On the Education of Youth

David Brooks, in today’s New York Times and in classic David Brooks style, makes an interesting and surprisingly accurate observation something, and then completely incorrectly applies the observation to a complete unrelated phenomenon in order to come to a “conservative” conclusion.  Read here.  Despite the farcical conclusion about Elena Kagan, Brooks’s underlying observation seems to reflect a deep truth about our educational system, or at least what common wisdom among intellectuals might be about that system.

Specifically, Brooks observes that today’s educational system, with its standardized tests, grade inflation, and test-based advancement to good colleges, professional schools, and jobs, rewards a culture of prudence, cautiousness, and hard work, and tends to discourage innovation and risk-taking.  Those who succeed need not discover anything or show intellectual keenness by sparring with their elders; rather, to succeed, they need only follow the directions precisely.

One consequence of this is what I would term a lack of intellectual adventurism.  Children tend to inherit the intellectual predispositions of their elders.  Though brilliant, they have a sheep-like instinct to follow authority.  The influence of their parents in religion and values, their teachers in politics, and their peers in social mores is contested only by a general apathy and indifference aroused by the weakness of their education and the lack of the passion that conflict inspires.

What is to be done?  How to inspire them?  Imagine that you have two months to form and mold the mind of one of these young, sleeping giants.

One possibility is to ask him to defend a doctrine plainly repulsive.  Hitler is considered to be the chief and inarguable evil of the modern age; ask the young man to defend Hitler.  Pay him ten dollars a page for a book defending Hitler.  This approach is not without risks.  The risk of moral corruption is obvious, and there is a subtler risk too.  The young man, in being exposed to works such as Mein Kampf, may himself find the doctrine so repulsive that he concludes everything his teachers have taught him is correct, and so he has been right all along to uncritically accept.

What is a better way?  Our goal is to startle him out of complacence, to shock away his indifference.  Our goal not even to make him challenge authority, but at least to resent the fact that it must go unchallenged.  I confess to being a bit baffled.  My own instinct is to show the youth history… to let him see the infamy that is religion, the comedy that is human affairs, and the great minds that call to each other across the ages like mountain peaks above the clouds.

But my instinct is probably wrong… for it to work, the youth must love history.  What is a more general approach, an approach that would permit the youth to examine his own interests, or even an approach that is by its nature attractive to an unchallenged mind?  I confess to being, for the moment, baffled.

The Prisoner: The General

“The General” is a broad-based satire of modern education. It mocks deconstruction and examines the shortcomings introduced into education by the necessity of educating huge numbers of people.

There is much in “The General” to suggest a desire for a return to a study of the classics and the Great Books.  In several places, “The General” criticizes modern education, represented by the Village’s Speedlearn program, as empty.  “Finding things a bit strange?” the Professor’s wife asks Number Six.  “That is the trouble,” he replies, “I can’t find anything at all.”  When he steals into her house, he enters a tastefully decorated room filled with draped busts.  One is inclined to suspect that they are Greek or Roman, but when Number Six removes the drapery, we are surprised to find that they are busts of the leaders of the Village.  In other words, the leaders of the modern educational movement idolize only themselves, and not the great thinkers of the past.  Finally, the question that Number Six uses to destroy the General (which turns out to be a computer) is simply “Why?”  He asserts that no machine can answer this question, nor any human.  All of these examples point to a thesis that education ought not merely to fill our heads with science and the sterile literature of today’s educated class, but instead to teach us true art, to expose us to things that stir the soul and suggest where we might find meaning.

One scene, in which Number Six inquires of the Professor’s wife why a student is standing on his head (“to gain a new perspective”) reminds us that satire of education is an old art.  Recall a similar scene from Aristophanes’ Clouds.  Strepsiades is examining Socrates’ “Thoughtery of wise souls”:

Strepsiades: …[W]hat are those fellows doing, bent all double?
Disciple: They are sounding the abysses of Tartarus.
Strepsiades: Why do their rumps point toward heaven?
Disciple: They’re being taught astronomy too.

