Americans send kids to school for two ostensible reasons and one that is shameful. The two somewhat valid reasons are as follows:
"Bryan Caplan contests virtually every unchallenged premise we hold about our education system today. His new book, The Case Against Education: Why The Education System is a Waste of Time and Money, expands upon Americans’ growing skepticism about the value of a college education. He argues that formal education at all levels might be a raw deal not just for some people, but for our society in general. To answer this, the George Mason University economist begins by discussing two major purposes of education: the development of human capital, and signaling. Human capital purists would argue that “virtually all education teaches useful job skills and . . . these job skills are virtually the sole reason why education pays off in the market.” On the other hand, he writes, the “signaling” theory of education suggests that “even if what a student learned in school is utterly useless, employers will happily pay extra if their scholastic achievement provides information about their productivity.”
Before we even get to the evil reasons for the current system, we'll debunk the first two.
Development of Human Capital is useful, but only when there is a high ceiling. Since Caplan is an economist, we'll discuss this in economic terms. Human capital can only develop if it has a high return on investment. Some does, most doesn't. The local high school near where I live is a banner example. They brag about having an engineering/robotics program where approximately 15 nerds out of a class of 250 can STEM themselves into a stupor and leave for college with a good 12 or so AP credits in their bags and suitcases. As for the other 235...The place has a bit of a bad reputation.
The human capital development runs up against the problem of the non-blank slate. I've done OK with the whole Edumucayshun thing, but everything I'm decent at involves something a recent relative of mine is pretty decent at as well. My Maternal Grandfather taught math in college. I do it for a living, my son does it one level above his current grade. Is my family socialized to want to be good at math or do we just dole out the lucky sperm shots? If you buy the second hypothesis, you are then enjoined to question whether spending money and time on education does anything other than broaden and make obvious pre-existing heritable differences.
This brings us to our second ostensible purpose of a public education system. It does the job that the nincompoops in ACME Inc's Human Resources Department aren't smart enough to do. Rather than having to scout for capable actuaries the way The Detroit Tigers have to hit the road and find good pitching talent, MGM Grand can simply peruse resumes for graduates of UCLA or Harvard who have passed at least the first three actuarial tests. This tells them who has the intellectual capability to subtly rig games of chance against an unsuspecting public.
This gives universities an unfair monopoly on credentialling Amerika's prestige professions. This is reinforced by The Grigg v. Duke Power decision. Only rich, leftists in Silicon Valley and the NFL are allowed to give employees an IQ test. They both call them something else, but the Wonderlic Test and the Google perspective employee test measure pretty much the same sort of abstract logic that traditional IQ exams test. So again, why couldn't Nationwide Insurance do what the Saracens Rugby Club from The English Premiership does and identify mathematical or sales ability at a young age and send them to Nationwide Academy?
High cognitive skill professions such as actuaries, lawyers and high-end sales people could be trained more rapidly, less expensively and more completely by private professional academies. It would skip the waste, administrative bloat and political indoctrination that gets rammed down the throats of college students. Perfectly capable budding engineers and accountants would not be getting ripped off on tuition to subsidize Interpretive Dance and Lesbian Studies Majors.
But a lot of this is just fantasy because of the 3rd, unspoken reason of why we have these schools. They are jails in which children are incarcerated for the crime of being unwanted, inconvenient offspring of parents who are too busy being Homo Economicus to bother with the distractions implicit in good parenting. Our schools are used unsuccessfully as surrogate parents. Too many of our children are raised by a cynical, unconcerned managerial state. In the end, when you need a well-educated doctor; karma has a way of paying you back for a dysfunctional and useless education system. It's just God's way of telling us that even Roger Waters, could some days have a point.
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