Most jobs only require a basic solid
high-school level education, and a lot of people are simply unsuited to the
academic life.
If we could train everyone to be a PhD
computer programmer (and we can’t, not if standards are to be maintained),
there would be a lot of un- and under-employed PhD computer programmers. Having truck drivers with PhDs in truck
driving won’t make the trucks go any faster or carry more freight. ‘Educating’ everyone is not a panacea.
People who are talented and motivated
enough to excel at academics will find a way to do so (as long as they have a
solid base in high school, and as long as they aren’t living in a third-world
country and are too malnourished or forced to work in the fields etc). It was not that long ago that you didn’t need
a PhD to do research: just get the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree and find
someone doing interesting work in a lab or company and work with them (that’s
really all a PhD is, we’ve just formalized it).
As far as public education goes, the
major factors are:
1. The native ability of the student
2. The socioeconomic status of the
parents
3. The socioeconomic status of the
other children in the school
That’s it. Sure, you need the teachers to be basically
competent and professional, but they don’t need to be superhuman. Throwing money at administrators and fancy
buildings etc., having teachers with PhDs in educational pedagogy etc. does
basically nothing.
To the extent that private and charter
school have an advantage over public schools, it’s more because they have
better students than better teachers.
As far as our increasing fetish with
standardized testing, this is becoming a zero-sum game. Sure, if you train a child from birth to take
standardized tests, they will get better at taking standardized tests. And so will everyone else’s child, and the
net result will be zero, except that massive effort will be wasted.
Albert Einstein did not spend his
first 16 years being drilled in standardized test taking and I think he turned
out just fine. But today someone like
Einstein would first have to get perfect exam scores or they would be condemned
to working the fields. That’s not really
raising the intellectual level of a society.
The problem now is that, with the job
market so horrible, people are being forced into ever greater zero-sum
competition with their peers, hoping to be the one person to rise to the top as
the rest fail. It’s like if there are a
hundred people drowning in the middle of the ocean: perhaps one can survive by
clambering on top of everyone else, but that’s not a strategy that everyone can
succeed at simultaneously. It’s also not
a constructive strategy: it does not increase the overall level of the society.
The solution to a hundred people
drowning in the ocean is not, I think, to train people to better compete at
climbing on top of each other, but to provide lifeboats with enough seats. Or to not have them dumped into the ocean in
the first place.
If we had a better labor market,
people with less academic talent would not be under so much pressure to boost
their test scores or become what they are not: they could just make a decent
living driving trucks and filling out customs manifests. People with more academic talent would still
compete with each other, of course (as did Einstein), but they could be more
focused on things of true value and less on test taking per se.
This simple reality, however, has been
clouded by vested interests.
We are increasingly outsourcing jobs
to poor countries, and insourcing workers from poor countries, in order to
drive wages for the many down, and profits for the few up. Which is the major reason that wages are
falling. But that doesn’t sound very
good. So the rich blame the victims: oh
we have to import foreign workers, because American schools are so bad that
they are not producing enough skilled workers.
And wages aren’t falling because we have radically increased the labor
supply, no, it’s because American children aren’t getting a good enough
education to be competitive in the jobs of the future (like waiter or Starbucks
barista).
Of course this is rubbish. A truck driver in Japan makes a lot more
money than a computer programmer in India.
Education is fine, and for an industrial society it’s important that
everyone be numerate and literate.
However, other than meeting the basic standards, the overall standard of
living is not set by educational attainment.
If today everyone in India could magically be given a PhD in neuroscience,
there would be 500 million chronically malnourished PhDs in neuroscience.
Ah, but the educational bureaucracies
and unions have bought into this. They
like pushing the idea that schools are more important than they really
are. ‘Oh if the inner cities are
collapsing it’s not because there are no jobs and no money, no, it’s because we
haven’t thrown enough money at the schools!’
In the short run the educational
mafias made some bucks off of this fantasy of teacher as miracle worker. They got big raises, and lots of juicy
high-paying positions in administration (where you have the added advantage of
not having to do all that grubby work of actually lecturing and grading papers
etc).
But now the jig is up. The inner cities are still failing, real
wages are headed down, American corporations are still importing massive
numbers of foreign workers ‘because there just aren’t enough skilled Americans’
(hahaha), etc. The teachers are now being
blamed for what is not under their control, but they have so long pushed the
idea that it is under their control, that they are screwed. A backlash is coming, and teacher’s unions
are going to be broken, and public schools starved of funds in favor of
crony-capitalist ‘Charter’ schools, etc.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to feel any
sympathy for the teachers. They should
have realized what a toxic bargain it was to join forces with big business in
blaming so many of the ills of society on the quality of the schools. They should have realized that ultimately it
would turn around and bite them.
They also should have realized what it
meant to join with big business in favor of cheap-labor immigration
policies. In the short run a massive
boost in school-age children would increase the demand for teachers, and the
size of the base of the pyramid upon which the educational administrators can
build their bureaucracies. However, this forced population growth also impoverishes the society at large upon which the teacher’s salaries
ultimately depend. You can’t get blood
from a stone. As lower wages drive down
per-capita state and local tax revenues, there will be less and less for the
teachers – and as wages and benefits for non-teachers keep falling, it will be
so easy to attack the educational unions as being overpaid (when the reality is
that everyone else is underpaid, but that’s a hard argument to make nowadays).
Look at what teachers make in places
like Guatemala and Haiti and Pakistan.
Slowly but surely, American teachers are going to learn what that feels
like.
