Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives (2000) — a Book Review

03 May 2016

Good in substantial part — especially so for readers willing to appreciate the nuances that Schmidt brings to his oft-repeated thesis

Physicist Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives (Rowen & Littlefield Publishers, 2000) is worth a look. Particularly for younger people about to enter professional or graduate training.

Schmidt’s contention is that:

[T]he hidden root of much career dissatisfaction is the professional’s lack of control over the “political” component of his or her creative work.

[P]rofessional education and employment push people to accept a role in which they do not make a significant difference . . . .

[T]he intellectual boot camp known as graduate or professional school, with its cold-blooded expulsions and creeping indoctrination, systematically grinds down the student’s spirit and ultimately produces obedient thinkers — highly educated employees who do their assigned work without questioning its goals.

Schmidt’s basic claim is accurate

I partially trained in medicine and completely in law, as well taking two graduate level excursions into other fields.

My perspective, especially as the oldest guy in both professional schools, matches Dr. Schmidt’s. Perhaps not as pejoratively, having been cynically inclined as a result of years of police work.

The author and I agree that the hidden societal point to tedious, inefficient, and frequently quasi-abusive training is to inculcate an unquestioning attitude on the part of future professional employees and practitioners.

This process curbs the freer elements of boat-rocking inquiry, which might disturb the status quo. Professional qualification tests, the best known being the MCAT for medicine and the LSAT for law, weed out candidates whom the test instrument-makers deem unsuited to become eventual cogs within the professions being selected for. Subsequent training makes those selected implicitly buy into the Establishment’s unspoken paradigms.

The book is filled with good examples of how this works. Do not be misled into thinking that Schmidt thinks of this as a conspiracy. It is, instead, a natural outgrowth of the way in which our society works.

I depart from Schmidt in suspecting that the insufferable elements of professional training are probably unnecessary, in that most of us would still buy into the Prevailing Order’s orientation, even without the drudgeries now imposed.

My skepticism in this regard leads to a couple of comments about the book’s noticeable weaknesses.

Lack of clarity — as to what readers should be rebelling in favor of

Curiously, Dr. Schmidt never lays out what a non-Establishment society of merit would look like.

Schmidt calls himself a “radical” in his concluding chapter. As a matter of intellectual fairness to readers, that bald statement probably should have come in the introduction. Yet, given how rebellious Schmidt appears to be in that chapter, his publisher probably wisely had him close, rather than begin, with it.

One certainly detects Dr. Schmidt’s contrarian nature along the way, but that closing list of recommended action-taking, society-changing behaviors will politically prickle more conventionally oriented Americans. With the negative result being that they discard his thinking, without first making fair-minded analysis of it.

Note

One Amazon.com reviewer labelled Schmidt a Marxist, but without advancing any evidence that such was the case. He seemed to think that attaching that label alone persuasively detracted from the quality of Schmidt’s reasoning. Others may reflexively agree with him.

Schmidt’s rebellion, such as it is, seems to favor a more egalitarian, peaceful, and individually fulfilling culture. But it is difficult to make a persuasive pejorative case that the Status Quo brainwashes us in evil fashion, without first hypothesizing a human assemblage that potentially would not do the same.

We “apes” are an inherently hierarchical bunch. My guess is that whatever alternative social construct we pick will eventually bring with an equally unpleasant oppressiveness for at least some groups.

Schmidt’s primary orientation seems to be that we should not have to lose our individualities to an oppressive selection and training process. This makes sense as a humanitarian ideal.

On the other hand, it is easy to quarrel with his “no loss of individuality allowed” proposition as a practical matter. No organization, employer or profession can afford to have a bunch of people, who go off on tangents that cannot be reined in. For example:

Patients with gall bladder disease probably would not want a physician who impulsively decides that electroshock would be the ideal cure for it.

And no reasonable client would want an attorney who advances an argument that has no chance of flying in court.

Nor would Los Alamos National Laboratory want to unwittingly hire a pacifist physicist who thinks that she or he should take sabotaging action against the nuclear weapons technology potentially being designed there.

Schmidt never realistically deals with these confounding issues. Because he makes no foundational philosophical argument of his own, his writing seems to assume that just because the Status Quo wants things a certain way, these are necessarily bad.

