Mass Production

Delving into the history of precision engineering seems like an unlikely book topic for production to the masses. You might think that only a few nerdy enthusiasts would care. But in the hands of Simon Winchester, the story is engaging, interesting, and you’ll look at the countless man-made gadgets and gizmos around you in a different light. All this awaits you in The Perfectionists, subtitled “How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World”. And while it showcases the past in light of the present, it made me think about the future of my profession – higher education – and the tensions within as we see continued stratification between the ‘elite’ and the masses.

The prologue begins by defining and contrasting two terms, precision and accuracy, something I also do on Day 2 of my introductory chemistry classes. (Day 1 is about an atomistic view of matter and ‘seeing the unseen’.) Each chapter is then organized with a target precision, or tolerance; the values get progressively smaller as inventors and engineers get closer to making the ‘cutting edge’ progressively finer. Yes, indeed. The increasing ability to make fine, precision cuts gave us the phrase that we now familiarly think of being at the forefront of technology.

Chapter 1 begins, appropriately, with chronometry – the measurement and keeping of time. One hero in this story is John Harrison, maker of clocks with the best precision available at the eighteenth century. His time-keeping devices allowed mariners to determine their longitude and for railway lines to substantially increase coordination and efficiency. The business of education is ruled, perhaps enslaved, by time – when classes start and end, when meetings are scheduled and for how long, so we can get on with our day. Harrison’s devices had many tiny interacting parts that had to work just right in concert. His achievements are amazing given the lack of precision tools at the time.

In the eighteenth century, being able to consistently make parts and devices to the tolerance of one-tenth of an inch was remarkable. But did the Greeks beat Harrison and his contemporaries to this level of tolerance two thousand years ago? Winchester introduces us to the discovery and analysis of what is termed the ‘Antikythera mechanism’ (pictured below). Was it an ancient computer? We now know from MRI measurements that there is “miniscule inscribed lettering in Corinthian Greek chased into the machine’s brass work – a total of 3,400 letters, all millimeter-size… – [suggesting] that the gearwheels, once fully engaged with one another on the side of the box, could also predict the movement of [the moon and] five other planets then known to the Ancient Greeks.” Unfortunately, while the device certainly is precise, it is not accurate. Harrison’s clocks on the other hand were both precise and accurate, up to a certain tolerance at least.

In Chapter 5, Winchester brings us to the early twentieth century. Two Henrys feature prominently – Royce and Ford. Their automotive creations, the Rolls-Royce and the Ford Model T, would come to exemplify the divergence between products for the elite and products for the masses. But the interesting story here is that what truly requires cutting-edge precision engineering is efficient mass production, not slower custom-built pieces of engineering. The drive toward perfection shows up in both, but in different places, and for different reasons.

Winchester writes: “… while Henry Royce over in Manchester had been captivated by perfection. Henry Ford in Dearborn was consumed by production. Their two fledgling companies, so similar in so many ways, each wedded to the idea of making the best and most suitable machine it could, began to diverge in both purpose and practice from the moment of their respective foundings… Within Rolls-Royce, it may seem as though the worship of the precise was entirely central to the making of these enormously comfortable, stylish, swift, and comprehensively memorable cars. In fact, it was far more crucial to the making of the less costly, less complex, less remembered machines… for a simple reason: the production lines required a limitless supply of parts that were interchangeable.”

Interchangeable is key here. A system made up of precisely and consistently manufactured parts can be built and fixed quickly and efficiently. If two pieces don’t fit, production slows down until something is fixed or replaced. Winchester’s conclusion is haunting: “Precision, in other words, is an absolute essential for keeping the unforgiving tyranny of a production line going.” The Rolls-Royce doesn’t require precision everywhere in the process because the well-trained artisan engineers can handcraft the required fitting. The production line doesn’t require expensive engineers to run. It just needs all component parts to be precise.

This story isn’t just true of cars, it turns out to be true for guns. Back when these new weapons of destruction entered the battlefield, they were unreliable. Having your gun jammed was a frequent problem. (Bayonets, swords or knives were crucial!) Gunsmiths were few and far between if your gun needed fixing or repair. There was no easy D.I.Y. for the common soldier. It was the French that came up with a solution: constructing a gun that used interchangeable consistent parts that could easily be replaced in a fix. But shortly after the French revolution, “the idea of interchangeable parts had withered and died in France – and some say to this day that the survival of craftsmanship and the reluctance entirely to embrace the modern has helped preserve the reputation of France as something of a haven for the romantic delight of the Old Ways.”

