I am quite unqualified to review Bryan Caplan’s blockbuster The Case Against Education, by virtue of the fact that I have not (yet) found time to read all of it. But I think I have a pretty good idea what’s in it, and an even better idea of what others are saying is in it. So this will be a review not of Bryan’s book, but of the various paraphrases that are floating around the internet. Those paraphrases might or might not be accurate representations of Bryan’s thinking, but they deserve to be treated as arguments in their own right. So this will be a review of those arguments.
Argument 1: The Argument From Uselessness. The argument tends to run something like this:
Except in a very small number of careers, nobody ever solves a quadratic equation on the job. Therefore the fact that schools require everyone to study quadratic equations is a waste of time and effort.
It is true that except in a very small number of careers, nobody ever solves a quadratic equation on the job. It is also true that no professional athlete ever does a pushup on the playing field. Does it follow that for professional athletes, pushups are a waste of time and effort?
I expect that even Bryan will agree that a great many people occasionally need to solve linear equations, in the pursuit of answers to questions like “How long till my cab runs out of gas?”. So we teach them that. Then we can do one of two things: We can stop there, or we can encourage them to think about whether there are any other equations we might be able to solve. The instinct to push on a little farther is a valuable asset, and one that it’s possible to cultivate.
A good teacher might now proceed as follows:
1) Invite students to try to invent a method that will work for other polynomial equations. Watch them fail.
2) Suggest that they restrict their attention to quadratics. Lesson learned: If the problem is too big, narrow it down and try again.
3) Watch them fail again. Eventually, either lead them to discover the technique of completing the square, or just present it to them. This is a pretty out-of-the-box idea, but it totally works. Lesson learned: Think outside the box.
4) Practice solving a bunch of equations by completing the square. Watch the students get good at finding roots for 14x2+x-4 or 6x2+13x+6.
5) Suggest that instead of having to solve each quadratic equation separately, we can use the same technique to solve all of them at the same time by completing the square in Ax2+Bx+C, and watching the quadratic formula fall out. Lesson learned: Abstraction is a great labor-saving device. You can keep doing the same thing over and over in the same way, or you can do a generalized version of that thing just once, memorize the answer, and use it forever.
Those are some pretty good lessons. Like pushups, they are damned good practice for a whole lot of practical on-the-job activities.
Now you might, perhaps, argue that students could learn the same lessons in a more useful context, say by building robots instead of solving equations. I doubt it. We’ve already agreed that we want our students to solve linear equations. Once we’ve taught them that, we can either plow on to the next level or stop dead in the water. The latter teaches a truly terrible lesson, namely: Don’t be curious.
Or, you might argue that although we can teach the quadratic formula, we can’t teach habits of thinking — students either come by those habits naturally or not at all. That, I think, is patently absurd. We learn to think by watching others think. We learn to move from the particular to the general by watching others move from the particular to the general.
Or you might argue that the quadratic formula is not always taught this way. Sometimes it’s just presented as a formula to memorize, with no particular context or motivation. And from this the students gain relatively little. I agree. It’s also true that some physical trainers do a really really bad job of teaching the proper form for a pushup. I still don’t want to conclude that athletes don’t need pushups.
Argument 2: If knowledge is so valuable, why doesn’t anyone steal it? The argument here is that people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend classes at Harvard, even though nothing stops a non-matriculated (and non-paying) student from sitting in on exactly the same courses. This suggests that students value not the knowledge, but the credential. And “therefore” we can conclude that classes are not really about conveying knowledge — they’re about proving to the world that you’re the sort of person who can sit still in a classroom week after week.
But there’s a reason I put those scare-quotes around the word “therefore”. Here’s a perfectly reasonable alternative conclusion: Harvard students learn a lot in their classes and are willing to pay a high price for the package that consists of both the knowledge itself and a certification that they’ve acquired that knowledge.
Great products fail all the time because they’re not properly advertised. In those cases, it makes sense for the seller to pay a high price for advertising. (And it can also make sense to forgo creating the great product in the first place if you think you won’t be able to advertise it.) A Harvard education might be a great product that has little value until it’s advertised with a sheepskin. It can still be a great product.
Argument 3: The Argument from Snow Days. According to this argument, students cheer when school is canceled. But a day off diminishes their knowledge acquisition without diminishing their credential acquisition; therefore it must be the credentials, not the knowledge, that they really care about.
Anybody who makes this argument has probably never tried putting a hot fudge sundae in front of a dieter. Frequently, the dieter is grateful for the sundae. Does that mean that dieters don’t care about their diets?
No, it means that human beings are complicated. It’s very convenient, and often entirely appropriate, for economists to model people as having well-defined preference orderings, even while acknowledging that communities of people have no such thing. But sometimes it’s important to recognize that individual people have no such thing either. There’s a whole community of agents vying for power in your brain. Some want you to count calories; others are delighted by a hot fudge sundae. Sometimes the latter grab the mike and yell “Hooray for sundaes!”.
It’s perfectly possible for schools to convey valuable knowledge, for students most of the time to want that knowledge, even when it comes at the cost of considerable effort, and for students some of the time (when different parts of their psyche sieze control) to be gleeful at an opportunity to subvert that purpose.
Argument 4: The Sheepskin Effect. It is alleged that students with four years of college earn far more than students with three and a half years of college — and that the difference is too large to be plausibly explained by an extra semester’s worth of knowledge acquisition. Therefore those who graduate must be receiving rewards for something other than knowledge acquisition. The most plausible “something” is the stamina to stick things out to the end, which is a quality that schools can certify but cannot create.
The logic here is hard to dispute. But experts (who I won’t name without permission) have told me that the evidence for the sheepskin effect is much less compelling than is being widely reported. I have not investigated this further and am therefore officially agnostic.
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None of the above should be seen as an endorsement of the current system of education, or even as a dissent from any of Bryan’s policy recommendations. It is an attempt to look with a critical eye at some of the arguments that are currently being bandied around, often with loose (or sometimes un-loose) attributions to Bryan. I chose them to respond to because they happen to be the argument I keep stumbling across.