The hollowness of modern education is further examined with “Speedlearning” itself.  Speedlearning’s motto is “100 percent entry, 100 percent pass.”  In just fifteen seconds, Speedlearning enables all of the citizens of the Village learn a complete college course in history, and they can then go about quoting to each other facts about the Boer Wars.  The knowledge turns out to be shallow, though; the citizens know the rote facts, but they attach no meaning to them.  When Number Twelve, a sneaky rebel, asks Number Six, who has just finished the Speedlearning course, “What was the Treaty of Adrianople?” Number Six responds “September, 1829″.  The students of Speedlearning are unable to adapt the facts they have learned to new situations.

I think there is much value in this satire.  We live in an amazing age.  The Earth is more populous than ever before, so much so that up to six percent of all people ever born are walking the Earth today.  Literacy and the availability of accumulated written wisdom are both more widespread, and reaching far greater absolute numbers of people, than at all previous points in history.  Despite all this, the student of history knows that the behavior of people today is not substantially different from the behavior of the uneducated masses of forgotten eras.  We are still subject to xenophobia, jingoism, manipulation, greed, and religion.  How can this be, given the nearly free availability of knowledge?  The failure cannot be in anything but the agents we have chosen to disperse that knowledge, educators who have seen fit to mock and destroy the accumulated wisdom of ages.

For those fortunate enough to have studied the classics, some secrets are known.  Plato could not teach us to be wise, but he at least filled us with a desire to be wise.  He could not teach us the truth, but he at least assured us that it existed.  What is the ignorance and denial of modern America but a complete escape from the desire to know, and the belief in absolute truth?  We see in the anti-intellectualism, the anti-scientific movement, and the race for wealth only the simple fact that people have not been taught to strive for goodness and wisdom.

On the Paradox of Freedom

Political freedom is in some ways a paradox.

One of the core tenets of American political freedom is the right to free speech, embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution.  Though there has been much debate on how broadly this principle of free speech applies, nearly all critics agree that political speech is protected.  A commonly-accepted extension of this protection is the idea that no person in a publicly-funded position can endorse or promote political candidates or positions. Effectively, such endorsement would constitute government promotion of one candidate, or suppression of others, therefore restriction of speech.

Why is free speech a paradox? The First Amendment protects a protester holding a sign saying, “People should not have the right to free speech,” since the right to free speech is a political issue.  More generally, for a free society to be free, it must permit speech and behaviors that seek to  limit this freedom.  It must permit debate not only on where to lay roads and when to go to war, but also debate on whether freedom of speech should be permitted.  Certain people, in winning the debate, would stifle the very means by which that debate occurred.

The United States has struggled with this paradox for much of its history.  Particularly in times of war, politicians of all stripes have sought to limit debate on their actions.  Their argument has generally been that permitting the type of speech described above would imperil our nation’s continued existence.  Examples of such behavior range from the Alien and Sedition Acts, Woodrow Wilson, and Japanese internment camps right up to modern Republican jingoism.  In each example, a ruling power made the argument that, for the protection of all of our freedoms, some small part of them must be sacrificed.

Our struggle with the paradox is even more insidious than this.  Consider education: any public school teacher who promoted a particular political candidate or party to his students would probably be fired.  Schoolteachers, public officials, bureaucrats, police, politicians, and even priests – who by running tax-exempt religious organizations effectively receive public money -  are the many faces of the government.  Therefore, these figures, in their public capacities, are political-neutral.  At first glance, this seems consistent with the principle outlined above, that no official receiving public funds should endorse specific politics.

The paradox occurs when one considers the one sort of political speech that is permitted to public figures.  This is the right to promote participatory democracy.  Particularly during election season, political figures and social leaders of all stripes aggressively promote voting and its importance in democracy.  Moreover, certain values are held to be unquestionable: love of country, love of freedom, love of democracy, even, sometimes, love of the free market are examples.  The opposities of these values are taboo, and those who promote them are ostracized and may be condemned by anyone, even a public official.

