I guess it's hard to explicitly say that you're indoctrinating people without failing to actually indoctrinate them. The problem with our modern indoctrination as opposed to Chinese indoctrination is that there are multiple competing groups trying to indoctrinate you, and since there isn't strict control over classroom materials, individual teachers can make choices about the kind of indoctrination they do.
I remember from college that the best way to get an A from my economics professor was to be an ancap libertarian, the best way to get an A in social studies was to talk about how wonderful equality was and so on. I never feel like I learned a real ideology, I was just figuring out the idiosyncratic politics of my professor, then writing that into my essay
There's an old parable about monkeys and bananas. I'll see if I can avoid butchering it too much.
Put five monkeys in a room, with bananas hanging from the ceiling and a ladder underneath. The moment any monkey goes for the bananas, hose down the *other* monkeys with icy water. The monkeys will soon learn to attack any monkey going for the bananas.
Once they no longer go for the bananas, replace one veteran monkey with a rookie. The moment he goes for the bananas, the four veteran monkeys will attack him. He will soon learn his place.
Repeat until all five monkeys are from the second generation who have never been hosed down with icy water. Replace one with a third generation monkey. He too will learn to conform. If he were capable of asking why, the other four would tell him, "That's how we've always done it."
College had utility in 1500 and on, when the main goal was to memorize lots of scripture or arcane laws and Latin. Those were the first generation monkeys. It gained new utility with the advances in science and engineering; those were the second generation monkeys; "we've always had four year degrees", and they could certainly find lots to teach to fill up those four years, so why not. The social "sciences" wanted to be part of the process and invented new fields which surprisingly needed the same four years as the technical fields.
This kind of presumes that there is a single driving force behind the current American educational system. But the more likely case is that it’s a bit of all three theories, competing with each other and each trying to assert itself resulting in a messy patchwork of a system. Yes, it’s about signaling. But some of it does increase your productivity. Some it is indoctrination but what is to be indoctrinated changes all the time with different intellectual fads and tends to run into the practical financial desires of students (and their parents). So you get a big mishmash that nobody can make sense of.
One thing worth noting is that the "reason" for the examination system, whether Chinese or modern, doesn't have to be something we would like, such as more effective administrators or workers. It is worth noting that the Chinese empire was not terribly well administered for a very long time, and by the 1800's being just another eastern empire to be smacked around by barbarian western nations. It isn't clear (to me at least) when exactly they fell so far behind the western world, but despite massive wealth and trade since Roman times the Chinese accomplished relatively little. It seems to me that most of the idea that the examination system did anything good stems from an assumption that it must have done so rather than any evidence that the Chinese system was doing particularly well relative to European powers, or even most of its neighbors.
Anyway, all that to say that possibly humans are prone to falling prey to pointless status competitions that might have had roots in something valuable, building or just signaling virtues, but that eventually turn into Red Queen Races as we learn to exploit the system. We should be careful in assuming they were somehow efficient.
I believe China's stagnation has been a problem of geography. A big wide flat area, few mountains or other features to isolate power centers as in the Mediterranean, and a long coastline again with no peninsulas or other features to isolate regions. It was conducive to rule by one regime, or at least had such fluid internal borders that separate regions could not flourish and compete.
It's similar to central Asia, which the Mongols swept across and which Russia had bossed around for centuries, but without any regional power centers to create competition.
The Middle East had two river systems (Tigris/Euphrates and Nile) surrounded by deserts which created competing power centers, and the eastern Mediterranean coast, the Aegean islands and peninsulas and mountains and the Turkish western peninsula all competed.
China's coast is another problem. They trade a lot and act like a maritime nation, but you can bet dollars to donuts that if Russia were to cause serious border trouble, they'd shift sailors to cannon fodder in a heartbeat. They're like France in that regard; they put up a good fight against Britain's Navy until the Germans or Italians or Danes threatened them, then they beached their ships to turn sailors into cannon fodder.
The trouble with the the geography argument is that it sidesteps the question of administration. Why did having one large, relatively stable political entity result in such stagnation? That should have been a slam dunk for trade and industry as there should have been many fewer civil wars (there were lots) and effectively a Pax Sino that allowed the arts and industry to flourish. Yet instead we see China ceasing trade with outsiders, sending zero fleets to Europe, never really doing anything useful despite being a huge chunk of the Silk Road. A thousand years of administrators being chosen through testing, and yet steppe nomads pretty routinely take the place over, get assimilated into the system, and things keep going.