Schmidt’s starting point arguably should have been whether it is even possible to rein in loose cannon-people, without selecting and training them to self-discipline themselves — as, he says, the current system does. But it makes no productive sense, from my pragmatic perspective, to complain about these processes, if there are no workable alternatives that avoid the current one’s anti-humanitarian drawbacks.

Thus, Disciplined Minds will most appeal to readers who already share Dr. Schmidt’s objections to our cultural traits. Others, I suspect, will simply be irritated by his not adequately argued perspective.

Book’s strengths

Although one could seize upon the above weaknesses as a reason to reject Schmidt’s reasoning, I think that an unwarranted reaction.

His book presents an outstanding orientation toward surviving professional selection and training with self-respect intact. Especially so for people who are independently minded and resentful of attempts from others to squash their individual spark.

Schmidt even includes anti-beat-down advice from the US Army’s first edition of Field Manual 21-78. The manual prescribes actions that captured troops can take, so as to endure captivity and torture with a sense of retained honor.

The fact that I could retrospectively relate to Schmidt’s selection of Army POW-resistance actions — as being equally effective ways to endure the professional training processes that I underwent — indicates how accurately he has dissected professional acculturation.

Think about it. An Army field manual intended for POWs being a perfect guide to professional school survival?

What an indictment of our educational system.

Disciplined Minds’ more subtle strengths — the exam tricks “they” screw you with

A couple of Amazon.com reviewers complained that Schmidt make his basic point over and over again. That is true. But, in my estimation, these reviewers seem to have missed the informative nuances with which he does this.

One permutation that I especially liked appears on page 168 in Chapter 10, Examining the Examination. The author presents a problem taken from a physics PhD qualifying examination.

If you are not mathematically inclined, ignore the equation below and read the commentary that follows it. You will understand the gist of Schmidt’s statements about it:

Consider a 1 dimensional harmonic oscillator.

Minimize the energy for a triangular wave function.

[The figure that Schmidt shows for the "minimize energy" segment of the problem is an isosceles triangle placed with its long base side along the x-axis. The left x-axis vertex of the triangle based is labeled –a. The right x-axis vertex of the triangle’s base is labeled a.

The highest point of the triangle is on the y-axis. Thus, the triangle is bifurcated by the y-axis, with the two equally long diagnonal sides being labeled Ψ (just to the left of the top vertex point) and b (just to the right of the same top vertex point).]

Compare your calculated value to the true ground state energy for H.

Schmidt explains that this is a trick question

It cannot be solved in the exam time allowed, unless you know the twist.

The obscure slant is aimed at weeding out people who are primarily concerned with thinking critically and conceptually. Meaning here, students who are unwilling to put major effort into jumping through idiotically unnecessary professional hoops:

The curtness of the statement of the problem — “minimize the energy” — ensures that many students will not even know what they are being asked to do.

[T]he technique is not central to quantum mechanics and is often not part of the curriculum. Hence, most students . . . will not realize that they problem is asking them to compute the energy associated with the pictured wave function and then to adjust a and b so that the energy is minimum.

[T]here is a catch. In most problems involving a function that has two parts that meet at a sharp point (the diagonal lines that meet at point b in this problem), physicists handle each part separately.

In this problem . . . separately applying the Hamiltonian H to each part of the wave function Ψ leads to the wrong answer. The trick here is to treat what appear to be two linear functions as a single, absolute-value function — that is, as a single binomial with an absolute value-function term . . . .

This crucial mathematical trick is so obscure that the only students likely to have learned it are those who have worked this particular physics problem before.

[S]tudents who use the trick do so because they have memorized the need to do so, not because they recognize the need to account for the energy associated with the one point, and certainly not because they understand the quantum mechanical reasons why the one point contributes so much to the energy.

Those who use this problem are not troubled by the fact that the typical student who gets credit for it probably does not really understand it . . . it aims to see if the student saw the problem, and memorized it, while preparing for the examination.

By revealing what the student did specifically to prepare for the examination, problems like this are an excellent measure of the student’s willingness and ability to do disciplined, alienated work, the work that characterizes the preparatory process.

