Check out the brief overview videos of the courses on their website - I thought they weren’t that impressive. Seems like it could just be a cash grab (either purposefully or not).
However it is marketed, I think Peterson's Academy is not actually competing with traditional universities but with people looking at education about interesting stuff as a consumption good. The competition is The Teaching Company, which has been offering such material for decades on remarkably similar topics. (I've listened to a lot of their stuff on long drives, just because it was interesting - Rufus Fears on Caesar was a great lecture series, for example). Some evidence that this is the case is that there are reported to be a lot of people signing up who are 30+ years old. These are not people looking of degrees but looking to absorb interesting information.
I think we can also safely predict that the Peterson Academy will not be accredited by any accreditor in the US - accreditation is about enforcing market conformity. There would have to be lots of instructional designers hired to write learning objectives, map them on to assessment techniques, and so on. That's all overhead that Peterson doesn't need and won't want to waste money on.
It does not appear that Prof. Kaplan, or the commenters that I saw, are aware of the St. John's colleges (one in Annapolis, MD if I remember correctly and one in or near Santa Fe NM). They follow the same curriculum of The Classics. Their definition of The Classics is reasonable. The St. John's colleges have been in operation for many years. The obvious move is to compare the St. John's curriculum to that of Peterson's project. Given the shaky state of higher education in the United States what value does the Peterson project offer? One of the great features of American higher education is academic freedom. I strongly suspect that the Peterson project, like most conservative academic projects, are disguised attempts to be a "Party school" (not party in the sense of fraternities and sororities) like the elite schools in the former Soviet Union and in China today. I fear that studying the classics - eternally worthwhile - can also be an attempt to avoid questioning the present and recent past. It also rules out by definition useful analyses relying on the work of scientists, artists, philosopher and writers who lived and worked well after the classical era. What is Peterson trying to accomplish? Why?
I am a rebel by nature. I relegate “rules of thumb” to the smallest part of my decision making process. Labels make me suspicious. Therefore, when society acknowledges that “education” is fundamental and “higher education” is preferred, I become suspicious of what those entrusted with the trappings of “education” and authorized to award “certifications”, “diplomas” and “accreditations” tuck into those qualifications.
I am of the mind that every level of accreditation and certification needs a thorough review. The money magnet that accredited colleges and universities have become is a ripe target for anyone to manipulate to create courses of study that provide less USEFUL education than many people might acquire much of through disciplined life experience.
As a career first responder, I can certainly see value in certain aspects of a college education. But making a diploma a requirement for either hiring or advancement in my field without placing any limitation on the major or minor field of study as long as the institution is accredited seems like whitewash to displace common sense and CYA for future problems.
About plunging through boring material, there seem to be three methods for this that work great, corresponding to three kinds of people, and I can imagine how they work out in an office environment.
(1) Ruthless optimization like a game. Honestly it doesn't matter much to them, but they can do things effectively easily.
(2) Insisting there's always meaning or making things meaningful. Even abstract math and actual nonsense.
(3) Tedious jobs are necessary to do, just be patient and responsible.
The kinds of people who do (1) are great workers, but companies should compensate them greatly, and so should also put them in high-impact areas. The kinds of people who do (2) vary wildly and can be confused with (3), but they're basically artistic. Risky but can innovate, and can be placed in odd jobs and hated jobs.
The kind of people who do (3) are consistent and good workers, though (1)s can outcompete them, but (1)s only appear to be loyal, and sometimes don't even bother to seem loyal. They complement (2)s because (2)s need space and time for acclimation and experimenting, while when (1)s leave (3)s can fill in the gaps well, and can mentor.
I doubt that many people would find _all_ of the courses interesting. (Personally? Plato and deconstructing-whatever are probably a bore.) Hence why one tracks _consistently_ high marks.
It strikes me that the major objection in the case against education is the fact that the collective subsidizes it. If Peterson is privately funding his academy, should we not let the market decide? If so, all the criticism is basically irrelevant.