But one person who saw the demonstrations of the French interchangeable flintlock parts back in 1785 was Thomas Jefferson, then emissary of the fledgling American government. Winchester narrates how Jefferson brought these ideas back to the New World, vigorously championing the system. The armory at Harpers Ferry became renown for their production-line produced guns. Consistent, easily fixed, and efficient to produce. No longer did you need a well-trained gunsmith. Machines did all the work – making “lock, stock and barrel”.

All this made me think about higher education. For a while, it was thought that Baumol’s cost disease applied to higher education. After all, isn’t this where you truly need human experts to teach human learners in a comprehensive way? As the Wikipedia entry suggests, it takes “college professors the same amount of time to mark an essay in 2006 as it did in 1966”. Except that robo-graders for student essays are on the rise, despite their teething flaws which could be ironed out over time. Or how about the robot teaching assistant that went under the radar undetected by students? Yes, there was still a human professor for the class, by all accounts a fantastic one, over in the computer science department at Georgia Tech. Ashok Goel, who does cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) research, invented Jill Watson to help him with the online 400-person class he was teaching. Are we innovating ourselves into obsolesence?

In my own field of chemistry, another Georgia institution, Emory University, is requiring students enrolling in the (introductory) General Chemistry college-level course to participate in a Preparatory Module. This module is run on ALEKS, an adaptive online learning system, that aims to help every student achieve competency of core concepts regardless of their individual backgrounds and learning speeds. (I’ve mentioned ALEKS in some blog posts.) Requiring is not the right word, since it’s technically optional. I should say ‘highly encouraged’ by making successful completion part of the grade for the General Chemistry course it is supporting. The goal is to “ensure that your math and chemistry backgrounds are strong enough for you to succeed”. And if they’re not when you begin the module, ALEKS will help you get there. ALEKS is fully automated. No human instructor.

Several new education outfits at both grade school and college level (I’m not naming names), all with a strong technology slant, aim to convince you that their new brand of education is both personalized while promoting the latest in ‘active learning’ strategies. Classes, especially introductory core ones, are tightly scripted and controlled because ‘the system works’. These claims are backed-up by evidence from the learning and cognitive sciences (mainly associated with psychology departments). I’ve spent a lot of time reading these studies out of personal interest, but I don’t fully buy into how these strategies are married into the curriculum. (Like many other seemingly innovative strategies, there are some good parts and some bad parts.) You don’t need faculty or teachers to be well-trained in the subject area. You need good discussion facilitators who have a script with talking points, and who are able to leverage data analytics to keep the system on track. Humans also provide that personalized touch that maybe we’re not quite ready to jettison in higher education.

Online education is here to stay, and will continue to grow markedly in the higher education sector. (Here are some technology trajectories.) At least, that’s my prediction. Today, we witness the proliferation of online master’s programs in myriad fields, as the baccalaureate degree starts to lose its distinctiveness. But it will be the masses that increasingly contend with this new world. Online education is mass production for the masses. Data analytics within integrated learning systems are the new precision devices to deliver a consistent product. That’s how education is portrayed today. It’s a product. Educational institutions produce graduates.

There will always be a small segment of the population that will support so-called ‘elite’ Rolls-Royce education. The rich, the 1%, the elite, will pay for their children to be educated in prestigious institutions with human teachers and professors – a dwindling group of experts and artisans. Competition will be fierce for the ‘top’ teachers, and reputation, more so than ability, will become increasingly important to rise to the top in an age awash with data where it becomes increasingly more difficult to distinguish the quality from the quantity. I used to think that my job as a tenured liberal arts professor was quite secure, and I could continue in my tried-and-true artisanal craftsmanship approaches to education. I’m likely to make it fine to retirement, but I’m less sanguine about the prospects of my younger colleagues, especially those who are not at the top reputable institutions. Expertise isn’t required for mass production, be it at Ford when it churned out the Model T, or for online facilitation of core courses.

Is there a way to break out of this technological system we are caught in? I don’t know, but I hope that folks like Simon Winchester, possibly one of the few remaining polymaths of our era, can help point the way. In any case, I recommend his book.