The Hick Factor: The Root Causes

Yesterday, inspired by a reading of one of David Brooks’s recent columns, I raised concerns that America was dealing with a growing national ambivalence about, if not disdain for, practical, as opposed to more abstract, forms of knowledge.

No doubt, the roots of this problem are complex.  While I’m not a social scientist, I suspect they stem from a combination of global economic factors as well as cultural and social trends unfolding in the United States.

Based on my own limited reading, I don’t think this problem will be addressed easily.  As a matter of fact, I think it will present an extraordinarily difficult challenge, not only for those of us in Cooperative Extension and other facets of the land-grant system but also for policymakers, entrepreneurs and other others who have a stake in preserving this nation’s longstanding emphasis on practical knowledge.

Perhaps the most telling example of this challenge in all of its complexity was shared recently by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who reported how these divisions were being played out in many of this nation’s leading college campuses.

Douthat cited a study by Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford of admissions policies at eight highly selective colleges and universities.

…while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances.

Of course, I’m not implying that this admissions trend reflects some conspiracy among elite colleges to undermine the value Americans have historically placed on practical knowledge.

Even so, if the products of two of this nation’s premier purveyors of practical knowledge, 4-H and FFA, are being denied admission to this nation’s leading colleges and universities and, ultimately, to the leading circles of influence and decision-making, what does this say about our prospects for restoring practical knowledge to a significant standing in American life?

Could this devaluing of practical knowledge also stem from the way elite colleges select applicants?

Writing in the June 1, 2008 issue of The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz, a product of Ivy League schooling, contends that elite universities are now selecting solely for analytical intelligence.   Yet, it seems to me — and I think David Brooks would agree — that practical knowledge, as an attempt to derive practical benefit from scientific discovery, requires as much creative as it does analytical intelligence and, consequently, tends to draw from both hemispheres of the brain.

Simply put, practical knowledge involves a combination of many different kinds of intelligence, with analytical intelligence occupying a prominent place within that combination.

Deresiewicz makes a similar observation.

The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic….But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

Granted, many of the points I’ve outlined above amount to questions — and possibly ill-informed, baseless ones at that.

Even so, I discern an opportunity for groups such as 4-H and FFA, despite the bias directed at them in some elite quarters — an opportunity to rekindle an interest in, if not an enduring passion for, practical knowledge among our young people.

The Return of the Hick Factor and It’s Implications for Extension

Part of our nation’s greatness stems from the fact that it has never erected a high wall of separation between so-called academic and practical knowledge.

 

Auburn, Clemson, Michigan State, Purdue and Texas A&M universities, all of which started out as agricultural and mechanical institutions but now command topflight rank along with their state-chartered counterparts, are a testament to this longstanding American openness to practical knowledge.

Our British cousins held a similarly high regard for practical knowledge, which perhaps accounts in large measure for why they rose in the 19th century to become the world’s first global economic superpower.

Quoting economic historian Joel Mokyr, New York Times columnist and author David Brooks maintains that Britain’s and later America’s phenomenal economic achievement stemmed from a changed state of mind.

“Because of a series of cultural shifts, technicians started taking scientific knowledge and putting it to practical use.”

 

To put it another way, Britain and its cultural and political offshoot, the United States, developed a respect, if not passion, for practical knowledge.

Other advanced nations initially did not hold practical knowledge in such high regard, including Germany. Peter Watson, writing in his superb history of intellectual thought, Thought: A History of Ideas from Fire to Freud, described the prevailing disdain for practical knowledge among the educated German upper and middle classes.

Watson cites as a prime example the ambiguous public standing of Max Planck, the physicist who discovered the quantum, the idea that energy comes in small packets, or quanta.

“Despite the fact that his discovery rates as one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, in Planck’s own family, the humanities were considered a superior form of knowledge to science,” Watson writes. “His cousin, the historian Max Lenz, would jokingly pun that scientists (Naturforsher) were in reality foresters (Naturforster) – or, as he would say, hicks.”

In an earlier piece, I referred to such historical bias against practical knowledge as the “hick factor.”

Ultimately, as Brooks writes, upper-class Britons followed suit, as “the great-great-grandchildren of the empire builders withdrew from commerce, tried to rise above practical knowledge and had more genteel attitudes about how to live.”

It appears that this hick factor, prevalent among 19th century elite Germans and, later, British elites, is gaining a toehold among American in the 21st century – and not just among elites.

“The shift is evident at all levels of society,” Brooks writes. “America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.”

That raises a disturbing question: Within this rapidly evolving social context, what are the implications for Cooperative Extension and the land-grant system in general?

These land-grant institutions helped elevate knowledge to a preeminent place not only in the United States but throughout the world.

Through tens of thousands of hours of classroom instruction, applied research on thousand acres of cropland, and countless field tours, this system played an indispensable role generating and purveying much of the practical knowledge on which the modern farming system is based.

Equally important, what role, if any, should Extension and other land-grant institution serve in helping restore industry and technical expertise – practical knowledge – to a preeminent place in American life?