The staunchest defenders of education, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), reject the idea of sorting subjects and majors by “usefulness”:
How do you know Latin, trigonometry, or Emily Dickinson won’t serve you on the job? A man told me his French once helped him understand an airport announcement in Paris. Without high school French, he would have missed his flight. Invest years now and one day you might save hours at an airport. See, studying French pays!
These claims remind me of Hoarders, a reality show about people whose mad acquisitiveness has ruined their lives. Some hoarders collect herds of cats, others old refrigerators, others their own garbage. Why not throw away some of their useless possessions? Stock answer: “I might need it one day.” They “might need” a hundred empty milk cartons.
One argument in favor of Emily et al is social cohesion and group self-identification, national-building.
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
Caplan is one of the most hit/miss popular academics today. He goes from cogently and insightfully detailing the flaws and issues with a complex system or behavior, to proposing the most obviously asinine and unworkable solutions imaginable to anyone with practical experience in that field, to slipping a totally original and unlooked for consideration into the mix that gives you pause, all within the span of a small handful of pages, only to do it again a few pages later. Reading Caplan gives me whiplash, but in an enjoyable way, like riding an old wooden rollercoaster.
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.
Bryan Caplan is definitely allergic to shared culture.
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:
“I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time.”
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.