Steven Singer takes issue with a libertarian economist who thinks that education is a waste of time. His post is actually titled “Economists Don’t Know Crap About Education.” Actually, I know some economists who are very knowledgeable about education, such as Helen F. Ladd of Duke University.
Singer writes:
I hate to be blunt here, but economists need to shut the heck up.
Never has there been a group more concerned about the value of everything that was more incapable of determining anything’s true worth.
They boil everything down to numbers and data and never realize that the essence has evaporated away.
I’m sorry but every human interaction isn’t reducible to a monetary transaction. Every relationship isn’t an equation.
Some things are just intrinsically valuable. And that’s not some mystical statement of faith – it’s just what it means to be human.
Take education.
Economists love to pontificate on every aspect of the student experience – what’s most effective – what kinds of schools, which methods of assessment, teaching, curriculum, technology, etc. Seen through that lens, every tiny aspect of schooling becomes a cost analysis.
And, stupid us, we listen to them as if they had some monopoly on truth.
But what do you expect from a society that worships wealth? Just as money is our god, the economists are our clergy.
How else can you explain something as monumentally stupid as Bryan Caplan’s article published in the LA Times “What Students Know That Experts Don’t: School is All About Signaling, Not Skill-Building”?
Singer goes on to lacerate Bryan Caplan’s lack of knowledge or understanding about education. Why should someone with a Ph.D. tell us that education (his, for example) was a waste of time?
What Singer doesn’t stress is that Caplan is an economist at George Mason University, which is funded by the Koch brothers. Please read Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains,” and you will learn everything you need to know about the economics department at George Mason University, which is famous for ideas that involve privatizing Social Security, eliminating Medicare, and getting rid of almost every government function.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What economists know about the economy could fit in a thimble. I’m not sure there is a small enough vessel to hold their education knowledge.
{}
“Vacuous Container”
The empty set contains
The education knowledge
In economic brains
Developed at the college
Unfortunately, the problem of economists weighing in on things they know nothing about is not restricted to the area of education.
They have also done it in the area of climate science, for example, pretending to “teach” the real scientists that global warming is either not real or no big deal — when all they have really done is teach people what a bunch of ignorant fools they are.
Nor is it restricted to George Mason, by any means.
Several economists at (or formerly at) Harvard are also guilty, for example.
It’s actually very ironic that they criticize the teaching profession because the economic profession is a disgrace.
When you make a business out of education, you get a broken and corrupt mess. I’m not even going to call it a system, because that word implies that the thing works, we all know it doesn’t.
Excellent piece. Thanks, Steven Singer.
Education in this country as it exists now is indeed a waste of time. Thirteen years of life is spent to barely learn to read and to solve linear equations. All one needs to graduate is some math and some ELA. Physics, chemistry, biology, geography, astronomy, music theory, dancing are not only optionsl, they are simply not available in many schools. Even with math, one would be lucky to take calc in senior year. It is a joke, even in schools considered successful. His students are transformed with great literature? Splendid, but they should be able to read well enough after leaving elementary school. The whole curricula – which is not standardized across the country – can easily fit into eight years. Unless schools want to provide better education, high school can be made optional, replaced with vocational training.
Could the average high school graduate solve a simple system of linear equations? Could the average high school graduate add 1/5 + 1/3?
Jim,
A) You DONT know the answer to your question.
B) Habe you seen the typical 8th grade math test. Go to the NAEP test for 8th grade and see how many questions you can answer.
C) The character, courage, honor, intelligence, and citizenship displayed by the high school students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas persuades me that they are accomplished, amazing, and smarter than most of our elected officials.
Diane,
I went to https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/nqt and it crashed on me. Then I went to https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2013/#/sample-questions and selected 4 “advanced” (note the quotes) questions for 8th grade, rated 345, 348, 379, 396 with 333 being a cut-off for “advanced” level. Needless to say, all these problems are on 6th grade level at best, I solved all of them correctly. Their statistics says that less than a third of the students solved them, and the one where they had to enter data manually instead of selecting a pre-defined choice was answered correctly by only 2% of the students. Does not say much about the students nor about the level of the math they are presented as 8th grade math. The students are being duped into thinking they are being taught grade-level math, they are not.
John,
I have a Ph.D. In American history. I went to a very fine liberal arts college (didn’t study college math). I have a good career. I cannot solve the advanced 8th grade math problems on NAEP. Glad you can.
I can’t. I wonder how many legislators and governors can. Or cabinet members.
So?
Diane,
math classes are not just about math, they are about making connections, seeing patterns and making logical conclusions. The latter is of vital importance considering that logic is not taught as a separate subject at school. The lack of logic can be seen in the statements of many a statesman.
“College math” is another weasel term. As a proper subject, it does not exist. You may have Calculus or Analysis or Linear Algebra or Analytic Geometry or Functional Analysis or Theory of Probability or Statistics…. Same as “science” at school. Seriously? Is it the 17th century, are we practicing physics, chemistry and math blended together into some woodoo magic, using candle light and quill? Why my son is studying the dreaded water cycle for the third time since elementary school instead of being taught proper physics and chemistry?
