Education: August 2003 Archives

Americans worship education. Perhaps more so the left than the right, but a great many people of all persuasions believe that the best solution to any problem is education. War? Education. Drug abuse? Education. Poverty? Education. Crime? Education. Racism? Education. Terrorism? Education. Don't get me wrong, education can be quite effective in treating some of these problems, but education alone isn't the cure-all that many people make it out to be.

Some have said that the solution to the War on Terror and the fighting in Israel is to educate the participants. If by "educate" you mean the almost complete tear-down and reconstruction of the Arab Muslim death-cult culture, then you may be right; that's not likely to happen through what we normally consider "education". Books, schools, and teachers, can change the direction of a society over generations, but that would do us little good at the moment. Aside from the practical problems of actually delivering education to the Muslim fanatics who hate us and want to kill us.

The idea that education will eliminate poverty is a myth. It will possibly work for a single individual, but there will always be a poorest 10%, no matter how wealthy they are. The poorest employed Americans live better than anyone lived 200 years ago, and yet we still consider them "poor" and debate about how to solve the problem of poverty. Education may raise the economic tide, but it will never bring everyone to the same level (thankfully).

Most drug abusers know that their addiction is ruining their lives, and even before they got hooked they knew of the potential danger. Would more education have helped? Perhaps. But it's likely that they made their decision in spite of the information available to them. They wanted to do it, and they did it.

Racism wasn't beat back by educating whites. The tide of racism and discrimination in America was turned by empowering blacks. I've written before that voting is not a right, but the power to vote can be a mightily effective tool for defeating real oppression.

Education won't make people do good; people are naturally evil. We do good things from time to time, but overall we act from selfish motives and do pretty much exactly what we want, even when we know better. Even if education tends to reduce violent crime (which is more tightly correlated with poverty, I suspect), I know plenty of educated people who lie, cheat, and steal on a regular basis. The Enron and WorldCom frauds were perpetrated by highly educated people; and don't forget politicians.

Education is a good thing -- heck, I'm working on my PhD -- but it won't solve all the world's problems. Sometimes people need to be forced to do what's right. I'm not talking about victimless crimes and that sort of thing; I'm pretty libertarian, and I don't think that everything I believe to be morally wrong should also be illegal.

Consider World War 2. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese were going to surrender until they were utterly defeated. We could have negotiated and talked with them endlessly while China was being raped and pillaged and the Jews were being herded into poison gas showers, and nothing would have come from it. "Educating" our enemies at that time meant firebombing their cities, and that form of education actually worked pretty well. The War on Terror will be won with a combination of combat and education -- but education alone could not do it. Same goes for the fighting in Israel.

Education is more effective at preventing problems that at solving them. Even better than education, however, is freedom. Free nations don't go to war with each other. Liberal values (true liberal values, not the values that most leftist Americans espouse) and democratic institutions are the best guarantors of international peace. Education and freedom are correlated, but not identical. Leftists in America use education to indoctinate children and make them dependent on government, for example, rather than assisting them to actually be free.

I'm not against education -- far from it -- but I think the matter needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Just because it's "for the children" doesn't mean it's going to work, and if it doesn't work it doesn't matter that it's more peaceful and nobody gets hurt.

A guy named Ken writes in the comments section of this post over at Oblivion that:

Point 3: Yeah, we need to keep the government out of education... That way every podunk school board in certain states can vote to teach creationism and throw science out the window. This is where I completely disagree with the conservatives. There needs to be a national standard for education at elementary and secondary levels. There should be a damn national core curriculum and a national standardized test. It's not government money (or lack thereof) ruining schools, it's teachers unions and lazy parents.

Who gets to determine these national standards? Why, Ken of course! Not those morons from other places with other ideas! Naturally. After all, Ken knows he's smarter than they are, so he -- and people who agree with him -- should be empowered to set the education standards for everyone! Who knows what crazy things parents will teach their kids without his intervention!

(Teachers' unions and lazy parents certainly don't help the situation.)

On the other hand, I have a different perspective. I think that education should be entirely privatized, and that the free market should determine what kids are taught. Parents, and kids, want to succeed in life, and they will naturally design and select schools that help them do so. There's no need for anyone to impose outside standards; in fact, as with all socialist proposals, the attempt to impose high-level government control will certainly fail.

I'm really amazed that anyone still buys into this socialist garbage. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that the solution to America's education problem is to tighten government controls. The government has been in charge of education for nearly a century, and it has been a consistent failure. Every socialist experiment around the globe has crashed and burned. Why does anyone think that socialism will work for education? It's mind-boggling.

The WaPo reports on an idea being floated in Anne Arundel, Maryland, to punish misbehaving students by requiring their parents to come to school with them.

Students who break the rules in Anne Arundel County public schools may one day face a punishment that, for the typical kid, is far worse than detention: having to bring Mom or Dad to school with them for a day.

The idea -- essentially to embarrass students into good behavior without making them miss classroom time -- came from a task force of 20 Anne Arundel parents, teachers and educators working to revise the Code of Student Conduct. A draft of the group's proposals was presented to the county school board yesterday, and final approval of the code is due early next year.

I love alternative punishments, and I think that using public shame as an incentive for kids to behave properly is a great idea. After all, that's how the real world works. You do something stupid or rude, and people ridicule you. Peer pressure is essential for the survival of society; in fact, one of the greatest abnormalities of sociopaths is their apathy towards social mores.

One of the greatest flaws of our public education system is that public schools are nothing like real life. Each student only associates with others in their age group, and the social hierarchy is completely artificial -- based on looks, style, and presentation rather than any actual abilities or merit. Sure, some people in the real world get by on these things, but most of us don't.

I'm not a big fan of home-schooling, for many of reasons, but one advantage that it does have is that home-schooled kids tend to interact much more with people of widely varying ages. Diverse interactions can be had in other settings as well, and they're one of the chief social benefits of belonging to a church, in my opinion.