The Better Mousetrap, and Other Myths we may Need to Jettison.

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When America first hit the stands as the biggest thing since paved roads, it was Henry Ford's assembly line that headlined the news.  The better mousetrap became essentially sidelined, and the fabulous economies of scale took over the thinking of economists and businessmen.

Industries had been around for a long time; craftsmen were, for instance, making dresses for wealthy customers back in the time of King Arthur and Queen Betty Lou.  The sweat shop that makes dresses so inexpensive that even I can afford one were a recent invention.  Horse carriages, likewise, were being turned out in factories all over Britain and the USA.  The assembly lines of Detroit made them a lot cheaper.

Books were hard to find in the Middle Ages.  Gutenberg's  invention made them affordable to everyone (and ultimately created the new occupation of the Bible-thumper, surely a good thing, eh?).  So we're all hung up on mass-producing things for good reason.  Small farms are disappearing, and instead we have these giant businesses which, if they produce anything, will only produce a million of them.

We in America, in particular, have a tendency to equate progress with growth.  A new breed of "geniuses" has come into existence: the kind that will take a good idea to make something useful, and increase your profits by (1) marketing them to people you never thought could use the bloody things, and (2) help you make far more of the things than you can easily sell.  At this point (3) you need them to find new and better ways of making money out of the things, e.g. use them as toys for pit-bulls, for instance.  Infuse them with bone essence, and here you go: a toy for Rover.  (Never mind that it was supposed to be a nail-clipper.)

Our brave new world is now filled with a number of millionaires (apparently most Congressmen are), but also trillions of flavor-infused nail-clippers that nobody wants.  So, in my humble opinion, this breed of genius must die.  Actually, we have choices: we can fill the planet with surplus products, or we can change the advice these geniuses give the idiot entrepreneurs.  It's time we pursued a more imaginative way of being productive than that of simply mass-producing everything, and persuading those who aren't interested in a product that they should purchase one anyway, and give it a temporary home on the way to the landfill, ---that is to say, the Planet--- which will be its final resting-place.

But for many reasons, we're going to have to abandon this view of the world.  There is not scope for endlessly expanding everything, just as everyone cannot be above average, and just as the population cannot expand without limit.  Today, landfills are wild places in which nobody, supposedly, wants to live.  Tomorrow, these will be the places where the poor will have to build their homes.  The more landfills expand, the greater the proportion of real-estate that will be "converted" blighted land.

In the future, not everything that expands is bad: information and technology will continue to improve and spread wider.  Living conditions should improve.  An increasingly larger proportion of the population should have access to medical resources.  But once education was identified as something that was suitable for economies of scale, we lost a great deal.  Certainly, education is important for the citizen to fit him- or herself into society in the most effective way.  But we cannot make education into an assembly-line process, though it is very tempting to do so.

When the armies of production-line jockeys entered the planning of academia, we outsourced the business of publicity, admissions, raising money, etc, to a large number of well-meaning folks (a.k.a. "production-line jockeys") with wives, and children with teeth that needed straightening, and jets that needed fuel, and weekend getaways in the flood plains ... you get the idea.  Soon, students were paying for a lot more than instruction.  (They had to bankroll the very means whereby they were being exploited.  I say this even though some of my best buddies are recruitment specialists.)  College was costing more, the Government had to subsidize it, and now Congressmen could get up on their hind-legs and demand that colleges prove that they were effective.

On the one hand, it is as well that teachers at all levels keep an eye on just how well they're doing.  But there has to be a fine balance between using Assessment as a useful feedback device, and pushing this fad of assessment as a way some idiot politicians can convince his electorate that once they get to Washington, your kids are going to do better in school, taxes are going to get lower, jobs are going to be more plentiful, and America is going to whip the pants off those pesky Asian teenagers at math and science.  I doubt that teachers at any level respond well to the whip.  Teaching is not something that can be delivered to order.  If you turn the screws on teachers, you will get kids who are screwed up in complicated and invisible ways, which will only emerge down the road.  It's a little like waterboarding.

The time may have come for us to go back to being a bunch of impecunious gurus holed out in a commune somewhere, where students can come to learn whatever we're interested in teaching.  No accreditation, no student loans, no federal aid.  We may have to scale down our lifestyles, but those of us who think we need 5-figure salaries (in constant 2011 dollars) are probably not happy teaching, anyway.  All this preoccupation about whether students are actually learning what we're certifying them to have learned is due to the fact that it costs so damn much.  The phrase "economies of scale" only means that there's a lot of cash for expenses that have to do with education and learning only very tangentially, such as football.  Sure, some kids won't come to a school that doesn't have football.  So much the better.

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