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Talking with George Gilder

|ER: You've pointed out in Life after Television that some 70 percent of the costs of a film go for distribution and advertising, saying, "In every industry—from retailing to insurance—the key impact of the computer-networking revolution is to collapse the costs of distribution and remove the middlemen." What's the future of the middlemen in educational systems? Do you agree with Lew Perelman's thesis in School's Out that hyperlearning will replace, rather than merely reform, conventional education?

GILDER: Yeah, I agree mostly with Lew. I don't think that things change so abruptly as he implies they will, but it's clear that because schools are centralized and dominated by these educationist elites, they're ineffective in teaching children. And so I think in the same way as the computer has tended to break down all existing hierarchies, monopolies, pyramids, and power grids of established industrial society, it will break down centralized educational institutions as well. There is no correlation—period—between spending per student and performance per student, adjusted for education and income of parents. But there is a very statistically significant negative correlation between the amount of bureaucracy per student and the performance of the student. So it's clear that the middlemen in education are not merely dead wood, they are also a destructive force, and they actually prevent education. It's teachers that are needed, and teachers don't need much supervision. The computer essentially replaces vertically organized institutions with horizontally organized institutions. It distributes intelligence and power rather than concentrates them; it endows teachers with authority and responsibility rather than reducing teachers to being instruments of some educational bureaucracy. And the reason teachers don't care about anything but money as far as their organizations are concerned is that the bureaucrats have destroyed the experience of teaching and the gratification of teaching. This is why the schools are such perverse institutions. As Lew Perelman says, academia is a socialist bureaucracy as big as the Soviet government at its height, and it is going to fail just about as cataclysmically.

ER: Do your observations apply from top to bottom? Do they also apply to higher education?

GILDER: Well, I think there's greater diversity in higher education—quite a lot of diversity—and that the schools people think are good are mostly bad, and some of the schools people think are bad are in fact quite good. For example, I think about 70 percent of the courses at Harvard are useless. You know less when you finish than when you started. All those endless sociology courses and social science courses and social psychology and political science courses, and the endless efforts to retrieve some inkling of truth from Marxism! You know, it's as though they were still teaching some pre-Copernican astronomy—they're really obscurantists in those institutions. It reflects the collapse of the elite culture in the United States, but I think there are a lot of other cultures out there, and a lot of schools that people don't pay attention to are in fact a lot better. Schools like Hillsdale, schools like Thomas Aquinas.

There are also schools like CalTech and Harvey Mudd—schools that are excellent in science and technology. These are the best schools in the country, because the one thing this culture does well is science and technology. One of the real jokes is when you find MIT increasingly trying to teach students the humanities. I think the humanities as taught in existing universities are mostly perverse: Nihilist, relativist, feminist, and Marxist. Marxism is just a completely worthless mode of study, and yet it's pursued intently at a great many elite universities as though there's something still in it.

ER: What would you recommend to a 17-year-old?

GILDER: Well, I think there are two possibilities. One is, if such 17-year-old boys or girls really have their act together, have strong convictions, and know what they want to study, then it would be interesting to attend one of the elite universities and be kind of a counterforce there and create an adversarial culture. Publications like the Dartmouth Review, the Salient at Harvard, and the Prospect at Princeton are part of a whole series of conservative publications across the country that are kinds of centers of resistance and rebellion on these corrupt campuses, and that's probably a pretty good education, to pursue that course. In general, however, I'd recommend getting a technical or scientific education, because I don't think the schools are teaching anything else.

ER: Granting that technological advances will have a great impact on the general culture, don't you fear that money will have an even greater impact? Are cities with thirty trashy radio stations better served than towns with only two, and are they not the victims of investors who are chasing maximum ad revenues? Have the 55,000 trade books published last year in the United States produced a better general culture? Or has the culture been affected mainly by the small number of books—and movies and television shows—that were hyped into best-seller-dom?

GILDER: I think that America is still the world's leading economy and it produces a tremendous amount of art and literature that elude the elite media and elite institutions and elite critical vessels. If American culture were really summed up by TV culture, there would be no leading software company, no world-leading scientific/educational enterprise, no globally ascendant computing industry. Bioengineering wouldn't be centered in the United States, and so forth.

So I really don't think this elite mass culture—and I believe it is elitist, contrived by elites to pander to mass prurience and anxiety—can generate anything worthwhile, and I don't think it does. The actual success of the United States does not stem from what the media generally treat—in other words, phenomena like the personal computer that are incomparably more important than phenomena like Madonna.

ER: What is the hardest part of your ideas for people to comprehend? I'm sure that many of the people in charge of the converging corpses of Hollywood, TV, cable, and publishing have read your books or heard you speak. Why do you think they can't get the message?

GILDER: Well, I think a lot of them do get the message, and the ones who do are actually doing well. The ones who are pursuing the PC incurred nothing but upside surprises last year. At the beginning of the year it was predicted by Bill Gates and Andy Grove—the world's leading experts on the subject—that between 34 and 37 million personal computers would be sold in 1993; the actual number turned out to be almost 50 million computers—about 30 or 40 percent more than expected. And all the people who produce software and peripherals for personal computers and personal computer networks prospered. The computer industry grew 20 percent or so last year, while consumer electronics was stagnant. A lot of people developed CD-ROMs, which were a $5-billion business last year, up from virtually nothing a few years ago. The cable industry, which I consulted with a lot and which I think I influenced a lot, recently launched a wide array of products to connect computers over the cable network, and those products are going to be very important and valuable. I predict that during the next five years or so the computer industry will yield more products for cable companies than the TV industry does.

ER: What advice would you give to the president of a college or university?

GILDER: I think a kind of organizing principle, such as St. John's Great Books Program or St. Thomas Aquinas's orientation toward the Catholic worldview, can animate an educational experience, whereas trying to be a smorgasbord of secular social theory is going to result in both a bad experience for students and failure as an educational institution. You've got to be willing to teach some specific thing. You can't adopt some relativist posture, because that will mean that fanatics will dominate the institution, and most of these institutions are dominated by propagandists rather than by teachers.

ER: And what would you advise college and university presidents to do with regard to information technology?

GILDER: They should digitize their libraries and make them available from student rooms over computer networks. They should in general not restrict the resources of the college to the classrooms in it, but reach out from their own classrooms to students around the world who want to take courses with the excellent teachers available, while at the same time allowing the students on campus to reach out around the world. In other words, make your educational institution one that summons the best from universities everywhere, rather than focusing on the faculty and students that happen to be assembled at your particular location.

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