Isegoria

Although you’ve probably never heard of it, BRAC is the largest nongovernmental organization in the world, with 100,000 employees. The name used to be an acronym for Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee:

BRAC does everything: health, microfinance, agriculture, water. BRAC gets some of its budget from donations, largely from rich-country development agencies like Britain’s DFID or AusAid. But most of its money comes from its businesses. Dairy farmers needed milk chilling stations, so BRAC built them; BRAC dairy now has 22 percent of Bangladesh’s milk market. BRAC’s programs needed Internet connections; BRACnet is now one of the country’s largest Internet service providers. In Bangladesh, BRAC is large enough and comprehensive enough to be akin to a parallel government.

And since 1985, BRAC has run schools:

In 1985, BRAC opened 22 one-room primary schools, admitting children who dropped out of primary school or had reached the starting age limit of 8. BRAC actually spends $20 per student per year. School buildings are rudimentary, with bamboo walls and corrugated tin roofs. All BRAC’s programs rely on workers hired locally at very low salaries, and so this became the way to find teachers as well. BRAC hires a woman from each village to teach, pays her a stipend and gives her two weeks of training before she starts, and ongoing training every month — 140 days in total over 4 years. A supervisor will stop in once or twice a week to watch a lesson and talk to parents in the village, asking if they have any complaints or comments.

Early on, said May, parents had to pay a small amount to send their child to a BRAC school. “At that point, this was a way to have local accountability for the teacher — parents would be very angry if she didn’t show up. But it didn’t work very well. There were very poor families.” Now BRAC schools are free, with textbooks, storybooks, slates, notebooks and educational materials such as math toys all included. (Public schools, by contrast, while supposedly free, charge parents numerous fees.)

BRAC designed its school system to address all the reasons children didn’t attend schools. Teachers are female. The schools aggressively recruit girls, who make up two-thirds of the student body. Ethnic minorities study in their own language for the first few years; disabled children receive free surgery and medical devices. Each village has a school; “the school goes to the children; the children don’t come to the school,” said Safiqul Islam, BRAC’s director of education. The teacher starts first grade with a group of 30 or so children of different ages and stays with the group all the way through primary school, covering the 5-year curriculum in 4 years. The children then go into government secondary schools, and the teacher starts over with a new group.

To allow children to do chores, the school day is short — three to four hours each day. But there are few days off, so children actually spend more time in class than in public schools. The village sets the schedule, so that children are home for harvesting.

Teaching in BRAC schools is very different from the rote memorization that characterizes the public schools in Bangladesh (and most poor countries). BRAC schools use some rote learning, but also lots of singing, dancing, drawing, games, individual attention, group study and Montessori-style work with educational toys.

In the first three years in a BRAC school, moreover, children spend a lot of time not on core subjects, but things BRAC deems important: confidence building, working with others, gender rights, nutrition, hygiene. In core subjects, children take monthly tests, but they are usually not told of the results — they are informal tests designed to help the teacher understand the students’ skills and weaknesses. And the national exams? “We do not bother with them,” said Islam. In the students’ final year they focus for three months on Bangladesh’s national exams. “We try to tell the student, ‘you know enough — just answer the questions,’” he said.

To outsiders, this model seems unlikely to succeed: surely disadvantaged children need more qualified teachers, not village women who might or might not have finished high school. But BRAC is good at getting high-quality work from local people who lack formal qualifications, and Islam said that it was no different with teachers. “There are a lot of educated women in the villages who do not have employment,” he said. “When they get it, it is seriously empowering.” One objective measure is that BRAC teachers show up for class — their absentee rate is less than 5 percent.

An evaluation (pdf) of BRAC students’ scores on government tests found that teachers’ levels of education did not affect their students’ performance — but experience did; the longer the teacher has been teaching, the higher the students’ test scores.

BRAC students, in fact, do better than their public-school counterparts.

We’ve entered an era of colleges as country clubs:

Princeton’s dormitories were the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, who was president of the university before he entered politics. Wilson worried about campus elitism and felt that too many students were housed in off-campus “eating clubs,” which divided students from one another and diverted them from the life of the mind. So he reconfigured the campus as “a walled city against materialism and all of its works,” as one architect wrote, built around solid but austere student residences.

