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The cost of tuition keeps rising, the burden of student debt grows and grows, and the number of college degrees conferred each year reaches into the hundreds of thousands and beyond—part of a vast credentializing process whose real-life value seems ever more dubious. A skeptic might say that things can’t go on this way—that we are in the midst of an education “bubble.” The whole thing could collapse, like tulips or real estate, but it is more likely that it will simply deflate over time. Indeed, some small private colleges have closed in recent years; others have laid off faculty and administrators. Would-be students and their parents are rethinking the assumption that a good life is impossible without an expensive degree—not to mention the chase for college admission that begins at kindergarten if not before.
Two new books may help to let out a little more air.
Bryan Caplan
and
Susan Wise Bauer
both engage in a radical questioning of 21st-century notions about education, though they come at the subject from different angles. Mr. Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, argues that most of the value of education—especially higher education—comes from “signaling,” not from the content of learning. As a result, Americans are “overeducated,” and it’s time to stop spending so much money (both private and public) on schools. By contrast, Ms. Bauer, an educator and former professor, offers a self-help manual for making school systems “flex” to a child’s needs and even for finding a path—and rationale—for opting out entirely.
“Put yourself in the shoes of a Martian sociologist,” Mr. Caplan writes in “The Case Against Education.” “Your mission: given our curriculum, make an educated guess about what our economy looks like.” You might well “leap from one erroneous inference to another.” Given the amount of time teachers spend on novels and poetry, for instance, there must be a “thriving market in literary criticism,” he writes, adding that most of the subjects that students try to master in school—from history and algebra to foreign languages—will be of little use in their salary-earning lives.
After surveying the research on the “transfer of learning,” Mr. Caplan concludes: “Students learn only the material you specifically teach them . . . if you’re lucky.” Generally, they don’t know how to transfer their reasoning from one topic to a related one. As to informal reasoning—the ability to come up with arguments for or against a particular proposition—education’s effect, he says, has been “tiny.” He similarly dispenses with the claim that schools teach common values or civic education. As college attendance has skyrocketed, he notes, voter turnout has declined.
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The Case Against Education
By Bryan Caplan
Princeton, 395 pages, $29.95
Rethinking School
By Susan Wise Bauer
Norton, 264 pages, $25.95
In light of all this, Mr. Caplan says that most of the people who attend college should not. It might well be better for them to go to vocational school, for instance, or take a learn-on-the-job approach. In any case, students need to ask whether the signaling aspects of education are worth it—whether a degree is worth the time and money it will take mainly to signal one’s suitability for a certain professional or social class. Unless you are a strong student, he suggests, you shouldn’t bother with college at all.
In “Rethinking School,” Ms. Bauer argues that parents should start questioning the value of our educational system from the first day of kindergarten. Even the idea that children of the same age should be put in the same grade—a proposition introduced by
Horace Mann
in the 1840s after he visited some German schools—is an absurd conceit, in Ms. Bauer’s view. Some children are more emotionally mature than others. If your child is struggling, you might want to “consider evaluation by a learning specialist. . . . But in many cases, a child who’s struggling simply needs the earth to circle the sun one more time.”
There are plenty of reasons, Ms. Bauer says, to be unhappy with what schools offer, from teachers who don’t have the knowledge (or time) to help students of different abilities to administrators unable to curb bad behavior in the classroom. She says that teachers hate parents who demand special attention for their children and then offers ways to butter them up. (Do research before meeting with them, volunteer to help in the classroom.) But ultimately, she observes, one shouldn’t assume that teachers will be on your side if your child is especially gifted or faces unusual difficulties.
So why bother? Now that every state permits home schooling, Ms. Bauer notes, there is no reason to put up with teachers or schools if they’re not working for your child. She was home-schooled herself, she tells us, and has home-schooled her own children. She makes the effort sound no harder than helping children with their homework each night—and it allows you to decide what subjects you want your children to learn. These may include the technical skills that will make them better able to find a job.
As for the longer term, Ms. Bauer says: “I beg you, for your child’s wellbeing, to let go of your elite college hopes.” Not only are the chances of getting in slim, but, she argues, it’s perfectly possible to get a good education at a “lousy” school. Or at no college at all. Ms. Bauer encouraged one of her sons to drop out of college when he didn’t seem to be enjoying it. Mr. Caplan, for his part, has done some home-schooling too and says that, while his elder two children are good students, he doesn’t know about the two younger ones. “If either turns out to be a C student, I will gently but emphatically advise them to find a full-time job right after high school.” There is something to be said for critics of higher education who are willing to follow their own advice.
Ms. Riley is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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