In short, government or public officials have complete freedom to promote the continued existence of government and society in its present form, and complete freedom to suppress speech or ideas deemed antithetical to our current way of life.  Modern controversies over free speech do not question the right of the government to promote certain forms of speech and suppress others; rather, they question how broadly the “current way of life” that public officials may endorse applies.  For instance, in the debate over whether a judge may post the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, the question is not, “May judges use their office to promulgate certain belief systems?”  The question is, “Are the Ten Commandments, and Christianity, really an unseparable part of the ‘American’ belief system that judges always promulgate?”

At this point, it may seem to the libertarian mind that even the promotion of democracy and freedom is an unacceptable infringement on the right to free speech, when that promotion is carried on by a public official.  Why should it be taken for granted that a particular element of society is a fundamental part of our identity?  If we construct a perfectly free society, do we not wish to leave open to our children the possibility that certain things we take for granted, they may discard?  Is it not possible that what today seems necessary for the protection of freedom may tomorrow be merely another tool of tyrrany?  The libertarian must answer that it is possible, that we must, insofar as we are able, avoid promulgating any belief system that may lead to tyrrany.  In a free state, the state may offer no defense of itself, because this infringes the ability of the citizens to draw their own conclusions.  This, then, is the paradox of freedom: a free state must not endorse freedom.

On Education – III

What ought the role of the state to be in education?

Approaching the problem from the perspective of a free society, the answer is that the state ought to have as little a role in education as possible.  It does not matter what the perfect education is; it matters what the perfect amount of education is.

Let us suppose that education must at the very least provide every citizen with an understanding of the law or the means to acquire that understanding.  Some libertarians would argue that the state itself need not even provide this education, but that it should be left to the initiative of the citizens to seek out the means to understand the law of the land.  This argument, though, seems to go against one of the fundamental principles of libertarianism, namely that whenever possible, the state ought to avoid imposing burdens on the citizenry.  If the law is complex, the burden imposed upon the citizenry could be quite large (cf. United States today!).

Putting aside such arguments as against the principles of a free society, we return again to our premise: in our state, the citizens will receive – from the state – an education that provides them a full understanding of the laws.  Let us further suppose that the legal structure of our state is relatively simple and static.  Given simple laws – thou shalt not kill, steal, break contract, etc. – we can imagine that not many years of education would be necessary to impart a full understanding of the laws.  It seems obvious that some of the tools that modern education provides, such as reading, would be necessary, while others, such as calculus and art, would not.  Such disciplines could certainly be pursued by individuals outside of the purvue of the state, but for the state to meddle unnecessarily in such disciplines is clearly against our free society/sufficient education premises.

It also seems clear that the education that one citizen requires will, in the broad majority of cases, be the same that all other citizens require.  Since we measure our education by the degree to which it gives citizens a full understanding of the law, the amount of education a citizen undergoes should be measured not by time, but by the understanding achieved.  In other words, all citizens should have to pass a standardized test measuring understanding of the law, and no citizen should be forced or allowed to receive education from the state once this test has been passed.

Finally, should citizens be allowed to supplant the state’s role in education with some sort of certified private school?  If we imagine that our educational system is not perfectly efficient – that is, that it imposes a burden on individuals somewhat beyond what is strictly necessary to understand the law, the introduction of a parallel private education system presents the problem of parity.  Should some individuals be allowed to use their financial resources to lighten the burden imposed upon them by the state?  Ultimately, there is no way that the answer to this question be negative, since we have already supposed that individuals be allowed to leave the educational system when they have acquired the proper level of understanding.  A wealthy individual could choose to acquire the necessary understanding, then enter the educational system, only to immediately exit it because he was fully qualified.