It is not clear that the testing system did any good for China, and a strong suggestion that whatever their administration was doing was actively deleterious and so probably the testing system was largely negative.
As a side note, it is also worth noting that China has two major river systems, with very separate and different cultures cleaving to each, as well as a pretty fractious coast surrounded by many large island and peninsular nations.
Further, Chinese maritime trade is very much a modern phenomena; they were not sending trade fleets to Europe, but rather the Europeans were sending fleets to them, and prior to that caravans were handling the trade. To my limited knowledge there are zero accounts of Chinese delegations traveling to power centers of Europe prior to the 1800's. All that despite having a huge and relatively stable empire for a millennia.
> Why did having one large, relatively stable political entity result in such stagnation?
Because there was no competition. The governments were monopolies most of the time. They had no reason to upset the apple cart with innovation, in fact every reason to fear and suppress new ideas. Why did IBM and DEC flub the PC revolution? Because they did not want to risk their current product lines on something new. Why did Microsoft ignore GUIs and the Internet? It's a story as old as the hills.
China's coast is staid in comparison to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaya, all those islands, and the Mediterranean. Their two rivers did little to isolate their cultures, as evidenced by the Chinese emperors ruling all of them. They did send Zheng He to the Indian Ocean and Madagascar, then pulled him back and abandoned all exploration because their land borders were more important and his ventures were too distracting; compare his emperor's reaction to Columbus' choice of royal sponsors.
So, again, why did they administer themselves into a hole if they had such great administrators?
They were surrounded by competing governments and civilizations that they failed to stomp into the ground, and some of those barbarians took them over. How is that a lack of competition?
Their river cultures were so isolated from each other that they spoke different languages. Throw in the river delta with Macao and Hong Kong for a third river with a different language.
Columbus is something of a bad example, as his was a state sponsored voyage of exploration across open ocean. Plenty of private European traders were sailing all over the old world, meanwhile China had a government run trip around the corner in sight of the coast.
At the same time, no one in China was setting out to conquer a new land, set up colonies, start their own little empire. Rome kept expanding and expanding, but China just petered out.
In the end, all their testing just generated administrators who tried to control everything and wound up screwing themselves. Sounds familiar, except for the being taken over by nomads.
The competition China had with barbarians was sporadic and seldom, and always from the outside, not a bunch of little city states and small kingdoms fighting each other. Dynasties ruled the entire country for several centuries, then had a century of war, then another dynasty ruled the entire country for several centuries. That's not even close to the constant warfare in the Mediterranean. China was a peaceful heaven compared to the Mediterranean.
The different Chinese languages weren't enough of a barrier to keep one emperor from ruling them all, and only their spoken languages differed, not the written one. The Aegean was full of different city states sprinkled all over, just days apart, all with different rulers even though they spoke and wrote the same language, and the Mediterranean was almost as fragmented.
I'm not clear on what you mean by "China had a government run trip around the corner in sight of the coast". Zheng He's voyages across the Indian Ocean were not in sight of land, but his independence scared the emperor. All China's local trading missions were coastal, but so were Europeans until Vasco de Gama and Christopher Columbus. They used to sail along the coast, stop at night, start again the next morning.
Columbus shopped his idea around, it was not sponsored by royals until he sold them on it, and I don't know what that has to do with this except show more competition.
China filled out its territory up to the natural barriers surrounding it -- mountains, jungles, and deserts -- and then stopped expanding because they had no reason to conquer resource-poor lands populated by barbarian neighbors who spoke and wrote different languages. Greeks and Romans expanded by conquest because they had such small territories and resource-rich neighbors to conquer.
The Aegean especially, but all the Mediterranean in general, is a fantastic place to breed competing and cooperating cities and small kingdoms. They can stay fairly well isolated and protected by mountains and bays, or they can trade and cooperate, and they're close enough together that conquest or at least fighting is still a possible route to riches. China has nothing like that. No neighboring territory was at all attractive to conquerors, it was all desert or mountains or jungles. The interior provided easy communications and no real barriers to conquest.
