School is a waste of time. It’s boring. It’s hard. It’s just not fun.
This is an argument that most people have probably made at one time or another. Perhaps it was a rationalization used to convince our parents to skip a day of third grade. Maybe it’s the gripe of a college student tired of writing papers. Very rarely, however, is it something we hear from adults. Parents and teachers usually tell us that school is essential, that our futures depend on us receiving an education.
Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, says otherwise.
Education, he argues, is largely unnecessary, and the things learned in school often have very little value in the work force. Students who are required to study arts and literature that end up becoming doctors have wasted a significant portion of their education studying something they don’t need to know. Students who are required to study calculus and physics and then become musicians have wasted time learning information that does not develop their skills.
This is typical of American education. From the beginning, students are indoctrinated, pressured to succeed, to conform to arbitrary standards of excellence. Children are taught a myriad of subjects, most of which have no practical application. They are put into classrooms based on age, not ability — a model which is duplicated nowhere else in society, particularly not in the workforce where people are hired based on credentials rather than their year of birth.
The Roman rhetorician Quintilian believed that “education should be based on the stages of individual development from childhood to adulthood.” The American educational system neglects the individual needs of the student. By the time these students grow up and enter the work force, they know how to take tests and do what they’re told, but this does little to prepare them for work.
As Caplan points out, education is primarily about “hoop jumping.”
It starts in grade school where children are forced to learn everything from music to math to history. By high school, a time when you would expect to a student to have a basic grasp of fundamental subjects, the work merely grows harder. In college, a time when students are choosing a field of study to specialize in, college requirements yet again force them to study completely unrelated subjects in order to graduate.
Why then, after twelve years of education, do so many of us decide to go on to college and after that graduate school? More students are going to college than every before, despite rising tuition costs and a weak economy.
The answer is signaling. By holding a degree, you are telling prospective employers that you’re educated, smart, and dedicated. It doesn’t matter if you actually learned anything in school. Having that slip of paper theoretically makes you more employable.
Yet so much education does not make us better qualified. In fact, it may make us less qualified.
Caplan uses Germany as an example. By the age of 14, German children focus less on formal education and begin apprenticeships. This is four years sooner than most Americans declare a specialization in college. In narrowing down a field of study at a younger age, these students become more knowledgeable about their field.
This, combined with the fact that more people are earning degrees, means that higher education isn’t as valuable as we are led to believe. Schooling does not do enough to truly educate students and prepare them for work. Instead, it distracts students from learning critical skills that would better benefit them.
Clearly, there needs to be a change, not just in the education system but in how we perceive the importance of education. In a weak economy with the cost of a college education at an all-time high, this is particularly relevant. At the Fifth International Students For Liberty Conference last month, Alumnus of the Year Peter Thiel delivered a keynote speech in which he warned students about the education bubble.
Formal education isn’t worthless, but don’t overestimate its value. There is a quotation attributed to Mark Twain which students and alumni alike should bear in mind:
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