It will be objected that the rich and the smart will feel a lighter burden from the state than the poor and the dull.  We can only answer, “Let it be so.”  All men are not created equal; they are only treated equally before the law.

On Education – I

Academia. Its glimmering white towers inspire awe in many, contempt in some, and a great amount of greed in most. College is considered that essential proving ground, its result, the diploma, a sine qua non for the best jobs out there. Perhaps most often, I have heard college described as an “investment”.

Yet how much of an investment is college? At the current rate, yearly tuition is close on $40,000. Let’s say that instead of investing in college, our savvy young entrepreneur decides to invest in the stock market, which has earned an average annual return of about 10% over the course of the last century or so. Let’s be more specific and say that our savvy young entrepreneur deposits his money, each year, into the S&P 500 index fund, managed by Vanguard. Here’s how his returns would look.

Year 1 Investment: $40,000

Year 1 Dividends: $670

Year 2 Investment: $83,970 (Year 1 * 1.08 + Dividends + Year 2)

Year 2 Dividends: $1,400

Year 3 Investment: $132,000 (Year 2 * 1.08 + Dividends + Year 3)

Year 3 Dividends: $2,200

Year 4 Investment: $184,800 (Year 3 * 1.08 + Dividends + Year 4)

Year 4 Dividends: $3,100

So, at the ends of four years, you’re sitting on $147,200. Leaving that investment in the stock market, you’ll earn about $250 a month on stock dividends, which happens to be a bit more than the average college graduate’s monthly loan payments (in inflation-adjusted dollars, a fact that has been fairly consistent for a couple of decades).

To be sure, our entrepreneur and the college graduate both have the same amount of debt, so the entrepreneur’s net worth is not much higher than the graduates. The graduate has the handicap of monthly debt payments, though, while the entrepreneur just uses his stock investments to ignore this. Furthermore, since he is only using his dividends to pay the loans, he is also sitting on $150,000, which will appreciate over the years. If he did this now, using the last twenty years of stock returns as a guide, and including the 2001-2003 bear market and the current bear market, and if both he and the college graduate save nothing over the 20 years, this money would have appreciate to roughly (very roughly) $800,000.

But the college graduate gets paid more, right? Using median salaries from a random website (http://www.earnmydegree.com/), the college graduate will get paid about $20,000 more. This is probably extremely misleading because entry-level positions for both the college graduate and the high school graduate are likely much lower, and the high school graduate will have a four-year experience jump, which could give him a significant raise in a profession like plumbing. Nonetheless, the round number $20,000 accounts for the loan payments the college graduate will be making… over the same 20 years that the entrepreneur’s money was appreciating, the college graduate will accumulate an extra $400,000 that the college graduate did not. Thus, he is still behind by another $400,000.

To get at more accurate numbers, we’d have to do some hideously complicated math, make a lot of assumptions about savings rate, and do research about starting salaries. I think that the numbers speak for themselves: at the end of college, the college graduate has a $200 monthly liability, while the entrepreneur has $150,000 appreciating dollars (that he can’t touch until his loans are paid off, if he wants to pay them with the dividends).

On a side note, a savvy entrepreneur might wonder why, if it was so easy to pay off a $160,000 loan, why doesn’t everyone take out loans and invest them in the stock market? Risk, of course, means that the exercise we’ve gone through will only be meaningful some of the time, and in other circumstances, it is possible to imagine it resulting in some setbacks. Such situations are surprisingly rare, though. I think the main reason people don’t do it is that the interest on typical loans is much higher than those for college graduates… the government is engaging in socialistic behavior and basically providing college graduates with free money, giving them an advantage over our young entrepreneur, who is merely engaging in risky behavior.

A final note about the numbers: many are rough, and it is to be noted that I assumed an average 8% stock market return during the college graduate’s time in college. This is in fact somewhat lower than the average returns of the S&P 500, but I did it to avoid any argument that I have been generous with my numbers. The information on the average graduate’s loan burden is from the National Center for Education Statistics and available on their website.