China's bureaucrats were government monopoly bureaucrats with no incentive to be efficient or innovative. Europe's bureaucrats worked for private businesses and small city states who had every incentive in the world to be more efficient than their neighbors and to look to better ways to defend themselves and conquer neighbors and trade better.
Your grasp of Chinese history is a bit… off. Start with this map of the Chinese Imperial territory over time. Note the times it expands and contracts, when there are multiple competing kingdoms, often divided into north and south based on the river systems, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_Dynasties.gif
Consider also the possibility that the exams were (and are) a device for proclaiming meritocracy while at the same time strongly advantaging those that could afford to spend their youth cramming rather than doing productive work, not to mention paying for all the necessary preparation. (I hear the US has followed in the footsteps of other countries, and now has what amounts to elite-college-prep kindergartens. I have not confirmed this.)
Such a system would let a few of the most brilliant - and most lucky - lesser people through, while primarily replicating the existing class system.
I think the Chinese system had elements of that, since studying for the exams was pretty much an unpaid full time job. But a village or extended family might subsidize a very smart member in the hope that he would get a position that would benefit them.
At one point the grading seems to have been biased in favor of the children of high status parents but they switched to blind grading with elaborate precautions to prevent that.
England in the 70s had an 11-plus exam. If you passed, you could get a job when you were sixteen. I did. In England now, you need a degree to get those same jobs.
It’s signalling. That’s all.
There are some degrees, of course (science, law etc), where you need the education but someone decided that everyone should be educated, but even so, signalling is still what most employers need, and it’s no better at 22 than at 11. But the employers don’t have to pay for it. Why would they?
Interesting analogy. In fact, US higher education began with a few colleges training people for the ministry. That's indoctrination and training indoctrinators. Lots of other things happened in US higher education between then and now, but we can say at least the famous colleges, and others, too, have returned to their roots, if they ever left them.
ETA: Jobs restricted to indoctrinated people are available in government, in education, in non-profits.
Another aspect of it is job security for professors of useless subjects.
Oh, bingo!
I guess it's hard to explicitly say that you're indoctrinating people without failing to actually indoctrinate them. The problem with our modern indoctrination as opposed to Chinese indoctrination is that there are multiple competing groups trying to indoctrinate you, and since there isn't strict control over classroom materials, individual teachers can make choices about the kind of indoctrination they do.
I remember from college that the best way to get an A from my economics professor was to be an ancap libertarian, the best way to get an A in social studies was to talk about how wonderful equality was and so on. I never feel like I learned a real ideology, I was just figuring out the idiosyncratic politics of my professor, then writing that into my essay
Because that's how we've always done it.
There's an old parable about monkeys and bananas. I'll see if I can avoid butchering it too much.
Put five monkeys in a room, with bananas hanging from the ceiling and a ladder underneath. The moment any monkey goes for the bananas, hose down the *other* monkeys with icy water. The monkeys will soon learn to attack any monkey going for the bananas.
Once they no longer go for the bananas, replace one veteran monkey with a rookie. The moment he goes for the bananas, the four veteran monkeys will attack him. He will soon learn his place.
Repeat until all five monkeys are from the second generation who have never been hosed down with icy water. Replace one with a third generation monkey. He too will learn to conform. If he were capable of asking why, the other four would tell him, "That's how we've always done it."
College had utility in 1500 and on, when the main goal was to memorize lots of scripture or arcane laws and Latin. Those were the first generation monkeys. It gained new utility with the advances in science and engineering; those were the second generation monkeys; "we've always had four year degrees", and they could certainly find lots to teach to fill up those four years, so why not. The social "sciences" wanted to be part of the process and invented new fields which surprisingly needed the same four years as the technical fields.
That's how it's always been done.
This kind of presumes that there is a single driving force behind the current American educational system. But the more likely case is that it’s a bit of all three theories, competing with each other and each trying to assert itself resulting in a messy patchwork of a system. Yes, it’s about signaling. But some of it does increase your productivity. Some it is indoctrination but what is to be indoctrinated changes all the time with different intellectual fads and tends to run into the practical financial desires of students (and their parents). So you get a big mishmash that nobody can make sense of.
