It’s the end of summer, and it’s a slow news time, so the newspapers are dredging the bottom of the fecal lake for material, but this is ridiculous. How about Syria? Come on, that’s important stuff. Instead, though, we get op-eds like this one in the Globe and Mail from Zander Sherman, proposing a solution to a nonexistent education problem by making education worse.
His problem: there are too many educated people.
As an entry point for the middle class, our institutions of luminous knowledge have lost their efficacy.
This is an economic consequence of oversupplying the market with similarly educated labour. Too many graduates have the same qualifications, resulting in a loss of competitive edge in the workplace.
To stay relevant, students are reaching ever higher in the pursuit of more specialized degrees. It used to be that a high school certificate was all you needed to get a decent job. Now even a bachelor’s degree is often insufficient. In this credit inflation spiral, we have devalued both our labour market and the institutions we’ve relied on to populate it.
This is a strangely twisted view; it’s about using education as a tool to promote hierarchical stratification; “The more available and abundant something is,” he says, “the less it’s worth.” We should reduce the number of college graduates, because then the few will be worth more and get paid more…leaving unsaid the corollary, that more will be worth less and can be paid less. It’s a blatantly anti-egalitarian perspective.
Furthermore, it only looks at education from the economic side. There is a real problem, that too many look at college as a magic formula for a certificate, rather as a path to greater knowledge, and it’s fueled by cheesy exploitation — I’ve seen the late night TV ads touting ways to get your bachelor’s degree in 6 weeks! Part time! By mail! I’d like to see those outfits shut down cold, but they say nothing about a real education, in which you invest time and effort in learning. Education is a path to self-knowledge and broader understanding of the world around you. It makes you a better person and a wiser contributor to society.
And yes, if you must put it that way, it creates a more educated workforce that is better able to handle challenging new jobs. If your economy is built around serfs and laborers, I guess you wouldn’t need more education.
But Sherman, who was home-schooled, could use a little education himself. He completely distorts the history of education.
The link between school and work was connected in the mid-20th century by the president of the University of California. Clark Kerr envisioned a large middle class, and saw the postsecondary certificate as a way of achieving it. By influencing the Basic Educational Opportunity Act, Kerr effectively commoditized social mobility. If you could afford to go to college – or fill out the paperwork required for a bursary – you could effectively buy your ticket to the middle class.
But Kerr didn’t predict the perverse ramifications of such a decision. By putting degrees in the hands of anyone who could pay for them, he made the work those graduates performed less valuable. A measure that was designed to mobilize society has ground it to a standstill.
Oh, nonsense. The previous system was one in which you bought your degree: even now, those most prestigious institutions in our midst, the Harvards of America, have been and are finishing schools for the rich. You do literally buy your Harvard degree. But the University of California changes were to remove most financial barriers and make a college degree an actual measure of merit. You couldn’t just pay your way through, you actually had to earn passing grades in a curriculum to get a diploma at the end of it all.
Does it even make sense to declare that students were paying for their degrees when the whole point of the institutional changes was to make a college education as close to free as possible?
So far, Sherman is just stupid. But brace yourselves, he’s about to explain his fix for the problem.
The solution to our present predicament lies in the past. In medieval times, university attendance was extremely rare. This was at least partly because school environments were so hostile. Freshmen students spent every coin they had just to get in the door, at which point they endured a hazing ritual that included dagger attacks and assaults with buckets of scalding water.
Provided they reached their dormitories alive, students slept in dank quarters, awoke before sunrise, and attended lectures in the dark (where they memorized nearly everything they learned – paper was prohibitively expensive).
When it came time to demonstrate their knowledge, students were called upon to recite epic poems in both Latin and Greek, perform a variety of musical compositions on a variety of instruments, and then bow to the same panel of judges and examiners who had made their lives intolerable for the last several years.
It’s this model we should be adopting.
You know, I didn’t go into teaching because I’m secretely an afficionado of sadism. How do dagger attacks, living in misery, and memorizing epic poetry in Greek contribute to my goal of giving students knowledge of biology?
To turn this trend around, fewer people should be furthering their educations. With fewer people furthering their educations, value will be restored to the university degree. And with value restored to the degree, the workplace will function as it should: as a powerful, competitive meritocracy.
While a privileged few fret about the problems of philosophy, the rest of us will go happily unschooled, living student debt-free, making our own jobs, and being living exemplars of the age-old axiom that ignorance really is bliss. Rarefied in such a manner, we might then find that knowledge takes on a special luminosity.
Then, finally, we’ll have a truly enlightened society – just like in the Dark Ages.
That makes no sense. The university is already a competitive meritocracy — how does it improve that to throw up additional obstacles to entry? I can predict what those obstacles would be, too: money. The same as they already are. Something that has nothing to do with intellectual merit at all.
Sherman’s entire proposal is so insane and so irrational, yet so closely in alignment with what a good American Republican would endorse, that I at first thought it had to be some kind of clumsy attempt at Swiftian satire. So I dug a little deeper into this guy’s views…and discovered that he’s completely incapable of expressing himself with clarity and coherence. He has a book called The Curiosity of School, and I first tried browsing it for clues for what he really advocates. It was nearly impossible. Here’s a snippet from a Q&A, for example.
Were people better educated before the modern education system came into existence?
The case could be made that institutionalized education–what we’re now calling school–has negatively affected people’s sense of passion and wonderment. In The Curiosity of School I was less interested in making this argument myself and more interested in providing the means by which it could be made (along with plenty of other arguments) by other people.
Passion and wonderment are good things to encourage in school. But blaming the loss of those senses on modern institutionalized education (which definitely does have flaws) while praising the cruelty and rote memorizations of the scholastic system of the Dark Ages is bizarre. And he’s not interested in making an argument? What? So I read the preview of the book on Amazon to try and figure out what the hell he’s talking about (it’s a bad sign when you have to struggle so hard to understand a writer — lucidity is not Sherman’s strength). And yes, again, he starts out with a long section describing the horrors of a medieval school, and talks about the Prussian system of using education to shape students for the military, for instance, and then switches to a litany of terrible things that have been done in the modern school system and announces that that will be the focus of the book.
What a mess. Even without his silly op-ed, I’m able to read between the lines here.
And worst of all, he ends his introduction with a vacuity.
Finally, discerning readers will notice this book has no thesis. It doesn’t argue that school is bad, or that homeschooling is good, or any such similar thing. My intention is to simply present the story of school, and let you take away what you want.
Wait, that’s not an empty statement — it’s a lie. When you present a series of selective examples and distortions, when you focus on treating education negatively and call elitism a “meritocracy”, when you subtitle your book “the dark side of enlightenment”, you clearly do have a thesis — you’re just too great a coward to come out and state it openly.
