Education has no clear purpose. That’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation that there are numerous conflicting visions of what education is “for.” What are we actually trying to do for kids by making them go to school, and why are we trying to do it? If it’s an attempt to help kids understand things they’ll need to know in their daily lives, much of contemporary education makes little sense: very few of us will use chemistry or algebra or French. But it would be very helpful to know how to cook a good breakfast, negotiate a pay raise, or defuse an argument. If education is about making “model citizens,” well, we would probably expect civics to be treated in a little less cursory a fashion. Maybe education is about teaching job skills, providing abilities that will prove useful in making a living. Maybe it nourishes souls and expands horizons. Maybe it’s just a way to keep as many kids as possible in a room together and therefore out of trouble. Or maybe it doesn’t do much of anything at all.
Libertarian economist, George Mason University professor, Cato Institute adjunct, and Freakonomics contributor Bryan Caplan has written The Case Against Education, in which he argues forcefully that it’s the last one. Education, he says, does very little for kids. Or rather, it teaches them very little, which is different. Caplan says that while there is no doubt that the more years of education you receive, the better off you’re likely to be in life, this is mostly unrelated to anything you’ve actually been taught. One standard view of the value of an education is that because employers are willing to pay more for more educated workers, people must be getting something important out of school that pays off. Caplan points out that this is not necessarily the case. The fact that more education leads to a higher salary does not mean that school is actually teaching anybody anything. It could just be “sorting” students who have relevant traits, “signaling” to employers which people have the most potential to succeed at their jobs.
Think about this like an obstacle course. If we have a group of people clamber up rocks, shimmy down ropes, and, yes, jump through hoops, the ones who make it to the end might have showed that they’re the best candidates for a physically demanding job. But it’s just a test, a selection process designed to expose traits that candidates already possess. It’s a “signal.” It hasn’t actually taught anybody anything, except how good they are at swinging from ropes. For Caplan, this is what education is mostly about. It’s a test of endurance and ability. In contrast to “human capital” theories that emphasize the body of valuable intellectual assets students acquire through schooling, Caplan believes that education is largely a credentialing process. An employer doesn’t want people with high school diplomas because of anything they’ve been taught in high school, but because they want the sort of people who get high school diplomas, i.e. those who have habits like showing up on time, following directions, being able to assimilate new facts quickly, etc. Or, more cynically, they want the sort of people with the financial resources and family support to make it through high school.
This does not mean that school teaches nothing, and Caplan concedes that basic literacy and numeracy are obviously important. But it does mean that a colossal amount of time and resources are being wasted. After all, if you could tell which candidates were going to complete the obstacle course after the first stage, would there be any need for ten additional stages? Plenty of jobs that require college degrees don’t actually require any skills learned in college; there’s no reason they couldn’t be filled by people with high school diplomas, saving the students four years and a pile of money. Caplan asks:
Think about all the classes you ever took. How many failed to teach you any useful skills? The lessons you’ll never need to know after graduation start in kindergarten. Elementary schools teach more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They also require history, social studies, music, art, and physical education. Middle and high schools add higher mathematics, classic literature, and foreign languages—vital for a handful of budding scientists, authors, and translators, irrelevant for everyone else. Most college majors don’t even pretend to teach job skills. If you apply your knowledge of Roman history, Shakespeare, real analysis, or philosophy of mind on the job, you have an odd job.
The “uselessness” of education leads Caplan to downright radical conclusions. While typical criticisms of the existing education system focus on how the system is working, Caplan’s objection is to the system itself. He believes that “there’s way too much education” and that “typical students burn thousands of hours studying material that neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives.” He considers himself the ally of every student who has ever sat in class, looking despairingly at the ticking clock, wondering when they’re ever going to use any of the stuff they’re being taught. You’re not, Caplan says, and that’s the problem.
When Caplan begins talking about the implications of his “signaling” theory, things take a turn for the disturbing. Because he believes education is bad and useless, he supports drastic cuts to public support for it:
Government heavily subsidizes education. In 2011, U.S. federal, state, and local governments spent almost a trillion dollars on it. The simplest way to get less education, then, is to cut the subsidies. This would not eliminate wasteful signaling, but at least government would pour less gasoline on the fire.
He believes there should be far more emphasis on vocational schooling, to the point of putting kids to work. He even has a section entitled “What’s Wrong With Child Labor?” in which he says that the employment of children is no worse than school and is far more useful:
When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future.
