Standardization and its Detrimental Effect on Academia

Philosophy is the precursor to science, and had the advantage of being independent of society. Because most people believed that philosophy had nothing to do with them, philosophers could freely think what they wanted without restraint of what people thought about what they thought, because the ignorant masses' opinions weren't relevant anyway. This meant that the great thinkers could be far less biased in their thought, and (more importantly) far more creative and innovative.

Every time a philosopher has been taken seriously by the populace, a science is formed. Such was the case with the first philosophies to become sciences, Issac Newton "natural philosophy" > natural science, Sigmund Freud "psychoanalysis" > psychology. Isaac Newton was originally just a knowledgeable philosopher and mathematician until people started taking his mathematical formulas seriously, and Freud was just another physician and dream sage until people started taking his dream interpretation techniques seriously. And the more seriously people take philosophy, the more philosophy dies ;-(

This is another reason I am opposed to progressivism. They wanted to modernize the scientific world by changing all epistemologically-relevant philosophies into sciences, for the betterment of mankind. This resulted in public awareness of most major philosophies, which in turn caused all philosophy to stagnate in the name of the standardization of knowledge. The more you try to control energy, the more energy is lost (entropy). This is one of the most basic laws of thermodynamics and more broadly of life.

I agree that progressivism has had somewhat of a positive of an impact on science in some respects (i.e. standardization allows for more effective transmission of knowledge), but then again, to a large extent progressivism created science, which makes me wonder what science would look like without progressivism. Of course I have a natural bias against progressivism because it attacks the liberty and individuality I stand for, and is based on this arrogant notion that you can accurately define knowledge and people by standardizing them and putting everything and everyone into proverbial boxes.

Since I believe that knowledge thrives most when it is free (for examples of what happens when knowledge is suppressed and controlled, you need look no further than the Dark Ages, dominated by Catholics suppressing knowledge in the name of God!) I believe knowledge should be completely free and unfettered by scientific bias, public opinion, or standardization. Sure the common people could not understand science as well then, but it's not like the common people understand science anyway! If anything, their knowledge of it is a grave misunderstanding perpetuated by an ignorant media and misconceiving public, and such a false "knowledge" is of no merit to anyone. 

Due to the nature of knowledge and the pursuit thereof, people should only be aware of what knowledge that they are actually interested in understanding. The reason for this shows us the most crucial flaw in the standardization that progressivism perpetuates "in the name of science": prejudice. That is, because most people don't care about knowledge or science, their exposure to it only breeds prejudice and ill-conceived assumptions about how the world, people, etc. work. They believe they understand the science, but they don't. They think they know all kinds of things about science, but they don't, they only "know" what is convenient for them, the lot of which is built on a superficial understanding and a stack of fallacious assumptions that do not in any way do justice to the science they claim to understand.

In America this is especially apparent. with millions of Americans with college degrees which are utterly useless. I have a friend who have Master's degrees in communication studies from Stanford, an Ivy League-class university. You would think that journalism and the editing process would be easy to her. Yet when I gave her my novel to work on, she said she found the grammar too difficult to edit to a publishable format, and had spent the past few weeks trying to work on it. Of course, I only presented it unedited because I didn't care about editing, but personally I don't have hardly any formal education in editing. When when she told me how much trouble she had editing, I told her that it would be easier for me to edit it without looking at her edits, and with no effort at all I had the whole thing edited to a publishable format in a matter of less than 10 minutes. She wondered how I could do it so fast, and I could only wonder why she couldn't do it at all. I really think it's sad that even after he getting such a prestigious degree in the field, she could even efficiently edit such a simple thing as the grammatical quality of a chapter of a novel. 

I have seen many more examples of such incompetence in nearly every major field of the educational system. I have had conversations with graduates of Computer Science, AI, Quantum field theory, Art History, Economics, Theology, and virtually every major field of education, and my conversations with them only demonstrated their ignorance of the field they claimed to be an expert in, that they had "worked hard" to become knowledgeable about. My knowledge about these subjects often topped theirs; even though my interest in these topics is merely sporadic and superficial, somehow I know more than them. 

This is not to say that I am somehow I genius or "omniscient", to the contrary, it is saying that most college students and college graduates in America are hopelessly ignorant even in the fields they major in. It really is very sad, how they put all that time and money and effort into becoming knowledgeable, only to end up graduating with nothing more than superficial knowledge and "common sense", and perhaps the ability to regurgitate what their teachers, books, and curriculum taught them. Standardization and this idea of controlling education has created this pathetic state of stagnation, where people learn only how to discriminate in their knowledge and be prejudiced in their thoughts, to pretend to understand where they only regurgitate, to rationalize instead of innovate. In many way, College and the educational system have destroyed knowledge in the same way they "helped" it, through standardization.

Right now we live in a reality where everything is standardized, and that standardization is believed to be "common sense", and that belief is perpetuated by the same people who mistake "common sense" for being expertise. The illusion that standardization is a good thing and a necessary part of the knowledge exchange process is encouraged at the social level, giving only social outcasts and eccentrics reason to question the system. One such eccentric organization dedicated to education without standardization is UnCollege, but these movements are few and far in-between as the vast majority of people have accepted standardized education as the best and only legitimate means of transmitting academia. Our educational system is in a sad state indeed ;-(