One thing worth noting is that the "reason" for the examination system, whether Chinese or modern, doesn't have to be something we would like, such as more effective administrators or workers. It is worth noting that the Chinese empire was not terribly well administered for a very long time, and by the 1800's being just another eastern empire to be smacked around by barbarian western nations. It isn't clear (to me at least) when exactly they fell so far behind the western world, but despite massive wealth and trade since Roman times the Chinese accomplished relatively little. It seems to me that most of the idea that the examination system did anything good stems from an assumption that it must have done so rather than any evidence that the Chinese system was doing particularly well relative to European powers, or even most of its neighbors.
Anyway, all that to say that possibly humans are prone to falling prey to pointless status competitions that might have had roots in something valuable, building or just signaling virtues, but that eventually turn into Red Queen Races as we learn to exploit the system. We should be careful in assuming they were somehow efficient.
I believe China's stagnation has been a problem of geography. A big wide flat area, few mountains or other features to isolate power centers as in the Mediterranean, and a long coastline again with no peninsulas or other features to isolate regions. It was conducive to rule by one regime, or at least had such fluid internal borders that separate regions could not flourish and compete.
It's similar to central Asia, which the Mongols swept across and which Russia had bossed around for centuries, but without any regional power centers to create competition.
The Middle East had two river systems (Tigris/Euphrates and Nile) surrounded by deserts which created competing power centers, and the eastern Mediterranean coast, the Aegean islands and peninsulas and mountains and the Turkish western peninsula all competed.
China's coast is another problem. They trade a lot and act like a maritime nation, but you can bet dollars to donuts that if Russia were to cause serious border trouble, they'd shift sailors to cannon fodder in a heartbeat. They're like France in that regard; they put up a good fight against Britain's Navy until the Germans or Italians or Danes threatened them, then they beached their ships to turn sailors into cannon fodder.
The trouble with the the geography argument is that it sidesteps the question of administration. Why did having one large, relatively stable political entity result in such stagnation? That should have been a slam dunk for trade and industry as there should have been many fewer civil wars (there were lots) and effectively a Pax Sino that allowed the arts and industry to flourish. Yet instead we see China ceasing trade with outsiders, sending zero fleets to Europe, never really doing anything useful despite being a huge chunk of the Silk Road. A thousand years of administrators being chosen through testing, and yet steppe nomads pretty routinely take the place over, get assimilated into the system, and things keep going.
It is not clear that the testing system did any good for China, and a strong suggestion that whatever their administration was doing was actively deleterious and so probably the testing system was largely negative.
As a side note, it is also worth noting that China has two major river systems, with very separate and different cultures cleaving to each, as well as a pretty fractious coast surrounded by many large island and peninsular nations.
Further, Chinese maritime trade is very much a modern phenomena; they were not sending trade fleets to Europe, but rather the Europeans were sending fleets to them, and prior to that caravans were handling the trade. To my limited knowledge there are zero accounts of Chinese delegations traveling to power centers of Europe prior to the 1800's. All that despite having a huge and relatively stable empire for a millennia.
> Why did having one large, relatively stable political entity result in such stagnation?
Because there was no competition. The governments were monopolies most of the time. They had no reason to upset the apple cart with innovation, in fact every reason to fear and suppress new ideas. Why did IBM and DEC flub the PC revolution? Because they did not want to risk their current product lines on something new. Why did Microsoft ignore GUIs and the Internet? It's a story as old as the hills.
China's coast is staid in comparison to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaya, all those islands, and the Mediterranean. Their two rivers did little to isolate their cultures, as evidenced by the Chinese emperors ruling all of them. They did send Zheng He to the Indian Ocean and Madagascar, then pulled him back and abandoned all exploration because their land borders were more important and his ventures were too distracting; compare his emperor's reaction to Columbus' choice of royal sponsors.
So, again, why did they administer themselves into a hole if they had such great administrators?
They were surrounded by competing governments and civilizations that they failed to stomp into the ground, and some of those barbarians took them over. How is that a lack of competition?
Their river cultures were so isolated from each other that they spoke different languages. Throw in the river delta with Macao and Hong Kong for a third river with a different language.
Columbus is something of a bad example, as his was a state sponsored voyage of exploration across open ocean. Plenty of private European traders were sailing all over the old world, meanwhile China had a government run trip around the corner in sight of the coast.