I don't think either the guest commenter or Bryan is saying that we shouldn't let the market decide. Rather, they are saying that they think the market WILL decide--against Peterson's project. If I see someone setting up a business to sell ice to people in the Arctic, I think it's reasonable of me to warn them that their business might well fail.
The Greek word for soul—psyche—is also the word for butterfly. This curious overlay of definitions points to a deep intuition the Greeks had about the soul—its capacity for transformation.
And yet, education—by rights the agent of the soul’s metamorphosis—has become an increasingly transactional enterprise.
Students complete assignments to get a grade. Grades are redeemed for credits—recorded on a transcript—until the accumulated total is exchanged for a degree. Graduated and certified, the students take their degree to the marketplace—and cash it in for a job.
In this model of education, the teacher becomes a kind of quality control manager armed with a clipboard, ticking off boxes on a beautifully tooled rubric to ensure that certain measurable outcomes have been reached. Accrediting institutions are a mere extension of this quality control model of education.
Assessment, data, transparency are necessary to make education more efficient and cost effective—and to hold institutions of learning accountable to parents, employers and taxpayers.
But what has been less readily acknowledged is the insidious side effect of education’s fixation on the metrics of transaction—the calculating mindset it produces in students.
Requirements are “hoops” to jump through. General education is something “to get out of the way.” The most important thing to know about an essay assignment is “how many pages does it have to be?”
The calculating mind is not interested in inquiry. What it wants—is to know the minimum work required to get the credentials needed in exchange for a desired salary and title.
So what’s the problem? Isn’t education about young people becoming career ready so they can afford to live?
If we believe in educating the soul, and not just outfitting students for a job, then teachers must reclaim the language that conceptualizes learning, not as a transactional enterprise, but a transformational one.
Transformational learning recognizes a simple truth: we learn only what we discover for ourselves. Education takes place at the outer limits of knowledge, when students push past what they know and confront their primal ignorance. We honor students by challenging them in this way. From what I’ve seen of the lecturers lined up for Peterson’s academy—Vervaeke and Pageau, just to name two—these are teachers who are deeply committed to education as a transformational enterprise. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
So long as college administrators treat education as a transaction, the students will continue to hit the benchmarks, complete the requisite credits in exchange their degrees and, in the process, lose their wings.
I don’t care about Peterson’s fake university, but this essay is an interesting case study in how Caplan’s theory of education may fit less with pro-capitalist libertarianism than with the politics of David Graeber.
To elaborate, the implication here is that capitalist incentives and the employment relation inherently push education towards mundane bullshit instead of serious intellectual engagement.
Caplan explicitly addressed a version of your critique in his book: The nearly one trillion dollars of government money spent on education each year has the potential to distort any sort of market signals that would arise in a more capitalist/libertarian education system.
This got me thinking what employers would actually want their potential hires educated in. This would apply only to more professional and non-vocational jobs but as a business owner and employer myself, my first guess (beyond basic literacy and numeracy) would be: How to collect and analyze data in organizations, Best ways to work with people and get them to do things, Why projects fail and why they succeed, How to communicate effectively in writing and using modern communications tools (Slack, social media, etc.), public speaking and presentations skills, Basic sales and marketing, Personality types and the workplace, Characteristics of high performing organizations, How companies and organizations make money and/or sustain themselves (basic Econ), How people adopt and use technology. Some of these are overlapping so you can probably combine. Through these classes you’d get basic accounting, Econ, writing, finance, stats, analytical skills, speaking skills, etc. I also got an MBA where I learned to drink more beer but they didn’t really teach these skills either. They taught straight stats but not how to apply it to businesses or organizations. Of course given Bryan’s work on how little people retain of what they learn, maybe this is pointless.
Really? I think what they would most want them educated in is showing exactly what hgher ed does now -- an ability to be highly successful following relatively boring and arbitrary rules like those most corporations actually implement (just for org/hr/etc reasons).
