If human nature weren’t as it is, I’d be perfectly content
with tearing apart America’s educational system, root and branch, and starting
over from scratch. Compulsory schooling? Gone! Federalized K-12
standards? Fini! Stafford Loans? Kaput!
But, given the fragility of such deep-seated things, I’m
wont to hold back, arguing for cautious reform toward a more prudent position.
I guess that makes me a Burkean.
Maybe a sucker. Perhaps both.
Anyhoo, a recent piece in
the periodical National Affairs got me reconsidering why our
education system is such a mess, and what it means for America’s future in the
age of automated
labor, eroded
institutional authority, Chinese
tiger moms, and vast economic
anxiety.
In “The Fog of ‘College Readiness,’" Chester E. Finn,
Jr., a former assistant U.S. secretary of education for research and
improvement, gives a grim diagnosis of how well public schools prepare students
for college. Spoiler alert: They
don’t.
From the first day of kindergarten, children are told if
they go through the rigor of schooling, pass the exams, get good grades, and
impress all their instructors, they can matriculate to a university of their
choice. Along the way, teachers, from first through twelfth grade, bolster the
delusion by padding the path with grade
inflation, coddling,
inculcating an entitlement mentality, and outright gaming
the system.
The fruits for such proactive college preparation? “[O]ur
K-12 education system has never gotten more than one-third of young Americans
to the ‘college-ready’ level by the end of the 12th grade,” Finn writes,
deflating the great expectations of education enthusiasts.
Why is simple: Diminishing
marginal returns. But, alas, real-world logic rarely gets in the way of
idealism. It’s dogma in America’s civil religion that every youngster, no
matter race, creed, or class, is ripe for college attendance. And if it’s painfully
apparent that they aren’t? Then it’s the fault of the white
heteronormativepatriarchy, which deprives young Jamal and his 1.5 GPA or
non-English speaking José of collegial success.
Finn holds nothing back in his remedy for university
duplicity: “It's time for our K-12 school system and our institutions of higher
education to take responsibility for their complicity in a system that lies to
millions of students and their families every year.”
What is the great lie
Finn refers to? A better question to ask is: What isn’t a lie in our current
schooling system?
Not only is it catechism that every American is born for
college, but that a college-conferred degree is a guarantee of middle-class
living. The 2008 Great Recession popped that illusory bubble, as newly minted
graduates still have a tough time finding
full-time work.
But even if the labor market hummed along smoothly and job
opportunities abounded, the notion that a university degree should be had by
all who desire it doesn’t hold water. During their respective campaigns,
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders proposed
plans to make tuition at public universities more affordable. Clinton
wanted to prevent students from racking up eye-popping amounts of debt; Sen.
Sanders wanted attendance to be completely free. Both operated under the
assumption that a degree should be a gimme to anyone so inclined.
Degrees-for-all might sound like a noble goal, but it makes
about as much economic sense as a two-dollar diamond ring.
If you increase the supply of something, ceteris paribus, its value
goes down. It’s similar to the effect of economist Murray Rothbard’s “Angel Gabriel model,”
wherein an angel of the Lord descends upon earth and stuffs everyone’s wallet
with 20% more cash. Does that mean we all become 20% richer? Of course not.
Producers and suppliers adjust, prices rise, and things go back to normal.
The same applies to college degrees, and universal
education in general. Everyone having a high school diploma lessons the value
of the diploma. Everyone having a college degree lessens the value of a degree.
And everyone having a PhD means that society is forever damned to listening to
NPR on repeat and reading white papers for fiction.
Of course, there’s more to an institutional imprimatur than
a shot at a good six-figure job at Goldman Sachs. There is the value of
education itself. Memorizing the chronological order of presidents isn’t
education. There’s no firm definition of what an educated person is, but the
closest I’ve found is Albert Jay Nock’s formulation in his classic The Theory
of Education in the United States. For Nock, a learned mind is one
“that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of
an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty
experience of the human spirit's operations.”
Such thinking is unfortunately anathema in the modern
university, where murals of Shakespeare are replaced
with paintings of black lesbian poets and Ovid is
viewed as a sex criminal. The combined knowledge of Western history and its
lessons for contemporary affairs is not something that can be learned in safe
spaces or classes focused on “stopping
white people.”
America has always been a place of contradictions. Our
affinity for equality under the law was born from a revolution against lawful
authority. Individual liberty is embedded in our constitutional code, yet
civil society is where our country
most thrives. We demand the innovation and convenience wrought by the free
market but also government
protection from market downturns.
Education follows in that knotty tradition. We treat
schooling like a universal good, but still want students to have the ability to
gracefully climb the ladder of social mobility without stumbling. We want
structure with restriction, yet crave the freedom of flexibility.
Paths can’t be both rigid and freewheeling. Our education
system’s emphasis on guaranteed success with indefinite outcomes creates an
aporia. Hence my inkling to throw the whole thing out, teachers, curricula,
standards, unions, administrators, mandates, with the baby and bathwater.
That type of radical reform is, obviously, unrealistic.
The Puritan and Prussian influences
on our school system are too firmly ingrained to be cast out overnight.
Fundamental change takes time. A good start, though, might be ceasing to tell
every American school pupil he or she is predestined to prosperity. As the
old socialist
saw goes, someone has to pick up the garbage. And it doesn’t take a
Bachelor of Arts degree to do that.
