The Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto recently interviewed Bryan Caplan — a professor at George Mason University and author of several books — about whether or not every kid should attend college.
There were problems right out the gate with the subheadline. After the title asks “School is Expensive. Is it Worth It?” the article answers, “For your kids, yes—at least assuming they graduate. But the author of ‘The Case Against Education’ says the benefits to society are vastly overstated.”
So: your children, like the authors, will gain a whole lot of goodness from college. Go right ahead and splurge away! But all those tax dollars going to fund the education of other people’s kids — aka the suspect entity “society?” That money, Caplan argues, is wasted.
Why? Well, Caplan revisits an argument heard round middle and high school campuses the nation over. What’s the point of studying art or music, trigonometry or Latin? In what job will these skills be needed? As the adolescent often puts it, “When will I ever use any of this?”
Caplan says that when he brings up this thoroughly tired idea, “Almost everyone says, ‘Yeah, my God, I wasted all of those years in trigonometry—what a waste of time that was.’ Or, ‘I had to do Latin for four years—what a waste of time that was.’”
It’s, uh… telling about who Caplan appeals to. And his unquestioned acceptance of this unexplored reaction is illuminating as well. After all, to take just one of the subjects Caplan casually throws under the school bus, there are benefits to learning a second language — any language — that are worthwhile, whether or not one ever moves overseas. Anne Merritt outlines seven cognitive perks to being bilingual in a 2017 article at The Telegraph. For one, students of another language end up scoring better on standardized tests than their monolingual peers — in math, reading, and vocabulary. Other benefits include a sharper memory, delayed onset of dementia, and kicking one’s English skills up as well.
His argument, basically: What a stupid waste of money all this investment in academia has been.
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What about art and music, philosophy and, yes, trigonometry? Those pursuits also find themselves on Caplan’s chopping block in favor of practical skills such as welding and plumbing. Someone might here argue perhaps economic contribution is not the most important, or at the least not the sole, consideration in bifurcating learning into exclusive camps of worthy and dispensable.
What does it hurt a future plumber to know something of poetry? Is Caplan really thinking those who aspire to be car mechanics or hair stylists ought to trot through life harboring zero concern for expressing themselves — and appreciating the expression of others — with beauty and eloquence?
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
That’s from “Agememnon” by Aeschylus, quoted by Robert Kennedy when he spoke to a mostly black crowd the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. He likely didn’t expect everyone present to know the poem, or even who Aeschylus was. But Kennedy allowed his listeners the dignity they deserved — that they, too, could hear and partake of the words’ truth, bound inextricably within the poet’s composition.
This is not important for Caplan. Rather, he notes the disparity between modest annual economic growth per extra college year blown on studying the humanities. “If a year of school for an individual raises earnings about 10%, [then] if you go and raise the education of an entire country’s workforce by a year, it seems to only raise the income of the country by about 2%.” The economic gods can’t have that.
So Caplan’s solution, proposed in his latest book The Case Against Education, is to separate school and state entirely. No more public funding for universities, he says. His argument, basically: What a stupid waste of money all this investment in academia has been.
It makes one ponder if Caplan has looked around recently. The United States is an economic powerhouse, unrivaled from the mid-20th century to date. The greatest technological advancements of the past century — indeed, in modern history — have emerged from an enclave of innovation in northern California. Markets in New York determine global stock trends. Entrepreneurship exists at rates here unheard of throughout the rest of the world.
One’s approach to this question seems, to this author at least, to hinge on a certain question: Are students allowed to be people too? With human qualities — such as a capacity for appreciating beauty?
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Of course, it’s possible America’s economic eruption would have occurred regardless of the country’s centuries-old support for public and private institutions of higher learning. Doubtful, to be sure. But the least Caplan might do is recognize monetary investment in colleges and universities has not hindered the United States from creating wealth at a rate unprecedented in human history.
Notably, though not at all surprisingly, higher education is viewed through a business lens. Forget the intrinsic value of a philosophy degree, nevermind what kind of benefit a person holding one might bring to “everyday” work spaces. The university system, according to Caplan, his interviewer James Taranto, and the imperialists of economics-only dogma, education is about one thing and one thing only — training and funneling good little workers into the GDP machine.
One’s approach to this question seems, to this author at least, to hinge on a certain question: Are students allowed to be people too? With human qualities — such as a capacity for appreciating beauty? If the answer is yes, as it clearly is for Caplan when considering his own sons, what justifies denying that quality to kids who might need state funding in order to afford their own wondrous and exploratory college years?
We might argue (wrongly) that the point of college is not that. But even then, Caplan is in trouble. For, given his “four years of Latin” example complaint, he clearly means high school Humanities courses are also a waste. (Unless someone might direct me to a university that has such a graduation requirement.) So it isn’t only youths past the technical adult age of 18 that Caplan thinks better to society without philosophy and second languages. It’s high schoolers, too.What’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander, in Caplan’s view. Rather, what’s cheapest for the gander is what’s best for his particular, luckily-privileged-with-a-professor dad geese. And that’s too bad.
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