Why do we need so much education?

Why do we place so much importance on institutional education, and look down on people who forgo it?

These days, students above a certain level of poverty are expected to gain a bachelors degree as the bare minimum. It's become normal to be 23 years old before you leave school and possibly enter the workforce on a full time basis. More than a quarter of your life expectancy has been focused on school.

Looking back, I don't really see what I retained from school that warranted the HUGE commitment it required. For the most part, I learned better through other means.

Then there were people who didn't want to learn. They did little but cause disruptions. The school tried to control them with punishments, which created a hostile environment all around. Plenty of them ended up dropping out anyway. Wouldn't they have been better served if they could have avoided all those years of misery and instead spent a short time learning a respectable trade skill? That would have let them support themselves while they tried to work out their problems.

People say that education is an investment for the future economy. We need to ask what kind of return we're getting on that investment. I'd bet most people could still do the jobs they're doing even if they chopped off years of schooling.

Other times, people say that education makes people better citizens. I'll grant that it can expose you to new ideas and philosophies, but you also have to look at what it takes away. People don't enter the 'real world' until well into adulthood, and so they are denied a wide range of experiences that could help them understand the world they live in and the problems they face. People grow up expecting every aspect of their life to be dictated to them from on high. Are these really the ideal citizens of a free society?

Finally, people often say that education is a way to escape poverty. Again, I have to question whether the benefit outweighs the cost. Mainly, I mean the burden that school responsibilities place on individuals. For every child who grows up to 'escape' their social class, there are many left behind. Those people would have been better served if they were allowed to devote their time and energy towards earning money for their family, building their community, or improving themselves in other ways.

Basically, I can't think of any benefit we get from the school system that we wouldn't get if we:

• Started later and/or finished earlier.
• Allowed people to leave even earlier.
• Recognized that other types of learning exist.
• Removed the stigma of a blue-collar career path.

edited 18th Nov '12 2:40:34 PM by Topazan

Almost everyone I know who works in public education has severe criticisms about the way things are run, and many of the problems are not recent but have been endemic in all of living memory. It seems to me the only way we can see reform is to lessen the burden on the system and open it up to competition.

A college education does come with some benefits. Namely, the assumption that you have all or at least most of:

• The indication you can be fairly self-reliant
• Showing you are capable of completing tasks independantly
• The ability to acquire and retain knowledge and put it to use in a semi-practical fashion
• A broader experience of the world
• A certain minimum ability at making yourself understood though text and speech

As to why it's needed, well, for most positions, it's really not. The number of people with a bachelor's degree has been rising every generation since WW 2, and since it was something simple and obvious that employers could look at and pre-judge prospective hires, it quickly went from "overqualified" to "looks good" to "absolutely necessary." Just as an example, there are a number of companies that hire Americans to teach English to children in countries like Japan or South Korea. Their only requirement is that you possess a bachelor's degree. No proficiency in the language of the country you're going to, no educational experience, not even a degree in education or language, or anything even related; the guy with a BA in Underwater Basket Weaving is, by their criteria, fully qualified to teach a bunch of junior high students how to talk like an American, but any number of people who are bi- or multi-lingual or have experience teaching or tutoring but lack a BA or BS don't meet the basic qualifications for employment.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Work experience does 4/5 of those things, and communication skills can be tested in other ways, surely.

The problem is people are embracing that trend instead of trying to reverse it. In the face of this 'education inflation', they just keep talking about more funding, more scholarships, etc. These things will give the students who receive them an advantage over those who have not, but recognizing their superfluousness would do the same.

I was one of those people. In China, my BA in anthropology made me an English teacher, although I actually can speak quite a bit of Chinese.

a BA in Anthropology is at least tangentally related, but how does someone with, say, a BA in European History qualify?

Work experience does grant that, but that means that the employee is going to be less productive/useful than an employee who walks in the door already knowing those things. Given the two, the company is going to hire the one who is going to make them the most profit.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

I have to start this by pointing out that we already have a thread about education reform. it's probably drifted to the second page or something because we ended up re-hashing points because no one new was coming in.

If by "opening up to competition" you mean "privatizing" that's been happening and has had a largely negative effect. The way we run it now burdens everyone unduly with debt and we'd be better off financially if we did it more like they do in Sweden and such. Taxing so we can fund people's college educations and preventing students from having crippling debt as they're starting out in life, whatever it is they choose to do with their college education.

Efforts to privatize education has done nothing but harm the education system. It is a service we should all have equal access to. And having a well educated populace is necessary simply for society to function (particularly as regards having a well informed VOTING public).

