Schools Are Not Education

Ah! The advanced degree holder: these intellectual gladiators have fought valiantly through years of rigorous study, sleepless nights, and enough caffeine to power a small nation. While their accomplishments are commendable, one has to wonder: have they perhaps left their common sense at the door of the lecture hall?

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but I think that the cultural value attributed to a formal education is solely based on how relatively easy it is to describe, and very little to do with any actual merit. Let me be clear: I value education very highly, but I just don't place as much value on "school".

Personally, I don't have a degree - of any sort - or any form of post-secondary academic credentials. To paraphrase a quote about Churchill, "I didn't go 'through' high school, I went under it", and instead of moving on to college as most of my friends did, I chickened out and enlisted in the Marine Corps. Yet, despite my lack of a "formal" post-secondary education (outside of the military), I often encounter folks with advanced degrees (e.g., a Masters, or a PhD, sometimes multiple degrees) who 'rest on their laurels' and boast about their academic credentials with all of the bravado of an entitled third grader, yet also seem to have the actual intelligence of a carrot.

Granted that advanced degree holders and I do have a few things in common. For instance, we both have the social skills of a potato. For me, it's the 'tism, but for them, after years of studying alone in libraries and labs, they’ve forgotten basic conversational norms. You can usually spot us at parties (if we ever go to a party). We're the ones backed into a corner earnestly explaining a subject no one else cares about to a houseplant while the rest of the guests are talking about the latest TikTok trends.

Candidates of every stripe and party consistently whine that "our public schools are failing our children", but usually point out differing symptoms (depending on their party ideology) instead of any real cause. Perhaps Carl Sagan said it best:

"My experience is, you go talk to kindergarteners or first-graders, and you find a classroom full of science enthusiasts. And they ask deep questions: 'what is a dream?', 'why do we have toes?', 'why is the moon round?', 'what is the birthday of the world?', 'why is the grass green?' These are profound, important questions, and they just bubble right out of them. You go talk to twelfth-grade students and there's none of that. They've become leaden and incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and twelfth grade, and it's not puberty." - 30-Jan-1995 [YouTube Video Clip]

Sagan doesn't offer a reason as to why our schools have been failing for so long but applying the principle of Occam's Razor that "all things being equal, the simplest answer tends to be correct", it seems to me that the responsibility for this failure should rest squarely on the shoulders of the schools' single common denominator: the various levels of government.

A Libertarian Perspective

I get it. Libertarians like me are often accused of opposing public education merely as an extension of our generalized distrust of the government, but our antipathy in this area involves so much more than that. As educators, as parents, as former (and current) students, and as employees, we have watched as our public schools waste resources, traumatize students, frustrate families, and generally fail us. And it only becomes worse as the years pass and as more money is poured into the system as a supposed panacea for its inadequacies. So, it stands to reason that those of us who don't trust the government to manage our healthcare, or our money systems might also have an issue with trusting the government to educate our children, or with political marionettes arrogantly assuring us that they know exactly how best to meet the educational needs of every child. Teachers and administrators in public schools are often forced to "teach to the test" which provides useable metrics like relative intelligence and academic ability, but rarely fosters a student's drive or social skills.

Here’s a suggestion: how about we start treating high school students more like the adults that we want them to become instead of the "enemies of the state" as they are so often portrayed? Most 14–15-year-olds already have at least an idea of a career that they might want to pursue, so instead of insisting that all students must follow the same secondary educational track regardless of their personal interests, offer them an educational track that teaches them what they need to know to help them enhance those interests and excel in that field.

In my opinion (for what that may be worth), one answer to the question of "how do we best serve our students?" is not more state control, but more innovation. As we saw during the 2020 pandemic, alternative education solutions are readily available and convenient for many students. These "outside of the box" solutions using modern technology and innovative approaches to education can save money and provide more prosperous and diverse educational opportunities to different types of students. Perhaps this will also offer a larger selection of elective (perhaps college prep) courses for their final two years of high school, or allow them to choose a trade, intern, or apprenticeship program.

Will these ideas work? I have no idea. I'm not an educator or an education administrator: I am only an analyst. I've mastered several areas of obscure knowledge, but I still can’t change a light bulb without consulting three different YouTube tutorials. But looking at the solutions proposed and implemented by Old Party legislators over the past few decades since I attended public school - policies which are arguably failing our students and our society in general - I'm willing to try something a little "outside of the classroom". Are you?