Smart people can pick up most skills without too much time outside of advanced STEM fields. So it's not that important they learned it in school and the biz wants them to do it there way.
Is that what the shareholders want? Maybe not. They might prefer more boat rocking and less fighting in but the people doing the hiring are doing well and don't want their methods questioned. Moreover, any institution can only endure so much questioning of fundamental assumptions and needs a bunch of just intelligently going with flow.
Apart from signalling against conformity, something like Peterson Academy is also going to have trouble as a university alternative without having bona fide experts teaching difficult subjects. Some of his teachers are experts; others are not. Some of the subjects seem like legitimate, university-level subjects; others do not.
Just as public grade 1-4 (or 1-8) was originally about getting enough "readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic" to navigate life in the 1800s (both of my paternal grandparents made it through 4th grade and were wonderfully intelligent people), and the industry employment from the 1880s or so through at least the late 1950s, college has now become all about being "qualified" to fulfill boring mid-management jobs.
And since it doesn't really take that much knowledge or "larnin'" to be a mid-level manager, college is frequently a 4-6 year, high-cost endeavor aimed at turning partly square pegs into nicely "rounded" pegs that fit into those mid-management holes.
Too many of non-STEM majors (and to many even STEM courses) are basically "don't make waves/don't rock the boat" efforts at indoctrination of one kind or another.
I don’t see how the engagement of the lectures is all that relevant, I’m sure there are good lecturers at all the traditional schools. Either you’re making them work for the credential or not, and you have a reputation for admitting top students or not, isn’t that there where the signaling comes in?
They should add some pointlessly difficult math to the curriculum. It wouldn't go against Peterson Academy's brand because doing pointlessly difficult things builds character or something. Plus, math is immune to the influence of postmodern stuff that Peterson dislikes.
Employers will appreciate the signal and students should accept it in the spirit of character building even if they personally don't care about math.
Check out the brief overview videos of the courses on their website - I thought they weren’t that impressive. Seems like it could just be a cash grab (either purposefully or not).
However it is marketed, I think Peterson's Academy is not actually competing with traditional universities but with people looking at education about interesting stuff as a consumption good. The competition is The Teaching Company, which has been offering such material for decades on remarkably similar topics. (I've listened to a lot of their stuff on long drives, just because it was interesting - Rufus Fears on Caesar was a great lecture series, for example). Some evidence that this is the case is that there are reported to be a lot of people signing up who are 30+ years old. These are not people looking of degrees but looking to absorb interesting information.
I think we can also safely predict that the Peterson Academy will not be accredited by any accreditor in the US - accreditation is about enforcing market conformity. There would have to be lots of instructional designers hired to write learning objectives, map them on to assessment techniques, and so on. That's all overhead that Peterson doesn't need and won't want to waste money on.
It does not appear that Prof. Kaplan, or the commenters that I saw, are aware of the St. John's colleges (one in Annapolis, MD if I remember correctly and one in or near Santa Fe NM). They follow the same curriculum of The Classics. Their definition of The Classics is reasonable. The St. John's colleges have been in operation for many years. The obvious move is to compare the St. John's curriculum to that of Peterson's project. Given the shaky state of higher education in the United States what value does the Peterson project offer? One of the great features of American higher education is academic freedom. I strongly suspect that the Peterson project, like most conservative academic projects, are disguised attempts to be a "Party school" (not party in the sense of fraternities and sororities) like the elite schools in the former Soviet Union and in China today. I fear that studying the classics - eternally worthwhile - can also be an attempt to avoid questioning the present and recent past. It also rules out by definition useful analyses relying on the work of scientists, artists, philosopher and writers who lived and worked well after the classical era. What is Peterson trying to accomplish? Why?
I am a rebel by nature. I relegate “rules of thumb” to the smallest part of my decision making process. Labels make me suspicious. Therefore, when society acknowledges that “education” is fundamental and “higher education” is preferred, I become suspicious of what those entrusted with the trappings of “education” and authorized to award “certifications”, “diplomas” and “accreditations” tuck into those qualifications.