And yes, there are issues with our primary education. Doing what you suggested would be a horrible solution for a lot of reasons. Making education a commodity would only harm our students.

Very tangentially. People can gain experience working at a simple job for a couple of years before moving on.

Private education is one possible competitor to the public school system, but so is independent study, life experience, apprenticeship.

The mods made me trim down the post a little bit, so it may not be clear what I mean. I'm mainly talking about reducing the number of years we spend in school.

If you don't want people to be burdened with debt, don't make them get a wasteful institutional education that they don't need.

edited 18th Nov '12 5:04:22 PM by Topazan

Well, tertiary education works as an official recognition of what you've learnt: whether it be a profession (like a medical doctor or an engineer or scientist) or just something generic like "business management". Yes, work experience can provide the knowledge but there's no standard, ie two people with the same amount of work experience can have a big difference in terms of skills and knowledge. A person with a degree will actually mean that at least s/he knows the answers to at least 50% to the questions and problems involving a trade.

It does that, but it's horrendously inefficient at it. There has to be a better way.

People can still devote some study to their chosen profession, but it doesn't have to be so much, and it doesn't have to be so late in life.

No one makes anyone do anything. There's no law mandating that we get a college education, and quite a few people do, in fact, skip out on that. But generally a college education is, in fact, the way out of poverty, if they can get lucky enough not to accrue massive loan debt. Which Pell grants and the like help with.

I just don't think you've really thought through or understand what private schools can do to a person's pocket book. Really, the way to solve student debt problem is to go full on socialist here, which means taxing people in order to provide for people during their college years. Which has worked out damn well for northern Europe.

Note that this includes students who want to go to trade schools of the likes of De Vry. But privatizing what should be a public service is a terrible idea.

Uh, the late teens and early twenties aren't exactly late in life. That's the beginning for the vast majority of us.

edited 18th Nov '12 5:08:36 PM by AceofSpades

@ Topazan

However you've based your argument on the presumption that it is costly. The instant it has no out-of-pocket fees, half of your arguments disappear. I should also add, not everyone is like the USA and make post-secondary education a strict requirement for application. Work experience and personal projects are good enough if they can show you have the skills.

Yet, ironically, I'm quite sure everyone else in the West, beside the United States, have more powerful teacher unions, have less out-of-pocket fees for education (to the point of zero in many European countries) and have far higher post-secondary participation rates even though the work environments are less strict about education requirements.

But overall, life and society should be focused on quality. Why do you care you spend around 26% of an average lifespan on education? You find it is a hostile environment, I suggest changes to make it a better place to be. Academic institutions are there for you to learn new things and enrich your life. If all you are focused on is getting a job and earning money, you'll have a poor life no matter what.

edited 18th Nov '12 5:11:12 PM by breadloaf

I don't think you understand what this discussion is about. It's about scaling back education, not privatizing it. At all levels, not just college.

@breadloaf - First, see my response to Ace. School is costly even if you aren't paying fees because time is valuable.

Yes, changes like letting the people who don't want to be there leave. Knowledge is great, but you can learn things other places.

edited 18th Nov '12 5:16:05 PM by Topazan

The arguments you have made though involve privatizing it. That's what "competition" means in this case because the government doesn't compete against itself. It tries experimentations, like charter schools, but it doesn't compete against itself.

The competition comes from private sources, like the De Vry institute. "Scaling back" doesn't make much sense when things like graduate studies require years of education to do things like become doctors and lawyers, and other things like electrical engineers don't require as long to do such things.

Once you decide on something more complicated than the service industry you've dedicated yourself to a set number of years/months of staying in education field of your choice.

In fact, reducing "time" is rather a poor way to improve things. Making things more flexible as regards how long/when you spend in college is a better thing to do. And hey, look at what my community college offers. Flex terms!

At primary levels though I think we've got the right number of years. Kids DO NOT need to be entering the labor force, that's why we have child labor laws preventing that. School's the place for them. Improvements there need to be made by teachers, who know how to spend their time more effectively than whatever shit we've got going now.

edited 18th Nov '12 5:17:12 PM by AceofSpades

@ Topazan

I'm not clear on what you are trying to propose at all. The age of 23 is specifically that of post-secondary education. The age of 16 is the minimum age at which you can leave secondary education. It's called "dropping out" and it usually has disastrous consequences for those doing it. Every single statistic has shown that it's a incredibly bad decision made by people who don't understand the long-term consequences of stopping their education so early.