Before figuring out where the problem is and what to do, one has to decide what is the purpose of the public school. Is it to teach scientific knowledge, is it to play in the school band, is it to become a football player, is it to become an “amazing human”? The changes, if any, must be done based on the goal.
Spending 13 years in an establishment that very much resemble prison – with fences and armed guards and K9 units – under a feeble pretense of becoming an amazing human – unless killed in the process – does not cut it for me.
JOHN Doe—be honest and write without a pseudonym.
The purpose of schooling is to prepare citizens to sustain our society and our democracy, and all that implies about personal responsibility, knowledge, character.
You are a new contributor to the blog.
Rule 1: if you insult me, you strike out.
It is my personal blog, not a public forum.
Mind your manners.
I feel you are seething. Seethe somewhere else.
Diane, yes I am seeting. I assumed that as a historian and a former policy-maker you might be interested in the opinions of the masses. I will try to restrain myself, I apologize if I offended you. Yes, it is your blog, so feel free to block my messages. I prefer using a pseudonym for various reasons, and I am not the only one here doing that.
Seethe all you wish but do not insult me as you are out of here.
A note to my friend with the funny name: go to a high school and get to know some kids. They are as diverse as the grains of sand in the desert. From afar they look all the same to you, I know. But their personality as individuals and as groups teaches you that they are wildly diverse. I have had students who could never understand what a linear equation was about, and those a who went on to use them in engineering careers. And I have found wisdom in both, stupidity in both, and humanity in all. This is what your mission should be. Look for the humanity in people. Sometimes it is hard to find, but it is our job as people. Otherwise we contribute to the next holocaust or the next Rohingia removal or maybe the Trail of Tears.
Not all economists are so terrible, as you said. My wife looked at all countries that have gone from poor subsistence to agriculture to modern wealthy economies. In every one of them, investment in education was a key. All of them, no exceptions. Investment in “human capital” is in fact crucial to long term economic growth. Here’s her book (from Cambridge U.P.) https://www.amazon.com/Success-Agricultural-Transformation-Means-Happen/dp/0521717698 Also other recent books on the importance of public investment, such as Concrete Economics and The Entrepreneurial State make similar points. There are economists our there doing very good, historically oriented work that contradict this kind of myopic look that these terrible economics do.
You are right, William. Unfortunately it seems that people seem to find it so much easier to fight black or white battles when threatened. The fact that most of us have little idea what economists do (when they are not meddling in education) doesn’t seem to bother us when we are making blanket statements condemning them. The difference seems to be that someone listens to them whether they know what they are talking about or not. Educators have trouble being listened to about their own profession.
You are correct, William. My friend, the retired economics prof at a local university, spends much of his time volunteering in Costa Rica where he helps people. I have never heard him say one bad word about education except that he does not think there is enough of it.
That said, Singer was trying to protest that everybody seems to know more about education than teachers, a phenomenon that upsets him.
That fatuous Caplan op-ed made my blood boil, so nice to see Singer critiquing it here. Caplan makes the ultimate knowledge-doesn’t-matter argument. Coursework is empty, he says. Its only value is in signaling to employers that you’re a good worker. How stupid! My coursework on Plato changed me profoundly. My coursework on Latin American History reshaped my view of the world. My coursework on Ptolemy and Galileo provided a template that prepares me to see how the whole world can be led to believe a false idea (e.g. how we all think we can teach reading comprehension skill –false! It’s not a teachable skill. E.D. Hirsch is our Galileo.)
Second that! It’s been killing me to keep seeing Caplan’s Corporate Libertarian nonsense so prominently displayed in the Times’ website for so long. Great thanks the the Gadfly on the Wall.
If reading comprehension is not a teachable skill, then why bother at all? Those who can comprehend, will do. Those who cannot, will not. Because reading and comprehending the written material is the most basic skill one can have. Having mastered it, one can learn almost anything. Well, one needs bodies to practice surgery and cars to practice being a mechanic, but one can at least learn about body parts or car parts from books. 8-grade students who barely read on 4th grade level are lost for high school. You said it yourself, teaching them is a pointless affair. Maybe they would do better in a vocational school.
There are plenty of people here that disagree with ponderosa’s beliefs about skill training. If that were so, my chosen profession as a special education teacher is really useless. That being said skill training without a content basis is equally impossible. However, people do not read automatically. We learn to speak generally without any intervention. We are hard wired for it. We are not hardwired to read. I have had plenty of students claim that they could read just fine who were barely literate. I have also had plenty of students whose knowledge of mathematical concepts stopped somewhere north of counting (but not too high). Content and the skills to use that content were equally important.
