Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish
Education was the defining paradigm of the 20th Century model of social
progress, particularly the scientific education distributed through
cells and classes where trained educators teach from prepared texts
imparting the same knowledge to every students through the same methods.
Our educational system is nothing if not extensive. We, collectively and individually, spend fortunes on it. The average cost of
a four year degree is approaching 100,000 dollars and that isn't
counting textbooks (1,100 per year) and the astronomical rates of
interest on student loans. Total student loan debt has doubled in the
last seven years and is approaching 300 billion dollars. The average
student under 30 owes around 20,000 dollars as education has become the
new mortgage.
Senior citizens who came of age in the age when college became universalized are having their social security payments reduced to cover their student loan debts proving that a college education really does last for a lifetime.
The individual expenses for an education are trivial compared to the
collective burden. The budget for New York City's Department of
Education is 24.4 billion dollars.
That is nearly the GDP of Vermont being expended on the schools of a
single city. It's the GDP of 60 percent of the countries on the planet
being shoveled into a single school system of 1.1 million children under
the banner of "Children First" that amounts to 40 percent of the city
budget.
New York spends 11,572 dollars per pupil. For now the home of Wall
Street can afford this kind of insane waste, closing the budget
shortfall by finding a way to impose a 300 million or 500 million dollar
fine on a major bank or brokerage. Most other places can't. Across the
river, New Jersey's disastrous schools are bleeding taxpayers dry with
murderous property taxes to fund failing schools.
The same story is repeated across the nation where homeowners are bled
to fund swollen pension funds and failing urban schools. Gimmicks such
as "weighed student funding" are used to divert as much money as
possible from successful local schools to unsuccessful urban schools.
People are losing their homes so that another high school in Newark can
roll out more afterschool programs and Michelle Obama's idea of
nutritious lunches.
Politicians take for granted that education is the road to empowerment
and equality. Obama has read poems off his teleprompter about the
wonders of education as the only means of ensuring "our" children's
future. There is nothing revolutionary about that. Every politician
takes it for granted that education means empowerment. But does it
really?
Universal education was the panacea of every socialist state. By NEA
rankings the Soviet Union had a better education system than we do. Its
system routed as much of the population as possible through higher
education and degree mills making it better educated, on paper, than the
Yankee running dogs of the decadent West. And yet the USSR was behind
the United States in every possible area of life.
The more you universalize education, the lower the value of that
education becomes. When the goal of education is not to teach, but to
graduate, then the educational system becomes a cattle run which exists
only to move students through the system and then out the door through
classroom promotion. The High School education of today is inferior to
the Elementary School education of yesterday and the four year college
graduate of today couldn't even begin to match wits with a high school
graduate from 1946. College has become the new High School. Graduate
school is the new college. If we keep following the European model, then
two decades from now, everyone will be encouraged to get a Master's
Degree which will be the prerequisite for most jobs and also be
completely worthless.
The current model is that the more education you have, the better you
are and the better that the society you live in will be. Everyone is
expected to finish High School and as many as possible are encouraged to
go to college, even if they'll die before they pay off the student debt
and even if more people go bankrupt subsidizing other people's
education. And at some point when everyone has six years of higher
education, we'll have a utopia of flying cars, glowing sidewalks in the
sky and 5 minute tours of the moon.
But there is another model. Not universal education, but universal
competence. The Jewish text, Pirkei Avot or Sayings of Our Fathers,
circa 220, contains the following sage advice from Rabbi Chanina the son
of Dosa, "Whoever has more deeds than learning, his learning will
endure. But whoever has more learning than deeds, his learning will not
endure."
The modern educational system has a surplus of learning, mainly
purposeless learning. The average graduate of the four-year college has
spent a great deal of money and learned very little of any use to him or
to anyone else. By the end he may have learned to calculate interest
rates, if only through necessity. Despite all the pablum about preparing
the next generation for the future, he is in no way more empowered than
he was four years ago. Often he is more disempowered by debt.
