在此向大家推薦，前幾年由我政大英文所的學妹趙麗婷女士所寫的大專生研究計畫報告。雖然是用英文寫作，此篇報告寫的非常好，我因此也有感而發，寫了一封信（也是用英文），在此就貼給各位參考。
此篇報告的指導教授藍亭(Timothy Lane)老師（
http://www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/430-1.html）是一位思慮清晰的傑出哲學研究者，也對我個人接觸哲學有相當的影響，還期望能找時間向他多多請益。
報告原文
如不存在，請至國科會網站下載：
https://nscnt12.nsc.gov.tw/was2/award/AsAwardMultiQuery.aspx
（點選大專學生研究計畫後，搜尋97年度，學生姓名：趙麗婷）
以下則是我的信函內容：
Dear Ms. Chao,
I have been reading your report for NSC College Thesis Program named "Qualified Academic Competition, Achievement, and Social Equality for Higher Education in Taiwan—A Defense against democratic theory and vindication on the ideal higher education." To say the least, I am very impressed with your bold assertive (and yet confident) tone in scrutinizing some of the implausible ideas (shall we just say fallacies) in our higher education policies. Beyond that, it is indeed a very well written paper with well-reasoned arguments and analyses one after another. Moreover, you work is very relevant today. As a result, as a fellow citizen interested in education, I am moved to offer some opinions of my own. (If you do think any of these would contribute to any criticism to your work, please do not think so. I am just trying to supplement some of the points in your paper with my own experience in private sector, and my compliments for your work above are unreservedly genuine: I do enjoy reading every page of it.)
In the page 5 of your report, you analyzed three presuppositions in current educational policies, namely that the higher educations should aim at "(1) the enhancement of the educational level for the public, (2) the equal educational opportunity to higher education for any individual, and (3) the professionalization of academia for the provision of future human resources in job market." I totally agree with your analysis, but wonder what the proper aims of higher education would be, especially in view of these fallacies and in keeping with the qualitative approach of your inquiry. If you would kindly permit some presumption on my part for the sake of brevity, I think one proper aim for higher education should be
I. To Fashion Qualified Individual Men and Women into Ladies and Gentlemen.
Despite that such aim necessarily sounds Victorian (but we do owe our modern education system to this historical period quite a lot), this explains why liberal arts and general education, as contrasted with professional trades for apparent and immediate practical uses, should be the foci in higher education. Of course, these indispensable parts in higher education are not the aims of higher education in themselves. They are vital means to achieve ends, namely to fashion young men and women into ladies and gentlemen.
Also, in order to do so, it is important that higher education enrolls emotionally mature and responsible persons, so that they are capable of engaging in real (sometimes even heated and controversial) debates as rational and respectful individuals, not swerved by public opinion or passion. Only with such right intention, these people would become ladies and gentlemen by learning liberal arts. By reading works of literature they learn to sympathize with motives, passions, illusions and imagination of fellow human beings but are not swayed by them; by reading historians they learn to perceive the cause of human events and the formation of the human civilizations, but they will also know that they are equally liable to the follies, errors and wrongdoings committed in the past; by reading philosophy they learn to appreciate other's thoughts and to think clearly of whatever basic questions put forward before them, but they are not dependent on philosophers to express their thoughts.
To be sure, my emphasis on the liberal arts is by no means to preclude other subjects of study (or majors) in our universities. They too have a lot to say in the formation of any proper lady and gentleman. For the right mind, natural sciences teach one to scrutinize closely and diligently on the material or phenomenal world. Social sciences (such as economics, illustrated below), by contrast, lead one to look into the noumenal world (or colloquially, hearts and minds of fellow human beings) in a systematic manner. (I trust much of the same can be said of other "useful" subjects, only that I may need time to familiarize myself with these to speak for them.)