At the college level, Caplan believes that students should be discouraged from pursuing “useless” degrees (i.e. the ones that do not increase their employment prospects):
Why should taxpayers fund the option to study fine arts at public expense? Instead, shut down the impractical departments at public colleges, and make impractical majors at private colleges ineligible for government grants and loans. Deprived of impractical options, some students will switch to practical subjects. Won’t plenty of others respond to narrower options by cutting their schooling short? Hopefully. If students refuse to stay in school unless they’re allowed to waste public money, taxpayers should call their bluff. (...)
Anyone who has watched a roomful of young eyes glaze over during an high school English class might be tempted to agree. But it might not be that students are “philistines.” Rather, it might be that subjects are, in general, taught atrociously, that there are few truly inspiring teachers in the classroom who know how to make ideas come alive. The reason “academics rarely broaden students’ horizons” might have a lot more to do with the academics than the students. Caplan gives up very quickly, and without much evidence, on the possibility of engaging the majority of young people in history, literature, the sciences, and the arts. But showing that students aren’t being engaged isn’t proof that they can’t be engaged.
The truth is that Caplan is probably right that the experience of school, for most students in the country, is boring and useless. When the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence asked high school students how they were feeling, 75% of them answered with negative emotions like “tired,” “bored,” and “stressed.” But that doesn’t mean that they’re a bunch of incurious dopes cut out only for manual labor. The insight that “school sucks” is not original to Caplan, and plenty of critics of education have said it over and over. Unlike Caplan, their response has not been to advocate getting rid of school entirely and sending children to work, but thinking very seriously about what education ought to be like. Alternative schooling models like Montessori and Waldorf schools try to eliminate the tedious, obedience-training aspects of school, and remove the structural barriers that stand between students and real knowledge. The progressive education movement has a century-long history, and has produced thousands of experiments around the world in new ways of organizing schooling. There is variation in whether students enjoy school, have good relationships with their teachers, and see schools as supportive environments. Figuring out ways to investigate and improve those things is central to serious projects for education reform. (...)
Caplan tries to show the uselessness of education by pointing to statistics on how few facts people remember from their school days; they can’t remember whether an electron is larger than an atom, etc. But this may misunderstand what exposure to the sciences actually does. True, very few people use algebra after they finish “learning” it. They do, however, carry away a sense of what algebra is. That may not seem like much, but it could be crucial: there’s a big difference between “not knowing much about biology” and “not even knowing what biology is.” I may not understand a physicist’s equations, but it’s a whole new level of ignorance if she introduces herself and I wonder what physics even is.
If we are to offer a meaningful and powerful alternative to instrumental conceptions of learning, we have to be clear about what that might involve. One reason Caplan’s arguments can be tempting is that we haven’t really articulated what schooling ought to be about. This leaves a big prescriptive vacuum where, after making some empirical and commonsense claims, Caplan can slide in unnoticed and present his slashing and burning as the only available solution. And it can result in liberals and progressives trying to defend school on economic, return-on-investment grounds, insisting that sociology degrees are unexpectedly useful in the workplace, or that the average wage worker will someday use their French subjunctives. (Although they probably will use their Spanish subjunctives, which is why Spanish should be mandatory.) (...)
by Sparky Abraham and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Nick Sirotich
Libertarian economist, George Mason University professor, Cato Institute adjunct, and Freakonomics contributor Bryan Caplan has written The Case Against Education, in which he argues forcefully that it’s the last one. Education, he says, does very little for kids. Or rather, it teaches them very little, which is different. Caplan says that while there is no doubt that the more years of education you receive, the better off you’re likely to be in life, this is mostly unrelated to anything you’ve actually been taught. One standard view of the value of an education is that because employers are willing to pay more for more educated workers, people must be getting something important out of school that pays off. Caplan points out that this is not necessarily the case. The fact that more education leads to a higher salary does not mean that school is actually teaching anybody anything. It could just be “sorting” students who have relevant traits, “signaling” to employers which people have the most potential to succeed at their jobs.Think about this like an obstacle course. If we have a group of people clamber up rocks, shimmy down ropes, and, yes, jump through hoops, the ones who make it to the end might have showed that they’re the best candidates for a physically demanding job. But it’s just a test, a selection process designed to expose traits that candidates already possess. It’s a “signal.” It hasn’t actually taught anybody anything, except how good they are at swinging from ropes. For Caplan, this is what education is mostly about. It’s a test of endurance and ability. In contrast to “human capital” theories that emphasize the body of valuable intellectual assets students acquire through schooling, Caplan believes that education is largely a credentialing process. An employer doesn’t want people with high school diplomas because of anything they’ve been taught in high school, but because they want the sort of people who get high school diplomas, i.e. those who have habits like showing up on time, following directions, being able to assimilate new facts quickly, etc. Or, more cynically, they want the sort of people with the financial resources and family support to make it through high school.