I am of the mind that every level of accreditation and certification needs a thorough review. The money magnet that accredited colleges and universities have become is a ripe target for anyone to manipulate to create courses of study that provide less USEFUL education than many people might acquire much of through disciplined life experience.
As a career first responder, I can certainly see value in certain aspects of a college education. But making a diploma a requirement for either hiring or advancement in my field without placing any limitation on the major or minor field of study as long as the institution is accredited seems like whitewash to displace common sense and CYA for future problems.
Worse, it sends the "weird" signal like failing to graduate and it fails to signal they outcompeted others in standard admissions.
Will an A essay be a hodgepodge of literary allusions that fails to address the simple question a student was asked?
About plunging through boring material, there seem to be three methods for this that work great, corresponding to three kinds of people, and I can imagine how they work out in an office environment.
(1) Ruthless optimization like a game. Honestly it doesn't matter much to them, but they can do things effectively easily.
(2) Insisting there's always meaning or making things meaningful. Even abstract math and actual nonsense.
(3) Tedious jobs are necessary to do, just be patient and responsible.
The kinds of people who do (1) are great workers, but companies should compensate them greatly, and so should also put them in high-impact areas. The kinds of people who do (2) vary wildly and can be confused with (3), but they're basically artistic. Risky but can innovate, and can be placed in odd jobs and hated jobs.
The kind of people who do (3) are consistent and good workers, though (1)s can outcompete them, but (1)s only appear to be loyal, and sometimes don't even bother to seem loyal. They complement (2)s because (2)s need space and time for acclimation and experimenting, while when (1)s leave (3)s can fill in the gaps well, and can mentor.
I doubt that many people would find _all_ of the courses interesting. (Personally? Plato and deconstructing-whatever are probably a bore.) Hence why one tracks _consistently_ high marks.
It strikes me that the major objection in the case against education is the fact that the collective subsidizes it. If Peterson is privately funding his academy, should we not let the market decide? If so, all the criticism is basically irrelevant.
I don't think either the guest commenter or Bryan is saying that we shouldn't let the market decide. Rather, they are saying that they think the market WILL decide--against Peterson's project. If I see someone setting up a business to sell ice to people in the Arctic, I think it's reasonable of me to warn them that their business might well fail.
The Greek word for soul—psyche—is also the word for butterfly. This curious overlay of definitions points to a deep intuition the Greeks had about the soul—its capacity for transformation.
And yet, education—by rights the agent of the soul’s metamorphosis—has become an increasingly transactional enterprise.
Students complete assignments to get a grade. Grades are redeemed for credits—recorded on a transcript—until the accumulated total is exchanged for a degree. Graduated and certified, the students take their degree to the marketplace—and cash it in for a job.
In this model of education, the teacher becomes a kind of quality control manager armed with a clipboard, ticking off boxes on a beautifully tooled rubric to ensure that certain measurable outcomes have been reached. Accrediting institutions are a mere extension of this quality control model of education.
Assessment, data, transparency are necessary to make education more efficient and cost effective—and to hold institutions of learning accountable to parents, employers and taxpayers.
But what has been less readily acknowledged is the insidious side effect of education’s fixation on the metrics of transaction—the calculating mindset it produces in students.
Requirements are “hoops” to jump through. General education is something “to get out of the way.” The most important thing to know about an essay assignment is “how many pages does it have to be?”
The calculating mind is not interested in inquiry. What it wants—is to know the minimum work required to get the credentials needed in exchange for a desired salary and title.
So what’s the problem? Isn’t education about young people becoming career ready so they can afford to live?
If we believe in educating the soul, and not just outfitting students for a job, then teachers must reclaim the language that conceptualizes learning, not as a transactional enterprise, but a transformational one.
