The key word is “our”. Schools, world-wide, certainly teach a shared culture. Out in the sticks there may be a few unenlightened, deplorables of the lower orders who have issues with that shared culture. But, pfft.

On the other hand, I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time. I was just reading Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and that is one of his main points:

The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the reading textbook used in elementary school, the variants of which were modeled on the overwhelmingly most popular series, the McGuffey Readers. They were so widely used that selections in them became part of the national language. When Theodore Roosevelt once told a newspaper reporter that he had “no intention of becoming an international Meddlesome Mattie” by injecting himself into some foreign dispute, he could assume everybody would know what he meant because the story about Meddlesome Mattie had been part of McGuffey’s Fourth Reader in all its editions since 1853. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesmen, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the selections in the McGuffey Readers (the full texts are available at Google Books).

On topic, with regard to this particular passage, Caplan vastly underestimates the value of group cohesion that something like a classical liberal education provides, and the individual value that can be derived from that cohesion. The individual cost of knowing Latin, Dickinson, and Trigonometry may be individually inefficient, a waste of time, but the group cost of not having a common historical, moral and mythological framework to forge a cohesive symbolic language and identity out of is massive in comparison. That internally coherent and unique identity gives your group a competitive edge against other groups, and the degradation of that coherent and unique identity means that you are now vulnerable to groups with better…dare I say it, “Assabiyah.”

Incidentally, Assabiyah is the one concept libertarians can’t seem to wrap their heads around to save their lives. Quite literally.

Caplan seems to think humans are identical, interchangeable atoms, without history or culture. Or is he just furthering the usual sabotage of the surrounding, somewhat alien, culture in which he is embeddded