This does not mean that school teaches nothing, and Caplan concedes that basic literacy and numeracy are obviously important. But it does mean that a colossal amount of time and resources are being wasted. After all, if you could tell which candidates were going to complete the obstacle course after the first stage, would there be any need for ten additional stages? Plenty of jobs that require college degrees don’t actually require any skills learned in college; there’s no reason they couldn’t be filled by people with high school diplomas, saving the students four years and a pile of money. Caplan asks:
Think about all the classes you ever took. How many failed to teach you any useful skills? The lessons you’ll never need to know after graduation start in kindergarten. Elementary schools teach more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They also require history, social studies, music, art, and physical education. Middle and high schools add higher mathematics, classic literature, and foreign languages—vital for a handful of budding scientists, authors, and translators, irrelevant for everyone else. Most college majors don’t even pretend to teach job skills. If you apply your knowledge of Roman history, Shakespeare, real analysis, or philosophy of mind on the job, you have an odd job.
The “uselessness” of education leads Caplan to downright radical conclusions. While typical criticisms of the existing education system focus on how the system is working, Caplan’s objection is to the system itself. He believes that “there’s way too much education” and that “typical students burn thousands of hours studying material that neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives.” He considers himself the ally of every student who has ever sat in class, looking despairingly at the ticking clock, wondering when they’re ever going to use any of the stuff they’re being taught. You’re not, Caplan says, and that’s the problem.
When Caplan begins talking about the implications of his “signaling” theory, things take a turn for the disturbing. Because he believes education is bad and useless, he supports drastic cuts to public support for it:
Government heavily subsidizes education. In 2011, U.S. federal, state, and local governments spent almost a trillion dollars on it. The simplest way to get less education, then, is to cut the subsidies. This would not eliminate wasteful signaling, but at least government would pour less gasoline on the fire.
He believes there should be far more emphasis on vocational schooling, to the point of putting kids to work. He even has a section entitled “What’s Wrong With Child Labor?” in which he says that the employment of children is no worse than school and is far more useful:
When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future.
At the college level, Caplan believes that students should be discouraged from pursuing “useless” degrees (i.e. the ones that do not increase their employment prospects):
Why should taxpayers fund the option to study fine arts at public expense? Instead, shut down the impractical departments at public colleges, and make impractical majors at private colleges ineligible for government grants and loans. Deprived of impractical options, some students will switch to practical subjects. Won’t plenty of others respond to narrower options by cutting their schooling short? Hopefully. If students refuse to stay in school unless they’re allowed to waste public money, taxpayers should call their bluff. (...)
Anyone who has watched a roomful of young eyes glaze over during an high school English class might be tempted to agree. But it might not be that students are “philistines.” Rather, it might be that subjects are, in general, taught atrociously, that there are few truly inspiring teachers in the classroom who know how to make ideas come alive. The reason “academics rarely broaden students’ horizons” might have a lot more to do with the academics than the students. Caplan gives up very quickly, and without much evidence, on the possibility of engaging the majority of young people in history, literature, the sciences, and the arts. But showing that students aren’t being engaged isn’t proof that they can’t be engaged.
The truth is that Caplan is probably right that the experience of school, for most students in the country, is boring and useless. When the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence asked high school students how they were feeling, 75% of them answered with negative emotions like “tired,” “bored,” and “stressed.” But that doesn’t mean that they’re a bunch of incurious dopes cut out only for manual labor. The insight that “school sucks” is not original to Caplan, and plenty of critics of education have said it over and over. Unlike Caplan, their response has not been to advocate getting rid of school entirely and sending children to work, but thinking very seriously about what education ought to be like. Alternative schooling models like Montessori and Waldorf schools try to eliminate the tedious, obedience-training aspects of school, and remove the structural barriers that stand between students and real knowledge. The progressive education movement has a century-long history, and has produced thousands of experiments around the world in new ways of organizing schooling. There is variation in whether students enjoy school, have good relationships with their teachers, and see schools as supportive environments. Figuring out ways to investigate and improve those things is central to serious projects for education reform. (...)