To sum up all these claims concerning subjects of study in academia, it is the responsibility of higher education to have qualified men and women not only know the general knowledge of those subjects (rather than particular or "useful" applications of those), but also see farther than what is immediately and manifest before them. In other words, once these qualified men and women graduate, they must demonstrate basic skills for acquiring and discovering new knowledge on their own, namely, ability to do research, and those who are willing and proficient on such skills are prepared for pursuing graduate studies in any of these subjects of study; eventually they will be able to instruct later students to acquire these abilities.
The other aim for the higher education, in my opinion, should be,
II. To Foster Leaders in the Society (or more colloquially in Chinese, 社會的棟樑)
Of course, this directly follows from your argument against egalitarian distribution of higher education regardless of merits in individuals. Not any kinds of material can be made to sufficiently support structures; by analogy, not every single man and woman needs to go on colleges just to get a job. (Alas, with the effectual decimation in our vocational education, this is less and less true every day, and such is a tremendous waste of precious time and energy for our young men and women!) You have incisively argued for this point, so I won't belabor any further.
However, what do we want from these selected few who receive higher education? My suggestion is that they are to become leaders of the society. To clarify, I am not saying that as taxpayers, parents, friends, educators, or even policymakers we demand them (as if to be molded) to lead over others in society, because such leaders are required in almost every single aspect of society, from assembly lines of every factory to opinion leaders in legislatures, from any manager of a small company to the president of an entire nation, just as there are all kinds of beams and pillars for buildings and structures of various kinds. These leaders are not only there to achieve and decide what is to be done; utilizing skills such as "communication, interaction, basic logical/mathematical reasoning, and abstract perception/appreciation" (your paper pp. 3-4), they are also to coordinate the actions of fellow men and women and to inspire them to accomplish the task.
Note that none of these abilities are concerned with any specific trades to be acquired by vocational education. They are not even directly related to liberal arts or any sciences, or even any particular subject of study. On the contrary, they are exercised by ladies and gentlemen cultivated in these. It is true that most of these abilities are not very conducive in helping one getting one particular job or position, but without these we cannot even hope tasks be performed properly, efficiently, and purposefully. (In other words, without such abilities, we then know neither the big picture for which this particular task is a part, nor if the particular task would actually contribute to our benefit or utility).
As a result, although these well-educated individuals are not known for possessing any particular trade immediately useful in the job market, they have tremendous responsibility, and much indeed is at stake at their hands. Moreover, with their identity as ladies and gentlemen, they are worthy of exemplar for anyone around them to aspire and emulate. Of course, all these may not be said of any young man and woman right after commencement, but with right mind and acquired knowledge, by gathering more experience and earning trust from others, they will command greater and greater authority over time. Henceforth, there is great (if not greater) use for higher education beyond producing professors and teachers for its own use, only that such use is less apparent, less certain, and less immediate, requiring one to put his own efforts in figuring out the actual use.
And this is why higher education needs meritorious and competent people as students, because any graduates short of those standards would not only constitute waste and abandonment for those individuals, but also do a great harm to the society by fooling everyone (including themselves) into thinking that they meet the basic requirements pertaining to a college graduate. It has deleterious consequences, because they will become substandard leaders of the society who are either incompetent or even overreaching themselves into harming themselves and even other under their lead. Chances are that the society will weed those people out from positions of importance worthy of a college graduate; then they are forced to staring disaster in the face, thinking of their wasted college years (and mounting financial obligations if they should have taken on student loan). However, some of those substandard people are retained in these positions (partly due to nepotism, as opposed to meritocracy), they are liable to corrupt people under their command and influence, and believe it or not, entire countries (and even the whole world) can be corrupted by them. Grave is the danger of misplaced education indeed!
