It’s long seemed obvious that if we want to truly fix education, actually make it work for the 21st century, we need to kill a stockyard full of our sacred cows.
And we had just the man for the job on The Bill Walton Show this week. Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is Waste of Time and Money,” described the findings in his book and provided some stark recommendations based on them.
First, he said, we need to understand what we’re doing in school. There is the romantic version, he said – you go, learn skills employers are interested in, then get jobs with those employers performing those skills.
More likely is what he calls the “signaling school of education.” You mostly go to school to get certification, “a bunch of seals of approval saying, ‘Grade A worker’ or ‘Grade B worker.’” But, regardless of the grade, you need a seal.
The certification, Caplan argues, has become so accessible it has lost its value. Decades ago, a high school diploma was enough for most jobs. Now, thanks to what he labels “credential inflation,” a bachelor’s degree is often not enough.
That’s why he devotes a chapter in the book to the premise that we need a lot less education. And, failing that, we need to spend a lot less money for what we’re getting now.
To the first point, he divides students into four categories – excellent, good, fair and poor. Parents, he said, need to honestly assess, or have others do so, which category their children fall into. If the answer is “poor,” trying to get into college and major in math or science or management may not be wise, but pursuing skilled trades may be. Wherever you fall, the emphasis should be on maximizing the investment.
To the second, he says the main feedback he gets from education leaders is that few say the system works well, but many say, “Give us more money and then we can do the job.”
Caplan says we need to turn that logic on its head and cut funding for public schools by 30 percent. Education officials will demand “an exact blueprint” for where to cut. “And I say, ‘You know, there’s a strange double standard here. When people say we need more money for schools, people don’t usually say, ‘No way until you give us an exact blueprint of how you plan to spend the money.”
But “when you say ‘less money,’ that’s where people say, “I can’t even consider your idea until you write an encyclopedia about where every dime of budget cuts are going to come from.”
And where would Caplan cut? For starters, he would limit or eliminate foreign language classes.
“Almost no American adult uses a foreign language,” Caplan said. “It’s just a fact. Second, whether or not you agree with that, virtually no American adult even claims to have learned to speak a foreign language very well in school, despite the fact that it’s standard to do two or three years. So, essentially, you’re teaching people something that they almost never use and where almost no one even claims to have learned it, despite the fact that you’re putting a lot of years and classroom material on it. To me, that’s crazy.”
Go after the shibboleths as well, Caplan urges, and be thorough.
Some kids are not as bright as others, and schools and parents need to rethink expecting the same things from those kids. To claims that there’s nothing more important than education, he says, “How about food? Of course food is more important than our children’s education.”
One thing does bother Caplan. Economists who don’t specialize in this area hear his ideas and want to learn more. Those fresh out of the education experience find his message spot on. But education experts are another story.
“It’s sort of a weird case where the people who know the most disagree with me the most, and the people on the other hand who have sort of an intermediate level of knowledge are often very much in agreement with me.
“So I’m like, ‘Gee, the people who know the most think I’m wrong, so maybe they know something I don’t know.”
Or maybe they have not let go of those shibboleths.