At all-female Smith College, meanwhile, modest living quarters would illustrate “what the human spirit can do when unhampered either by deprivation or by excess,” as one dean of the college wrote.

After World War II, when the GI Bill allowed millions of returning veterans to attend college, they lived in hastily constructed Quonset huts or trailer parks. And when postwar prosperity and federal loans sparked another enrollment boom in the 1960s and 1970s, universities built drab cinder-block and concrete buildings to house newcomers.

Only in recent years did colleges start to resemble country clubs, with a few classrooms thrown in. Competing for students, universities also competed to see who could build the nicest dorms, gyms and stadiums. The expenses were passed on to students, of course, who met rising tuition costs by taking out more loans. Student debt has doubled in the last decade, topping $1 trillion, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.

To be sure, some of the new college construction is bankrolled by individual donors, who often prefer to fund buildings that can bear their names rather than scholarships or research. But private gifts to universities plummeted after the 2008 recession, while construction picked up. Between 2010 and 2012, colleges and universities spent $22 billion on new facilities, or twice as much as they were spending a decade earlier. And with fewer private donations, some colleges are taking on debt to fund construction, debt that is likely to be passed on to students and their families.

David Friedman recently discussed diversity and academic open-mindedness with a fellow academic:

It started with my commenting that I thought support for “diversity” in the sense in which the term is usually used in the academic context — having students or faculty from particular groups, in particular blacks but also, in some contexts, gays, perhaps hispanics, perhaps women — in practice anticorrelated with support for the sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.

I offered my standard example. Imagine that a university department has an opening and is down to two or three well qualified candidates. They learn that one of them is an articulate supporter of South African Apartheid. Does the chance of hiring him go up or down? If the university is actually committed to intellectual diversity, the chance should go up — it is, after all, a position that neither faculty nor students are likely to have been exposed to. In fact, in any university I am familiar with, it would go sharply down.

The response was that that he considered himself very open minded, getting along with people across the political spectrum, but that that position was so obviously beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse that refusing to hire the candidate was the correct response.

The question I should have asked and didn’t was whether he had ever been exposed to an intelligent and articulate defense of apartheid. Having spent my life in the same general environment — American academia — as he spent his, I think the odds are pretty high that he had not been. If so, he was in the position of a judge who, having heard the case for the prosecution, convicted the defendant without bothering to hear the defense. Worse still, he was not only concluding that the position was wrong — we all have limited time and energy, and so must often reach such conclusions on an inadequate basis — he was concluding it with a level of certainty so high that he was willing to rule out the possibility that the argument on the other side might be worth listening to.

An alternative question I might have put to him was whether he could make the argument for apartheid about as well as a competent defender of that system could. That, I think, is a pretty good test of whether one has an adequate basis to reject a position — if you don’t know the arguments for it, you probably don’t know whether those arguments are wrong, although there might be exceptions. I doubt that he could have. At least, in the case of political controversies where I have been a supporter of the less popular side, my experience is that those on the other side considerably overestimate their knowledge of the arguments they reject.

Megan McArdle discusses America’s new Mandarins:

The Chinese imperial bureaucracy was immensely powerful. Entrance was theoretically open to anyone, from any walk of society — as long as they could pass a very tough examination. The number of passes was tightly restricted to keep the bureaucracy at optimal size.

Passing the tests and becoming a “scholar official” was a ticket to a very good, very secure life. And there is something to like about a system like this … especially if you happen to be good at exams. Of course, once you gave the imperial bureaucracy a lot of power, and made entrance into said bureaucracy conditional on passing a tough exam, what you have is … a country run by people who think that being good at exams is the most important thing on earth. Sound familiar?

The people who pass these sorts of admissions tests are very clever. But they’re also, as time goes on, increasingly narrow. The way to pass a series of highly competitive exams is to focus every fiber of your being on learning what the authorities want, and giving it to them. To the extent that the “Tiger Mom” phenomenon is actually real, it’s arguably the cultural legacy of the Mandarin system.

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Almost none of the kids I meet in Washington these days even had boring menial high-school jobs working in a drugstore or waiting tables; they were doing “enriching” internships or academic programs. And thus the separation of the mandarin class grows ever more complete.

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And like all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should. Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less. But if they think there’s anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will. For the good of everyone else, of course. Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.