To give more practical support for such theory concerning the aim of higher education (namely, to produce leaders in the society), let me demonstrate my thoughts with reference to economics. People are accustomed to talking and thinking about market (or job) demand and utility of higher education, and your paper has covered such thinking in a reasonably comprehensive manner. I wholly agree with your analysis, not only because economics may not be best tool to describe every single facet of higher education, but also because much of the mainstream economics (as it is prevalent today) is miserably short of sound philosophical foundations. However, as will be suggested by my following analysis, I believe we can still look for sound economic thoughts with some historical and philosophical insight, and these thoughts may help us in correcting those widely held misconceptions.
Let us start with utility. In my opinion, the root of the problem is "for whom" such utility represents, especially when we know people have different set of subjective values and they have wildly different preferences for goods and services. Henceforth, to define things like "social utility" and to make function out of it is an impossible, implausible, and ludicrous notion in itself, because you cannot even begin by adding utility for two persons; you can only presume (and this is presumptuous indeed) that such and such contributed what to the utility of the society; in other words, it is nothing short to impose someone's arbitrary preferences over others without claiming to do so. This is, in a word, disingenuous.
(I of course did not invent such thoughts myself, and I have no intention to keep them as mine. I dropped all proper names and references only to show clearly they are logically sound. If you want to know more of the economics I am using (namely Austrian economics, based on axioms and logic concerning human action (or in a word, praxeology), in a way similar to geometry), let me suggest to you some great material for such thought, including
1. Lessons for the Young Economist by Robert P. Murphy, Lessons 2 to 3. (English, see http://mises.org/document/5706/Lessons-for-the-Young-Economist. This is such a great and accessible book that I decided to spend time and money translating the book into Chinese and publishing it, see http://lateliertw.blogspot.tw )
2. "『奧地利經濟學派』與『主流經濟學』之別" by Walter Block http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjaGikRhtaI )
The other one is market demand. The key is to distinguish demand from want. When going abroad, we all would love to have a private jet at our disposal rather than being cramped into a modest economy seat in a commercial aircraft (as long as we are not asked to foot the bill!). It certainly is quite a want in many people's hearts for private jets, but there is hardly a demand from the vast majority of those people for private jets, because we do not have the capabilities to acquire or maintain them. In plain English, they are too expensive for us. Exactly the same thing could be said of cell phones and computers quite some decades ago. They were appealing concepts, but only just so. What makes them possible and so prevalent in our modern society is that we have so much greater productivity that supply for such gadgets today is possible and even abundant (at least vastly so in comparison). It is the supply of those things (in economic terms, greater quantity at lower price; supply and demand actually denote relationship between quantity and price) that actually makes the demand, i.e. our capability to satisfy wants by buying them, possible. This result is called Say's Law, and it is arguably one of the most important and most discussed results in economics. In other words, supply comes first, and demand is enabled.
So, what does this have to do with higher education and college graduates? As I have said, in contrast to technicians trained with specific trades in vocational schools, these graduates are to be leaders to direct them and combine their diverse efforts to accomplish tasks. As far as economics is concerned, the most important category of such leaders are entrepreneurs, who
hires the technicians, i.e., people who have the ability and the skill to perform definite kinds and quantities of work. The class of technicians includes the great inventors, the champions in the field of applied science, the constructors and designers as we as the performers of the most simple tasks. The entrepreneur joins their ranks as far as he himself takes part in the technical execution of his entrepreneurial plans. The technician contributes his own toil and trouble; but it is the entrepreneur qua entrepreneur who directs his labor toward definite goals. (Ludwig von Mises Human Action 300)
From this we may envision why is higher education in general useful, if not by satisfying market demand or by training people with definite profession. It is then to produce future entrepreneurs who have the vision and competence to lead technicians to devise certain (business) plans and accomplish them. Of course it takes tremendous time and experience for one to acquire these abilities so as to take on such serious responsibility, new graduate may start his or her career under the lead of entrepreneur(s) as
[a] manager[, who] is a junior partner of the entrepreneur, as it were, no matter what the contractual and financial terms of his employment are. The only relevant thing is that his own financial interests force him to attend to the best of his abilities to the entrepreneurial functions which are assigned to him within a limited and precisely determined sphere of action. (Ibid 301)
In effect, a manager takes some part in entrepreneurial actions, as assigned and supervised by their superiors. By gaining more experience, such manager is entrusted with greater responsibilities, eventually becoming a capable entrepreneur responsible for an individual business unit, including its profit and loss (among other things).
(For more detailed analysis of the entrepreneur or manager please refer to related pages of Human Action. This magnus opus is one important work in Austrian economics, and in my opinion, one of the best books in economic thoughts. I highly recommend it.)
According to Mises, a successful entrepreneur,
does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way. In his actions he is directed by an opinion about the future which deviates from those held by the crowd. (Ibid 582)
In other words, an accomplished entrepreneur has to envision the future demand of consumers in a way no other people do and to satisfy such demand by actively supplying goods and services. This is what makes truly great businesses. For any individual to possess such uncanny capabilities he or she must be able to see beyond the present, apparent, and immediate market (demand) and foresee what others cannot. And this is exactly one essential and high purpose for higher education other than discovering knowledge and producing teachers (or just "educat[ing] officeholders" in the public sector, as claimed by Gutmann). In other words, higher education aims to produce individuals who with their invention and ideas bring forth new goods and services to satisfy demand of consumers. Such action necessarily involves risk and carries serious responsibility. It is perhaps for this reason that higher education must be reserved to only select meritorious few and not to be disseminated indiscriminately to the general public.
However, although higher education might not burden itself with the enhancement of education for the public, there is arguably a role for higher education for educating the general public, though an indirect one. From my preceding analysis of entrepreneur, well-educated individuals (college graduates, Masters and even Doctors) are certainly in an excellent position to teach their fellow men and women what they know and love. As a result, as entrepreneurs they may garner skills from other people and themselves to make their knowledge palatable to the public. (I cannot for sure determine that this is the duty of every single graduate from higher education, but at least one can fathom that this is perhaps one proper and effective way for higher education to elevate the educational level (or literacy?) for the general public, more so than just egalitarian or democratic distribution of opportunities for receiving higher education.)
I sincerely hope that, by my former example of economics, you do realize that the topic of higher education is an interdisciplinary one, and a well-rounded discussion of which necessarily requires one to have a comprehensive and holistic understanding of many subjects. (And I think, by this token, that this is perhaps one another reason why higher education should not be set to achieve professionalism.) To reach such understanding is extremely difficult indeed, and your work is admirable since it really engages with some of aspects not directly related to education, such as politics. For this I am wholly of your opinion and think that democracy is not the way forward for the development of higher education, because democracy is by definition egalitarian and not based on individual merits, and the majority rule flowing from democracy is inimical to the ideas of transcendence, tradition, and individual talent that higher education lives by.
On the contrary, free inquiry, as long as it does not interfere with others' freedom of expression, is clearly the way forward (and you are certainly right about that). However, as the recent NSC grant scandals exhibit, one problem remains: using public money for their research work, academics can neither be expected nor allowed to have a complete free rein to their research without emptying public coffers. Also, even if they have perfect integrity and the best intention in administering research, what is beneficial to them (and their research) may still be not beneficial to the public. What, then, would be the justifications for their free academic inquiries? More importantly, under the circumstances, whither higher education, and, what lies in the future for these subjects of study? Would they remain relevant for future generations?
These are serious questions indeed, but we must think about them if we want our future generations to enjoy higher education and these subjects of study, just as we were all privileged to do so. Despite these question, let me thank again for your incisive paper, which not only enlightened me to think very closely on the topic of education, but also inspired me to articulate my thoughts on the matter. I sincerely look forward to seeing your success in whatever field you choose to spend time and energy on in the future.
Respectfully,
陳宗佑
Hasting G. Chen
游藝文化事業有限公司執行長
Chief Executive, L'Atelier Culture and Publishing Co., Ltd.