“Minimize the energy” is not even a grammatically correct statement of what the test writers want done. Which is another wearisome indication of their provocatively misleading stupidity.

Schmidt’s example adequately reflects the annoying nonsense that I frequently saw in the major exams that I took. Including the MCAT, LSAT, and — as an example of an early “qualifying” exam — Step 1 of the United States Medical Licensing Examination, which takes place at the beginning of medical school’s third year.

As Dr. Schmidt implies, the “System” is set up to impose a series of obstacles to people who think critically and deeply — as distinguished from those who are content with demonstrating a willingness to do whatever seemingly purposeless silliness test-makers, future employers, and professional establishments want done.

Making his anti-boot camp case

Someone who has not seen the above type of questions repeatedly in their field of endeavor may not feel especially strongly about these arguably prickish testing tactics.

Perhaps, such readers will think, these are legitimate evaluations of admittedly obscure knowledge, rather than being slyly placed obstacles aimed at selecting for ant-like, rote-learning mentalities.

With that objection in mind, Schmidt makes the following observations:

The qualifying examination’s narrow focus on technical detail makes it an appropriate test for . . . rank-and-file experts, who will be employed to work uncritically within an assigned ideological and social framework and who will therefore live in a world where only technical detail remains.

One common feature of the many characteristics of the qualifying examination[s] discussed . . . is that they all place a higher value on unexamined production than on understanding.

Almost all questions on physics examinations, for example, are designed to have answers that are formulas rather than explanations or discussions of meanings or significance.

Valued is . . . the naked formula — a recipe sufficient for manipulating nature but sorely insufficient for understanding nature.

Even something as simple as a weight hanging on a string illustrates the point. Why does the weight swing back and forth after you give it a push? What can you say about its motion in terms of forces, velocities and accelerations? Is the acceleration every horizontal? Where is it zero? [These are basic questions that interested me as a pre-med physics student.]

Most physicists would have trouble answering these questions . . . .

The system is set up to produce servants, not critics, and it succeeds at this in part by propagating a culture of science that is fundamentally uncritical.

Lest I forget — pertinent to qualifying exams

The “better” professional schools do not prepare their students to pass professional qualifying exams. That is why students spent weeks cramming (frequently from separately published preparatory books) in order to get licensed.

In fact, after graduating from law school, months are devoted to studying just to pass the bar exam in those states where the exam is challenging. California, one of the places I am licensed, is reputedly the most difficult. What follows is based on my (not so long ago) experience there.

Students frequently have to take out a separate and private, meaning not government underwritten, “bar loan” in order to accomplish this study.

Now consider the rationally indefensible lameness of this construct:

Students have already spent thousands upon thousands of dollars

to train in schools that do not prepare them to pass the exams,

which they must take in order to qualify to practice the substance of what they have already supposedly been trained to do —

and further, in Law,

they have to take out yet another loan just to survive teaching themselves how to pass the pertinent Bar’s qualifying exam.

As with the POW manual’s pertinence to professional training, the educationally slighted exam aspect of training highlights the ludicrous nature of American professional education.

As Dr. Scmidt indicates, our self-screwing is entirely intentional. Intelligent beings from another planet would probably be astounded.

The moral? — Disciplined Minds is highly recommended to the like-minded

I would have had an easier time in school, psychologically, had Disciplined Minds been published before I undertook advanced education. I fall into the group of “wanna understand stuff” folks that Schmidt says are most likely to object to ant colony (my term) selection and training tactics.

More accepting people may not feel the same way.

You may already have an idea as to which group you predominantly belong to. If you think that too many GRE, MCAT and LSAT questions are poorly thought out or worded — and further, that their purported “best” answers are often debatable, if not wrong — you likely belong to the group that will experience irritation with predominating aspects professional education.

With educational process survival as your goal, it helps to be both noticeably bright and not conceited. That way you will eventually recognize that you were not the dumb one. Without being an ass in expressing that thought.

Keep your sense of humor handy. I have grown attached to my dark one, a gift from years spent policing.

Thanks to Dr. Schmidt for this book. Though evidently more radical than I, we are brothers in rebellion against intentionally repressive stupidities.

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Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives (2000) — a Book Review