So what are you proposing to put into place here? We're shoving in 5000 years of human science and technology into the space of the first 18 years of your life, four of which were spent as you rolling about on the floor as a baby. Scaling back is not likely to be possible and still equip people with what they need to learn.

And what are these magical "other ways" to learn? Nearly all of them are either supplemental (personal projects) or post-secondary (taking on crap jobs, freelancing for experience, volunteering). Name what you are proposing so I can analyse it.

@Ace - Competition can come from anywhere. If nothing else, education can compete with no-education.

You're focused on college education. I'm also talking about primary education.

@breadloaf - The consequences of dropping out are not because school actually helps you learn things. Some of the consequences are imposed from the outside, like the social perception that institutional education is the only way to become competent. Other times, I suspect there's some correlation-causation confusion going on.

You're saying that:

• Everyone needs to learn "5000 years human science and technology".
• Anyone learns all of it.
• School is the only place to learn any of it.

There's nothing magical about other ways to learn. All of those things you mentioned sounded like fine examples.

edited 18th Nov '12 5:29:08 PM by Topazan

I don't know about you guys, but some of us are getting gouged like crazy by mechanics/plumbers/electricians who left school at 15.

And we will continue to get gouged by them because there's not that many of them coming up.

Those mechanics had to go through some sort of education (and their education involves hands on training to begin with, so experience comes as a matter of course) and then got their certification in order to do that kind of labor on their own. So yeah, those guys ended up continuing their education at some point. And lo, it paid off.

@Topozan: It's been documented heavily that high school drop outs do poorly in life. So yeah, it comes out in favor of "no education" being categorically inferior to "high school diploma" already. Cutting back on the amount of time spent in school is not the grand solution you think it is. There's symptoms of a bad system here, but it's a lot more complicated than "hey we spend a fuckload of time in here". You are thinking far, far too simplistically.

Yes, those mechanics had to learn their trade, but did they need 15 years of general education first? What if they started learning their trade at say, 13-14 instead of 18?

Education is important because society makes it so. I have to wonder how the people who did that study controlled for all the various factors that go into someone deciding to drop out in order to establish causation.

Agreed. But I doubt the OP is arguing for shorter time at school so that people can go on to become non-contributing members of society, so I imagine the trades are what was in mind? Unless I'm misunderstanding (which I very well might be).

I would argue yes. 15-year-olds are already fairly underwhelming as far as their understanding of the world is concerned.

I wonder if you've done that kind of research yourself, actually. Anyway, the way we do things is quite old, and it would do to update it. And not in the sense of letting people quit at thirteen. We'd be going backwards if what we did was start training kids to do mechanical work at eighteen. Again, I repeat that we have child labor laws for a damn reason. I suggest you look those up.

So yes. Yes we need fifteen years of education first.

So are 18 year olds. You can't really blame either for that, given the environment they lived in.

How much understanding of the world do you really need to learn a trade?

edited 18th Nov '12 5:43:59 PM by Topazan

Disagree. But a lot of it comes down to parenting/nurture, which is a tangential discussion at best.

I'm mixed on this. I get Topazan's point that perhaps at bachelor's level, society expects an educational standard from everyone and it's becoming burdensome. But at high school level, there needs to be a certain level of basic education so that you at least know what it's like to learn, develop work habits, and meet with other people. And of course, the careers that really need qualifications, such as doctors and professionals, should remain as they are.

edited 18th Nov '12 5:48:28 PM by Trivialis

First of all, the two are not directly correlated. Second, again, child labor laws. We're not going to start apprenticing thirteen year olds any time soon, so talking about reducing primary education is stupid. We'd basically just be letting a bunch of hormonal teens free on the world.

Also, to join in on a business or anything else really requires that someone be a legal adult. As in eighteen years of age. Anyone under that gets a shitty job like food service that doesn't pay much, because there's legal issues about hiring them for things more complicated than that. AND you can't hire a minor to be full time either, I believe.

So again, what the fuck do you suggest these newly loose kids do with their time? School's a good place to spend it.

I think it's relevant. One of the points I had to cut out in order to satisfy the mods was that many kids have severe problems at home that the school can't help them with. These problems frequently prevent them from getting what they're supposed to from school, so all compulsory attendance does is take up the time and energy they need at home, and delay their leaving home for a better environment where they can learn more easily.

How about we change the laws that keep them from finding gainful employment?

edited 18th Nov '12 5:51:37 PM by Topazan