colleges need only classrooms and a library, and teachers are cheap because arts graduates are not qualified for much. Teaching is about the best most of them can hope for.

And to a politician or an administrator one school may look as good as another. We could open arts colleges cheaper and faster than technical schools and we did -- nine new universities in Ontario alone, within a few years.

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 degrees, even where the degree makes no difference.

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 in 1968, 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 are pushing arts courses.

Most arts courses are useless but some teachers claim that they "teach you to think". Most students, on the other hand, know they can get good marks by showing how one can rationalize the teachers' conclusions from the teachers' premises, and that it is not wise to question either the premises or the conclusions.

Even if students do not learn anything useful our tradition guarantees graduates well-paid soft 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 need jobs rather than the needs of the economy.

We all know that we can no longer afford make-work jobs but politicians still promise "job creation" and young Canadians keep going to university for educations they hope will launch them into management, even though we have very little to manage.

They keep coming to university because the teachers tell them they need school learning. Vocational guidance teachers are supposed to advise kids but most of them have no technical or practical skills themselves, and they 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 couple of 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 to work as a truck driver his teacher tried to convince him to stay.

The boy was starting 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 he would not learn anything about trucking or warehousing, and he would waste time. By starting as a truck driver he began a course of training that will teach him the business from the ground up, and he is earning the respect of the men who now work for his father and grandfather, and who will someday work for him.

With a pretense of facing reality some university students are switching from general arts to commerce and business administration courses -- but what will they administer? If there are no trained workers to run 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 is we need more computer training. They miss the point that the need is for machinists, not for computer programmers.

Modern machine tools can be run by computers but they are still machine tools and the man who will program the computer 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. 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 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 a classical 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 the lives of Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler than they would by reading about kings and conquerors.

My parents spent a small fortune to send me to a private boarding school, and I think 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 liked.

As it happens I survived anyway but even though I wound up working as a journalist I think I would have learned more if I had apprenticed for a trade than I did 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 the informal inter-action between peers, and the way we model on adults.

If I had apprenticed for a trade my adult role models would have been men who dealt with the world on its own terms. As a student at a private boarding school my adult role 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 prominent politician -- but because they moved on they never got much seniority. The most senior teachers and the most dominant role models were those who had chosen the dead end for themselves.

Canada would be better off if we had more apprentices, farmers and craftsmen, and fewer "professionals" and students. We can all study fine arts or the humanities after we learn to do something useful, but if we don't learn to support ourselves we can't afford to study anything.

And we could 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 it best 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 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 get a job in real-life marketing.

Teachers are hired by administrators who check paper but may not themselves understand the subject to be taught, and are not qualified to judge the teacher's qualifications. At work, the teacher will teach students who are not qualified to judge his qualifications.

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 that there are no jobs for marketing grads so he has to teach school. When we have a surplus of "experts", the people who can't get jobs may become teachers and turn out more "experts".

Five 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 the class got jobs after graduation, my friend said, because the type of instruments they were trained to service were obsolete before the course began. Obviously, one technician who had not been able to keep up with the industry found a way to recycle his outmoded skill.

If I want to learn marketing -- 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 marketers after I graduate. 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 could 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 tells me about the students she used to hire. In most cases she found that high school students were brighter, showed more initiative and learned faster than students who were part way through courses in accounting.

Schools also create a new breed of trained-unemployed. In days gone by most newspaper 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.

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 in Canada 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.

For years we assumed that Manpower Canada tracked jobs as part of its function as the national employment agency, but that was an illusion. In fact Manpower Canada knew only about jobs that were hired through its own offices and most Canadian business refused to deal with it. Manpower Canada never listed more than about 25% of all the jobs in Canada, and at times the level dropped as low as 10%.

Governments and government contractors had to hire through Manpower and that may have helped create the illusion that there were 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 an important difference 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 do well in it.

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. A good journalist knows that many of the most "authoritative" sources will try to distort a story for their own ends.

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 the schools are all training people to be company presidents. If General Motors and other manufacturers did their own training things would be different, because students would face the hard reality of real life 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's probably 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.

Schoolwork is always make-believe, and students don't have to be serious about either their projects or their choices. Most of what they learn in school may have no bearing on real life and they may be able to 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. They have to face reality.

And in a vital economy training as a machinist could lead to the president's office -- as it did for Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers, Gaston Chevrolet and others. Sergio de Zen, son of Vic de Zen and now senior executive vice president and chief operating officer of the billion-dollar Royal Plastics empire, qualified as a tool and die maker then took a course at a commercial business school before he started as a management trainee.

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.

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 above his station.

And we maintain the myth that we have unemployment because we don't have enough 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} newspaper said 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 get post secondary education rose from about 30% to nearly 40%, but in Sweden it kept steady at about 18% and in Germany it dropped.

All the other countries on that list have more skilled workers, and more high-tech industry, than Canada. Their citizens are not as likely as Canadians to learn the joys of ancient Greek history, or to spend years analyzing the work of some obscure poet, but they are much more likely than Canadians to be employed in a stable and well-paid job.

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 very low, we now have a flood of expensively-educated Canadians moving to jobs in the US. According to a story in the May 11/98 issue of {Time Magazine} Don Devoretz, an economist from Simon Fraser University who has been hired by the C.D. Howe Institute to study the problem, over-education creates a "long-term competitive disadvantage" for Canadian industry.

He says our situation is equivalent to "having one major university in the business of exclusively training students for the U.S."

Meanwhile our universities moan about reduced funding and pretend that our problem is that we don't have enough education. The schools tell us that education is a good thing, but the evidence of the real world shows us that practical training is better.

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