The New York Times is running a set of guest op-eds about education. Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University has one under the title, “School Is for Wasting Time and Money,” a topic on which he has written a book, The Case Against Education. His opening paragraph:
I have deep doubts about the intellectual and social value of schooling. My argument in a nutshell: First, everyone leaves school eventually. Second, most of what you learn in school doesn’t matter after graduation. Third, human beings soon forget knowledge they rarely use.
I’ve got doubts about Caplan’s argument, and those doubts cluster around that third assertion, but also the second. But I’ll present his argument before presenting my reservations.
Caplan asserts:
My work focuses on tests of adult knowledge — what adults retain after graduation. The general pattern is that grown-ups have shockingly little academic knowledge. College graduates know about what you’d expect high school graduates to know; high school graduates know about what you’d expect dropouts to know; dropouts know next to nothing. This doesn’t mean that these students never knew more; it just means that only a tiny fraction of what they learn durably stays in their heads.
This is especially clear for subjects beyond the three R’s of reading, writing and arithmetic. Less than 1 percent of American adults even claim to have learned to speak a foreign language very well in school, even when two years of coursework is standard. Adults’ knowledge of history and civics is negligible. If you test the most elementary facts — like naming the three branches of government — they get about half right. The same goes for questions of basic science, like “Are electrons smaller than atoms?” or “Do antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria?”
That’s his third point, and I have little reason to contest it. I took two years of Latin in high school and two years of German in college, and, since I didn’t use either language later in life, I’ve forgotten them. I’m willing to believe that I’ve forgotten much/most of what I learned in high school and college.
He admits, however, that there is some value there:
The payoff for teaching basic literacy and numeracy is admittedly much larger. Since adults regularly use reading, writing and math, they retain much of what they learn. Even here, though, schools’ performance is mediocre and unlikely to meaningfully improve. Schools have been trying to overcome reading, writing and math deficits in underperforming students for decades. Boosting their performance in the short run is quite doable. The recurring problem is fade-out — the effects of interventions diminish or disappear completely over time.
He goes on to assert:
I freely admit that my dim assessment of American education is a minority view among my fellow economists, who offer piles of evidence that education has a big effect on what adults earn. They’re basically right about that, but that’s no excuse for ignoring the piles of evidence that education has little effect on what adults know.
This blind spot is especially odd because there’s a clean explanation for both piles of evidence. Namely: School is lucrative primarily because it certifies, or signals, employability. Most education isn’t job training; it’s a passport to the real training, which happens on the job. That’s why graduation pays individuals so well. You don’t learn much in your last few weeks of school, but completion convinces employers to trust you.
That makes sense to me as well. There’s more to his argument, but the rest is secondary to my objection, though it is worth your time.
What then is my objection to Caplan’s argument? He seems to think that the content education is mostly about conveying facts of one sort or another, plus literacy and numeracy, and those facts are promptly forgotten. So why bother?
But there’s more going on than piling facts upon facts. Students are being taught how to think. That’s not something you can do in the abstract. You teach them how to think by giving them something to think about, all those facts. It seems quite possible to me that they will have developed basic thinking skills even though they forget most of the facts on which those skills are based. Basic literacy and numeracy, they are fundamental systemic thinking skills.
I make many posts about the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I developed over the years. Though we never wrote about it, we did think a bit about how those ranks mapped on to the educational system. In private conversation we suggested that a Rank 1 system of thought required a grade 8 education, Rank 2 required a high school education, and Rank 3 required a college education. We never pursued that, so I don’t have much argumentation on the issue, but you might want to test that assertion against our core article, The Evolution of Cognition (1990). Our argument would be that high school students think about the world – all of it, the physical world, the biological world, history and society, the arts, etc. – in a more sophisticated way than 8th grade graduates, and that college graduates are more sophisticated than high school graduates. Just how one would measure that directly, rather than by testing for remembered facts, I don’t know. But it should be possible.
Having said that, it’s not at all obvious that our educational system would come out fine on such measures. I’m sure there’s much room for improvement, MUCH. What bothers me is that Caplan doesn’t seem to recognize that there’s an issue here. His views on this matter imply, to me at least, that his conception of the mind and of education is (very) superficial. I suspect that at least some of the value his fellow economists find in education resides in these less tangible matters and not in the repertoire of facts remembered.
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I wonder how students would fare if education were more project based? Here’s the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Project-Based Learning:
Project-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy that involves a dynamic classroom approach in which it is believed that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems. Students learn about a subject by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, challenge, or problem. It is a style of active learning and inquiry-based learning. PBL contrasts with paper-based, rote memorization, or teacher-led instruction that presents established facts or portrays a smooth path to knowledge by instead posing questions, problems or scenarios.
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