Caplan tries to show the uselessness of education by pointing to statistics on how few facts people remember from their school days; they can’t remember whether an electron is larger than an atom, etc. But this may misunderstand what exposure to the sciences actually does. True, very few people use algebra after they finish “learning” it. They do, however, carry away a sense of what algebra is. That may not seem like much, but it could be crucial: there’s a big difference between “not knowing much about biology” and “not even knowing what biology is.” I may not understand a physicist’s equations, but it’s a whole new level of ignorance if she introduces herself and I wonder what physics even is.
If we are to offer a meaningful and powerful alternative to instrumental conceptions of learning, we have to be clear about what that might involve. One reason Caplan’s arguments can be tempting is that we haven’t really articulated what schooling ought to be about. This leaves a big prescriptive vacuum where, after making some empirical and commonsense claims, Caplan can slide in unnoticed and present his slashing and burning as the only available solution. And it can result in liberals and progressives trying to defend school on economic, return-on-investment grounds, insisting that sociology degrees are unexpectedly useful in the workplace, or that the average wage worker will someday use their French subjunctives. (Although they probably will use their Spanish subjunctives, which is why Spanish should be mandatory.) (...)
So what’s the alternative? What is school for? For the first 12 years of kids’ conscious lives, we put them in a room and try to fill them with knowledge. What should that be? What about college? To what extent should learning be driven by the preferences of parents or kids themselves? Also, if public schools start trying to make kids learn interesting things, and private schools keep teaching them the things that will make them rich, won’t the wealth gap worsen? Does capitalism give us no other option but to pursue the bleak Caplan vision?
We shouldn’t hesitate to speculate on radical, even highly unusual possibilities. Though we don’t think it should be strictly “vocational,” education should obviously be more practical and active. There’s no excuse for the fact that students aren’t taught basic skills like tying a knot, sewing a button, defusing a bomb, fixing a toilet, baking a loaf of bread, planting a garden, etc. Animal care should be a requirement; establishing relationships with animals is important and every school should have them. Nathan remembers being jealous of a neighboring high school in Florida that used to have cats on campus. What about plant identification? A high school degree should require one to be able to identify at least 80% of the plant life in one’s community. The fact that nobody knows which plants are which is a disgrace.
We can introduce college-level subjects at a much younger age in simplified form. Kids are perfectly capable of learning philosophy. Not the academic kind, perhaps, but as critical thinking (e.g. asking questions like “How do we know to trust our teachers?” “Why are things the way they are?” “Is a bird a process or a thing?”) Try teaching music and art appreciation; don’t just have kids feebly try to learn to play the recorder, introduce them to Miles Davis, or show them how hit songs are made. We should expand the range of material taught in English class. Give kids books they will actually like, don’t make teens read Nathaniel Hawthorne and forget to introduce them to Kurt Vonnegut. Sparky remembers that in his high school, the literature teacher had the class critically examine Dan Brown books, and the students loved it. Something cool should happen every schoolday, whether it’s an explosion in chemistry class or the examination of a historical artifact or the building of a Rube Goldberg contraption or the performing of a play/dialogue. Bring in less dogma, foster more creativity. Make recess longer. Make things more hands-on. Do more field trips. Reward quality of thinking rather than strict obedience (i.e. it matters more if a student has nothing to say about the reading than if they’re late to class). Don’t do anything excruciating to them. (Caplan seems to endorse a lot of this, actually, saying that unstructured play is good, but his whole scheme will ensure that the rich kids get the fun stuff and the poor kids get busboy lessons.)
It may well be true, as Bryan Caplan argues, that as things stand education is a bad deal, societally speaking. We can buy that a lot of the economic benefit comes from signaling, and that spending money on things like Common Core and standardized testing could be making things worse because the gains are illusory. This doesn’t mean, however, that the solution is drastically decreasing resources. That would just be putting all the burdens education is trying to bear (lifelong return-on-investment and publicly-subsidized training for corporate life) onto the backs of students and parents. Plus, why should only rich kids get to spend four years pursuing an arts degree? It shouldn’t just be the students who are willing to toil to pay off crushing debts who get to spend their college years exploring irrelevant subjects that interest them.
In fact, we need to put more resources into education, but we also need to change our thinking. It’s not because kids are “natural philistines” if they’re bored, but because we don’t prioritize (or spend the money on) the kind of extraordinary learning experiences that would engage even the most intransigent or apathetic child. If foreign language classes aren’t good enough for people to retain languages, then let’s introduce foreign exchange programs. Send them around the world on the public dime.