At the same time, no one in China was setting out to conquer a new land, set up colonies, start their own little empire. Rome kept expanding and expanding, but China just petered out.
In the end, all their testing just generated administrators who tried to control everything and wound up screwing themselves. Sounds familiar, except for the being taken over by nomads.
The competition China had with barbarians was sporadic and seldom, and always from the outside, not a bunch of little city states and small kingdoms fighting each other. Dynasties ruled the entire country for several centuries, then had a century of war, then another dynasty ruled the entire country for several centuries. That's not even close to the constant warfare in the Mediterranean. China was a peaceful heaven compared to the Mediterranean.
The different Chinese languages weren't enough of a barrier to keep one emperor from ruling them all, and only their spoken languages differed, not the written one. The Aegean was full of different city states sprinkled all over, just days apart, all with different rulers even though they spoke and wrote the same language, and the Mediterranean was almost as fragmented.
I'm not clear on what you mean by "China had a government run trip around the corner in sight of the coast". Zheng He's voyages across the Indian Ocean were not in sight of land, but his independence scared the emperor. All China's local trading missions were coastal, but so were Europeans until Vasco de Gama and Christopher Columbus. They used to sail along the coast, stop at night, start again the next morning.
Columbus shopped his idea around, it was not sponsored by royals until he sold them on it, and I don't know what that has to do with this except show more competition.
China filled out its territory up to the natural barriers surrounding it -- mountains, jungles, and deserts -- and then stopped expanding because they had no reason to conquer resource-poor lands populated by barbarian neighbors who spoke and wrote different languages. Greeks and Romans expanded by conquest because they had such small territories and resource-rich neighbors to conquer.
The Aegean especially, but all the Mediterranean in general, is a fantastic place to breed competing and cooperating cities and small kingdoms. They can stay fairly well isolated and protected by mountains and bays, or they can trade and cooperate, and they're close enough together that conquest or at least fighting is still a possible route to riches. China has nothing like that. No neighboring territory was at all attractive to conquerors, it was all desert or mountains or jungles. The interior provided easy communications and no real barriers to conquest.
China's bureaucrats were government monopoly bureaucrats with no incentive to be efficient or innovative. Europe's bureaucrats worked for private businesses and small city states who had every incentive in the world to be more efficient than their neighbors and to look to better ways to defend themselves and conquer neighbors and trade better.
Your grasp of Chinese history is a bit… off. Start with this map of the Chinese Imperial territory over time. Note the times it expands and contracts, when there are multiple competing kingdoms, often divided into north and south based on the river systems, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_Dynasties.gif
Consider also the possibility that the exams were (and are) a device for proclaiming meritocracy while at the same time strongly advantaging those that could afford to spend their youth cramming rather than doing productive work, not to mention paying for all the necessary preparation. (I hear the US has followed in the footsteps of other countries, and now has what amounts to elite-college-prep kindergartens. I have not confirmed this.)
Such a system would let a few of the most brilliant - and most lucky - lesser people through, while primarily replicating the existing class system.
I think the Chinese system had elements of that, since studying for the exams was pretty much an unpaid full time job. But a village or extended family might subsidize a very smart member in the hope that he would get a position that would benefit them.
At one point the grading seems to have been biased in favor of the children of high status parents but they switched to blind grading with elaborate precautions to prevent that.
England in the 70s had an 11-plus exam. If you passed, you could get a job when you were sixteen. I did. In England now, you need a degree to get those same jobs.
It’s signalling. That’s all.
There are some degrees, of course (science, law etc), where you need the education but someone decided that everyone should be educated, but even so, signalling is still what most employers need, and it’s no better at 22 than at 11. But the employers don’t have to pay for it. Why would they?
We spent a year in Cambridge and my sister was in the year before the 11+. By her account, the year was spent learning to do well on that exam.
Interesting analogy. In fact, US higher education began with a few colleges training people for the ministry. That's indoctrination and training indoctrinators. Lots of other things happened in US higher education between then and now, but we can say at least the famous colleges, and others, too, have returned to their roots, if they ever left them.
ETA: Jobs restricted to indoctrinated people are available in government, in education, in non-profits.