In The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of a Martian sociologist:
Your mission: given our curriculum, make an educated guess about what our economy looks like. The Martian would plausibly work backward from the premise that the curriculum prepares students to be productive adults. Since students study reading, writing, and math, you would correctly infer that the modern economy requires literacy and numeracy. So far, so good.
From then on, however, the Martian would leap from one erroneous inference to another. Students spend years studying foreign languages, so there must be lots of translators. Teachers emphasize classic literature and poetry. A thriving market in literary criticism is the logical explanation. Every student has to take algebra and geometry. The Martian sociologist will conclude the typical worker occasionally solves quadratic equations and checks triangles for congruence. While we can picture an economy that fits our curriculum like a glove, that economy is out of this world.
We should be equally puzzled, he notes, by the eminently practical subjects students don’t have to study:
Why don’t educators familiarize students with compensation and job satisfaction in common occupations? Strategies for breaking into various industries? Sectors with rapidly changing employment? Why don’t schools make students spend a full year learning how to write a resume or affect a can-do attitude? Dire sins of omission.
There has to be a logical explanation for the effect of Ivory Tower achievement on Real World success, he continues:
The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you reveal by mastering them.
Education signals three broad traits: not just intelligence, but conscientiousness and conformity, too:
What are modern model workers like? They’re team players. They’re deferential to superiors, but not slavish. They’re congenial toward coworkers but put business first. They dress and groom conservatively. They say nothing remotely racist or sexist, and they stay a mile away from anything construable as sexual harassment. Perhaps most importantly, they know and do what’s expected, even when articulating social norms is difficult or embarrassing. Employers don’t have to tell a modern model worker what’s socially acceptable case by case.
[…]
An intelligent worker learns quickly and deeply. A conscientious worker labors until the job’s done right. A conformist worker obeys superiors and cooperates with teammates. If you lack the right stuff to succeed in school, you probably lack the right stuff to succeed in the labor market.
School has, as a general rule, primarily been about social signaling and only ever rarely has it been about education, and usually only when signals are already guaranteed by some other mechanism, like class or occupation or family. Actual education focused schooling was, is, and will remain an elite minority undertaking.
We only need so many Medievalists who can read/write in Old Anglo-Saxon, luckily we only have so many who are capable and find it interesting. Convenient.
Phileas Frogg: “School has, as a general rule, primarily been about social signaling and only ever rarely has it been about education…”
That may be true from the bottom looking up, but it isn’t true from the top looking down. From the top looking down, schools are a mechanism of homogenization and control. And it isn’t like they hide it: school buildings and prisons look similar because they’re based on the same underlying logic—compliance—if in different implementational registers and intensities. Organizationally, neutral observers have often remarked that the same vendors supply the food for the captive populations of each. And there are even both private schools and private prisons, nominally at some remove from the state.
Jim,
Absolutely. I was just noting one way to look at it based on the posts main thrust.
The, “education,” system exists to:
- Continue existing
- Provide jobs for people
- Provide childcare for parents
- Gatekeep and reward compliant behaviors
- Signal who is compliant and, “acceptable,” for positions of power
Education is a distant 7th-8th item on the list, and only incidentally due to the efforts of some individual teachers (often harangued and punished).
Phileas Frogg:
Then we are substantially in agreement, our only meaningful divergence being that I reflexively view utility from the perspective of the world-controllers, as opposed to from the citizen-subjects.
The major difference, then, is not moral righteousness or justice or other such thing, but the habitual understanding that the perpetuation of a system, any system, is owing, ultimately, to the perspective of its managers, formal or informal, that the purpose of a system is what it does…and not its PR-drafted slogans or empty representations.