Transformational learning recognizes a simple truth: we learn only what we discover for ourselves. Education takes place at the outer limits of knowledge, when students push past what they know and confront their primal ignorance. We honor students by challenging them in this way. From what I’ve seen of the lecturers lined up for Peterson’s academy—Vervaeke and Pageau, just to name two—these are teachers who are deeply committed to education as a transformational enterprise. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
So long as college administrators treat education as a transaction, the students will continue to hit the benchmarks, complete the requisite credits in exchange their degrees and, in the process, lose their wings.
I don’t care about Peterson’s fake university, but this essay is an interesting case study in how Caplan’s theory of education may fit less with pro-capitalist libertarianism than with the politics of David Graeber.
To elaborate, the implication here is that capitalist incentives and the employment relation inherently push education towards mundane bullshit instead of serious intellectual engagement.
Caplan explicitly addressed a version of your critique in his book: The nearly one trillion dollars of government money spent on education each year has the potential to distort any sort of market signals that would arise in a more capitalist/libertarian education system.
The Peterson venture the letter discusses is entirely private though
This got me thinking what employers would actually want their potential hires educated in. This would apply only to more professional and non-vocational jobs but as a business owner and employer myself, my first guess (beyond basic literacy and numeracy) would be: How to collect and analyze data in organizations, Best ways to work with people and get them to do things, Why projects fail and why they succeed, How to communicate effectively in writing and using modern communications tools (Slack, social media, etc.), public speaking and presentations skills, Basic sales and marketing, Personality types and the workplace, Characteristics of high performing organizations, How companies and organizations make money and/or sustain themselves (basic Econ), How people adopt and use technology. Some of these are overlapping so you can probably combine. Through these classes you’d get basic accounting, Econ, writing, finance, stats, analytical skills, speaking skills, etc. I also got an MBA where I learned to drink more beer but they didn’t really teach these skills either. They taught straight stats but not how to apply it to businesses or organizations. Of course given Bryan’s work on how little people retain of what they learn, maybe this is pointless.
Really? I think what they would most want them educated in is showing exactly what hgher ed does now -- an ability to be highly successful following relatively boring and arbitrary rules like those most corporations actually implement (just for org/hr/etc reasons).
Smart people can pick up most skills without too much time outside of advanced STEM fields. So it's not that important they learned it in school and the biz wants them to do it there way.
Is that what the shareholders want? Maybe not. They might prefer more boat rocking and less fighting in but the people doing the hiring are doing well and don't want their methods questioned. Moreover, any institution can only endure so much questioning of fundamental assumptions and needs a bunch of just intelligently going with flow.
Apart from signalling against conformity, something like Peterson Academy is also going to have trouble as a university alternative without having bona fide experts teaching difficult subjects. Some of his teachers are experts; others are not. Some of the subjects seem like legitimate, university-level subjects; others do not.
Just as public grade 1-4 (or 1-8) was originally about getting enough "readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic" to navigate life in the 1800s (both of my paternal grandparents made it through 4th grade and were wonderfully intelligent people), and the industry employment from the 1880s or so through at least the late 1950s, college has now become all about being "qualified" to fulfill boring mid-management jobs.
And since it doesn't really take that much knowledge or "larnin'" to be a mid-level manager, college is frequently a 4-6 year, high-cost endeavor aimed at turning partly square pegs into nicely "rounded" pegs that fit into those mid-management holes.
Too many of non-STEM majors (and to many even STEM courses) are basically "don't make waves/don't rock the boat" efforts at indoctrination of one kind or another.
I don’t see how the engagement of the lectures is all that relevant, I’m sure there are good lecturers at all the traditional schools. Either you’re making them work for the credential or not, and you have a reputation for admitting top students or not, isn’t that there where the signaling comes in?
They should add some pointlessly difficult math to the curriculum. It wouldn't go against Peterson Academy's brand because doing pointlessly difficult things builds character or something. Plus, math is immune to the influence of postmodern stuff that Peterson dislikes.
Employers will appreciate the signal and students should accept it in the spirit of character building even if they personally don't care about math.