John Doe,
You fall into the same linguistic trap that most teachers do. They want kids to comprehend what they read. They coin the term “reading comprehension skill” and set about to teach it. But it’s not a skill the way juggling or drawing is a skill. Reading comprehension is the fruit of a complex mental process, the bulk of which is recognizing the words on the page and being able to construct a situational model of what’s going on. Thus a person’s reading comprehension varies depending on which word and world knowledge is pre-loaded in their heads. A famous study had “good” and “bad” readers read an article about baseball. The “bad” readers who played baseball understood it much better than the “good” readers who did not. See –background knowledge is the key. Thus, to teach reading comprehension one must load kids’ brains with world knowledge. The more one knows, the more likely it is that one will be able to comprehend any given text. The traditional way to provide this world knowledge is through a traditional liberal arts curriculum. History, science and literature classes expose kids to words and concepts they will never encounter on the playground. “Irrigation”, “tyranny” , “osmosis” and “Dickensian” enter their brains through such academics, and then serve them later in non-academic contexts. Sadly, in large part because of the reformers but also because of misguided ideas emanating from our education schools, many K-8 schools have abandoned this effective traditional approach in lieu of teaching and practicing metacognitive “reading skills” –little tricks like remembering to look for context clues –that have minor benefit, but also a giant opportunity cost: time spent practicing these tricks is time not spent on learning about the world and the words that describe it.
ponderosa,
obviously one cannot comprehend a word – oral or written – without knowing what it is about. But your parallel with baseball is preposterous in claiming that one needs visual, aural or physical contact with the subject to understand words about this subject. Are we talking about 3-yr olds or 12-yr olds? Are you going to explain tyranny by putting your kids on their knees for half an hour, are you going to burn one of your bad students to explain Medieval Inquisition, or are you going to explain irrigation by digging the school yard? I don’t think so. So you are going to explain it in words – new concepts explained based on existing concepts, this is how humans learn, and this is what makes us different from animals. Back to my point, all this can be done with books. You proved my point unintentionally by mentioning history, literature and science classes – that is, books. It is not a coincidence that the human progress sped up dramatically after inventing a printing press. Q.E.D.
John Doe,
You misunderstand me. I am not suggesting kids can only learn about the world through direct experience.
Ultimately you and I got to the point where we could read well enough to learn about the world through independent reading. Many adults and most kids are not at that point. How does one get to that point? One first needs to accrue a critical mass of vocabulary and world knowledge. Studies show you need to know about 90-95% of the words on the page to be able to read a text without comprehension breakdown. You would not have understood a Wall Street Journal op-ed when you were 5. Knowing how to decode letters and sounds is not enough. To get that critical mass of background knowledge that will launch us into reading competency, most of us depend heavily on oral transmission of word and world knowledge in our early years. Parents’ and teachers’ explaining stuff, read-alouds, educational videos, movies and TV build up a knowledge base of words and concepts that translates into improved reading ability. Even after one gains a measure of reading independence, good lectures and documentaries remain very efficient mechanisms for building that empowering knowledge base. Note that activities other than reading are strengthening reading ability. If you’re lucky to have educated parents and a content-rich elementary curriculum, one’s launch into competent independent reading happens fairly quickly. If one grows up in a vocabulary-poor household with little didactic instruction, and compound that with a content-free, skills-centric education, one may never get to the point where one can read widely with comprehension. Sadly I know many adults, even college graduates, who cannot understand a Dickens novel or even many magazines aimed at an educated general reader.
I actually agree with you that many of our school graduates are emerging fairly empty handed. I blame American schools’ extremely misguided rejection of a knowledge-based curriculum. Countries that teach more content get more competent and less ignorant citizens.
Ponderosa,
Did you listen to the Parkland students? They had evidence and knowledge. They are not empty handed or empty headed. I know you love Hirsch, but stop demeaning the students.
Diane, I said “many” not “all”. From what I’ve read, Parkland is an upper-middle class suburb where I’m sure there are many well-educated parents who ply their kids with rich vocabulary from a young age. I trust that many classes at Parkland were knowledge-rich too, especially AP classes. I am not demeaning any students. I am criticizing adults responsible for inflicting an educationally null curriculum on America; this is particularly acute at the K-5 level.
The median household income in Parkland in 2008 was $277,000 according to Wikipedia. The average home price was over $900,000.
If reading comprehension is not a teachable skill then isn’t it a waste of money to pay teachers to try to teach it?
Pond: if I remember Hirsch’s book that I read so long ago, his point was that comprehension had a relationship to knowledge gleaned from learning. Also that shared bits of knowledge was the basis for easy communication. I think this goes without saying and accept it a priori.
That said, the suggestion that we cannot introduce both knowledge and skills as a part of building both in school is the absurdity in Caplan’s suggestion that we dismember society by fragmenting education into a billion pieces. Seems to me the skills people need the knowledge people. What we do not need is the idea that anybody can do it by themselves.
Good summary of Hirsch’s early work. I highly recommend his latest book “Why Knowledge Matters”. It’s lucid, well-supported, erudite, interesting and very important.