(2018-04-15) Zvi M The Case Against Education

Zvi Mowshowitz: The Case Against Education (Schooling).

This was originally going to be my review of Bryan Caplan’s excellent new book, The Case Against Education. I was going to go over lots of interesting points where our ways of thinking differ. Instead, the introduction got a little sidetracked, so that worthy post will have to wait a bit.

*First, we have the case against education.

As in: I See No Education Here.

Nassim Taleb considers this fact – that school is a prison – so obvious he tosses it out as an off-hand remark with no explanation.

Robin Hanson knows: School is to submit. Signal submission.

To get our children into slightly less dystopian prisons, we bid up adjacent housing and hire coaches and tutors to fill our kids’ every hour with the explicit aim of better test and admission results rather than knowledge.

I was intentionally taught to write badly and read badly

“Appreciation” classes turned me off music, art and literature.

what the hell are these things called ‘high schools’ and what are we doing to the children we put inside them?

Fraud. We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn. Or rather, we tried that, and they couldn’t even pretend to learn, so we resorted to massive fraud and plain old not even testing the kids at all. We pretend to teach, and we pretend they pretended to learn.

We don’t care if the kids can read, write or add. We care if they get credit for time served.

I have no idea how one can see this, and present a human capital model of school with a straight face

Bryan Caplan’s economist hat is permanently glued to his forehead. So he sees school not as a genocidal dystopian soul-crushing nightmare of universal incarceration, but merely a colossal waste of time and money.

Reading The Case Against Education is to watch Bryan think.

He acts like someone trying to discover how things work, sorting through what he knows and considering what the world would look like if it worked in different ways. You get a book about education, but you also get an education, where it counts – the question of how to think.

Bryan lives the virtue of local validity. This is super important; when Eliezer Yudkowsky calls it the key to sanity and civilization, he’s not kidding.

Time and again, Bryan finds that the signalling model of education fits the facts, and the human capital argument does not fit the facts. His arguments are convincing.

Bryan concludes that if you take what you’ve read and experienced and shut up and multiply, no matter how generous you are to school’s cause, you will find that social returns to schooling are remarkably terrible.

Bryan then bites quite the bullet: Most critics of our education system complain we aren’t spending our money in the right way, or that preachers in teachers’ clothing are leading our nation’s children down dark paths. While I semi-sympathize, these critics miss what I see as our educational system’s supreme defect: there’s way too much education.

He means there’s way too much formal education. I don’t think Bryan thinks people spend too little time learning about the world or acquiring skills! He thinks they do so via other, far superior paths, where they remember what they learn and what they learn is valuable.

People don’t know things. People need skills. It’s a problem. School doesn’t solve the problem, it exacerbates it.