We’re not cynical about students—we think everyone can be enriched—but to do that we need to turn away from the economic benefits of education and actually focus on that enrichment. Let’s do the things Caplan says he wants (more play, a broader canon), but let’s do it for every child, not make it dependent on family ability to pay. If rich parents think it’s worthwhile to pay for private schools with 15-person classes and seminar environments, let’s guarantee that to the children of Baltimore and Detroit. If teachers are downtrodden and fatigued and not inspiring, then let’s fucking pay them. Teaching should be a prestige job and there’s no reason it can’t be.
There are many possible visions for what education could and should be. But the one thing it shouldn’t be is preparation for wage work. Attempts to destroy education in the name of efficiency are going in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of more efficiency, we need less of it. Students should be finding out about all of the fascinating things in our big, wonderful world, not being fitted and measured for future drudgery. What is education for? It’s for becoming a person, not a worker.
We shouldn’t hesitate to speculate on radical, even highly unusual possibilities. Though we don’t think it should be strictly “vocational,” education should obviously be more practical and active. There’s no excuse for the fact that students aren’t taught basic skills like tying a knot, sewing a button, defusing a bomb, fixing a toilet, baking a loaf of bread, planting a garden, etc. Animal care should be a requirement; establishing relationships with animals is important and every school should have them. Nathan remembers being jealous of a neighboring high school in Florida that used to have cats on campus. What about plant identification? A high school degree should require one to be able to identify at least 80% of the plant life in one’s community. The fact that nobody knows which plants are which is a disgrace.
We can introduce college-level subjects at a much younger age in simplified form. Kids are perfectly capable of learning philosophy. Not the academic kind, perhaps, but as critical thinking (e.g. asking questions like “How do we know to trust our teachers?” “Why are things the way they are?” “Is a bird a process or a thing?”) Try teaching music and art appreciation; don’t just have kids feebly try to learn to play the recorder, introduce them to Miles Davis, or show them how hit songs are made. We should expand the range of material taught in English class. Give kids books they will actually like, don’t make teens read Nathaniel Hawthorne and forget to introduce them to Kurt Vonnegut. Sparky remembers that in his high school, the literature teacher had the class critically examine Dan Brown books, and the students loved it. Something cool should happen every schoolday, whether it’s an explosion in chemistry class or the examination of a historical artifact or the building of a Rube Goldberg contraption or the performing of a play/dialogue. Bring in less dogma, foster more creativity. Make recess longer. Make things more hands-on. Do more field trips. Reward quality of thinking rather than strict obedience (i.e. it matters more if a student has nothing to say about the reading than if they’re late to class). Don’t do anything excruciating to them. (Caplan seems to endorse a lot of this, actually, saying that unstructured play is good, but his whole scheme will ensure that the rich kids get the fun stuff and the poor kids get busboy lessons.)
It may well be true, as Bryan Caplan argues, that as things stand education is a bad deal, societally speaking. We can buy that a lot of the economic benefit comes from signaling, and that spending money on things like Common Core and standardized testing could be making things worse because the gains are illusory. This doesn’t mean, however, that the solution is drastically decreasing resources. That would just be putting all the burdens education is trying to bear (lifelong return-on-investment and publicly-subsidized training for corporate life) onto the backs of students and parents. Plus, why should only rich kids get to spend four years pursuing an arts degree? It shouldn’t just be the students who are willing to toil to pay off crushing debts who get to spend their college years exploring irrelevant subjects that interest them.
In fact, we need to put more resources into education, but we also need to change our thinking. It’s not because kids are “natural philistines” if they’re bored, but because we don’t prioritize (or spend the money on) the kind of extraordinary learning experiences that would engage even the most intransigent or apathetic child. If foreign language classes aren’t good enough for people to retain languages, then let’s introduce foreign exchange programs. Send them around the world on the public dime.
We’re not cynical about students—we think everyone can be enriched—but to do that we need to turn away from the economic benefits of education and actually focus on that enrichment. Let’s do the things Caplan says he wants (more play, a broader canon), but let’s do it for every child, not make it dependent on family ability to pay. If rich parents think it’s worthwhile to pay for private schools with 15-person classes and seminar environments, let’s guarantee that to the children of Baltimore and Detroit. If teachers are downtrodden and fatigued and not inspiring, then let’s fucking pay them. Teaching should be a prestige job and there’s no reason it can’t be.
There are many possible visions for what education could and should be. But the one thing it shouldn’t be is preparation for wage work. Attempts to destroy education in the name of efficiency are going in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of more efficiency, we need less of it. Students should be finding out about all of the fascinating things in our big, wonderful world, not being fitted and measured for future drudgery. What is education for? It’s for becoming a person, not a worker.
by Sparky Abraham and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Nick Sirotich
