education

The value of education and the means of improving it has been on my mind quite a bit recently. The two biggest reasons are that NJ is approaching the age where we have to start planning for pre-school and kindergarten and the other is that I have been getting a bit jaded about higher education over the last few years. As is my wont, I am approaching this through a series of disjointed observations and opinions.

Choice

I don't think that there is a right choice for all kids regarding whether they do public schooling, private schooling, homeschooling, or online learning. They all have very distinct advantages and disadvantages, and so that makes the choice a situational thing more than anything else. A lot of people seem to judge others based on the educational choices that they make for their kids. I am not looking forward to that.

Improving Education

Many Republicans want testing in schools and performance-based pay for teachers. Many Democrats want higher wages for teachers and longer school years. Honestly, I think that all of these are red herring options that only make it look like the politicians are fixing something. They all sound great at first blush but every one of the options introduces perverse incentives, solves the wrong problem, or both.

The way I see it none of the traditional steps that politicians take to fix school systems addresses the main problem, which is that people who do not want to learn will not learn. By my observation, the greatest failure of the American educational system is that it drives kids to apathy of the world around them rather than to a love of learning. Going into too much more depth is beyond the scope of this post, but I have identified three causes that drive kids to apathy. The first is that most people do not learn the best in a classroom structure, so forcing kids to sit in a classroom environment every day for hours makes something that is already boring feel futile as well. The second is that kids who have a love of learning are tagged as nerds, so it is actually cooler to not try to learn and to be educationally deficient. The third is that kids who don't feel safe in school are not likely to enjoy being there, so things like social bullying should be taken much more seriously than they generally are.

Another thought regarding improving the educational system is that maybe personal finance should be a required course. I know, it's not like we are going through a horrific recession fueled by excessive debt accrued by people who should not have been approved for the debt in the first place.

Classism and an Inefficient Economy

I really do understand the value of education. I should. I have nearly twenty solid years of education under my belt. That being said, I believe that the focus on education over other forms of learning and knowledge in today's society serves both to re-enforce the class structure and as a drag on the economy. Let me explain.

First, the requirement of a degree to work in, or be taken seriously in, a business environment favors those people who come from families with means. Someone from a below-median wage-earning family who is not awarded many scholarships will probably graduate with significant student loan debt. I can attest from my own experience that few things are more destructive to building a strong financial foundation in a person's twenties, when doing so is the most important, than paying hundreds of dollars every month to Sallie Mae for years on end. The median student loan debt for graduates with BA degrees in 2007-2008 was $17,700. This is significant because the median is not a measure that weights people extremely high levels of student loan debt like the mean would. So, while education itself is not withheld from the poorer masses, the requirement of an education forces those without means into a debt trap that will be destructive to many graduates' net earning power for many years to come. For many, this will also damage their ability to retire since they were paying off debt rather than saving for retirement.

Second, I believe that the focus our culture places on the time spent in education is a drag on the economy as a whole because it leads to inefficient uses of capital that could be better improving the work force. There is a concept called Parkinson's Law which states that work expands to fill the time allowed for completion of that work. Likewise, if those who establish the rules for the educational system decide that four years of schooling is a good time requirement for a bachelor's degree then the degree programs will backfill to meet that arbitrary length of time. Greater thought should be put into making degree programs more efficient and not just require a certain number of classes for the sake of having a certain number of classes. The only reason this system is allowed to exist in this state is that those who make the decisions regarding how the system should be structured also benefit from requiring students to take more classes.

Frankly, I believe that the best way to improve the American work force is, for the types of jobs where this makes sense, focus many more educational resources on apprenticeships and consider restructuring many degree programs to heavily focus on internships/apprenticeships over other elective work. On-the-job training is almost always better than in-the-class training.

Future of Education

The future in nearly every industry is some sort of automation and increased economy of scale. I have said as much already (prediction #10). The same will be true for education as well, though I think it will take a different face. This isn't much of a prediction since it is already starting, but a very serious shift to online schooling at all levels is inevitable. If an online class can cut overhead by allowing thousands of students to attend the same class and assignments automatically graded or graded by lowly-paid TAs, then that school can theoretically offer the same education that a traditional institution does at a lower price. None of this requires technology that does not exist right now, either. Because of this, I actually suspect that the ever-increasing cost of higher education will drop below the level of inflation some time in the near future.

I do not think that traditional elementary and high schools will go the way of the dinosaur and completely disappear. I do believe that they will go the way of the condor, though, and be thinned out. Simply out of necessity one of the main purposes of schools today is to have somewhere for kids to be while parents are working. Most parents are not going to have the choice of keeping the kids at home if they have to work to put food on the table. I think, however, that school districts will learn that teaching kids online is cheaper than teaching them in the classroom and so they will start offering parents incentives keep the kids at home and learn online. This will encourage many of those who have the flexibility to either work from home or quit their jobs and stay at home while the kids do their learning online.

Ultimately, the strongest attacks against online schooling, at least for the elementary through high school level, will be the same that are leveled against home schooling. The argument will be that kids need social time. What will probably happen to keep that from being an issue is that most kids will go through some sort of hybrid program where they learn online certain days of the week and they come into class certain days of the week. Like everything here, though, this is speculation.

Conclusion

Wherever the bright young minds are today is going to be where the innovative adult minds are in a few years. The school system's main goal should be, then, to keep those who have a love of learning from dimming into apathy. This will have to be done in a changing environment where people will learn as much through an Internet connection as they do in a classroom. It's a challenging proposition to say the least, but I am actually optimistic that it will go mostly well.