Empowerment comes not from mere education, but from competence.
Competence is skill-based, it indicates a level of practical ability in
any field that goes beyond regurgitating the approved program of
standardized education. Competence covers everything from being able to
fix a car to being able to put together a sentence. And competence is
empowering because skill transmutes learning into deeds.
Competence trickles in between the bars of education, but the modern
educational system provides for less competence and more waste. The type
of higher education that we have now is geared toward two areas,
cultural transmission and meta-culture.
Cultural transmission would be more useful if we had a culture, but
instead it means students studying the Canterbury Tales and then the
Color Purple followed by Albert Camus, William Shakespeare, Jane Smiley,
John Dos Passos and a selection of Mexican LGBT poems. This isn't
culture, it's discordant noise, and our society has no great economic or
cultural interest in spending fortunes passing it along.
Meta-culture is even more useless as it is aimed at internalizing the
specialized vocabularies created through categorizing culture to group
identities. It is not only a useless egotistical exercise, but also
quite pernicious as well. Analyzing analyses of culture and then
critiquing them for political conformity used to be for aspiring Marxist
poets singing marching songs from the Spanish Civil War. Now it's for
everyone. Ten years from now, we will spending three times as much on
education and most students will have trouble with basic math and
literacy, but will immediately be able to look at a Bugs Bunny cartoon
and determine whose narrative it privileges. (Hint: White men.)
We can still send a probe to Mars and stream live video of it to the
world from servers to handheld devices not because of our wonderful
standard collectivist education, but because we have still retained
enough of a legacy of competence from previous generations. It's the
same reason that the Soviet Union still had classical ballet. Even so
about the only things we make anymore are programs from companies
created by college dropouts in fields that boomed before they were
standardized. Our innovation doesn't come, as Obama claims, from
education. It comes from men escaping education.
Innovation comes from competence. To innovate, you have to not simply
know about a thing, but you have to know how to take it apart and put it
back together again, and then put it down dissatisfied with its
limitations. Innovators rebel against conventions, not as the reflexive
Catcher in the Rye teenage pout against society, but because it can be
made better. True innovation is the function driven pursuit of higher
degrees of empowerment.
Competence need not be all that dramatic. It is as simple as
understanding the value of a thing, a skill that most people seemed to
possess back when consumerism wasn't an indoor sport and purchasing
meant buying the things that you needed to work and live. It means being
able to count, whether it's the total on the cash register or the
interest rate, with all the fine print, on a student loan. It also means
understanding how a politician is promising to screw you, when he talks
about our need to invest more in education, housing or balloon animals.
A society with universal competence is an achievement society. It is a
place where things get done because the people have the skill to do
them. They do not have the same skills, and they don't need to have
them. Standardized education leads to standardized drones, not competent
individuals. Ability is personal and skill is learned. Who you are
informs what you do and what you do informs who you are. Education is
information, but competence is identity.
Above all else, a society of competent men and women is self-ruled.
Competence is the core of independence while standardized education is
the essence of collectivism. Once you know how to do something, you are
less likely to be awed by men and women who only know how to rule over
others. Once you know how to do something, you have achieved a measure
of pure freedom.
An America with even more universal education will not be any more
competitive, it will be less so. There is only so much money available
for 24.4 billion dollar education budgets, or the 500 billion dollar
equivalent of it when applying the same per-child spending ratio
nationwide. And when that pyramid of debt sinks into the sand, we will
have a great many people with a passel of degrees and less useful skills
than most Stone Age aborigines.
But an America with universal competence would mean a return to the
country that was where the economy was driven by individual skill and
learning ability, rather than by collective programming. And that is the
only kind of nation for which the Constitution would be more than just
pretty words, but serve as the guarantees of an actual limited
government. That great nation existed once and it still exists even
among the ruins of the government cradle-to-grave state. All it needs is
the freedom to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment