No matter how many presidents spend ever
more on education, the situation gets worse.
President George W Bush had his ''No Child
Left Behind'' initiative. Now President Barack
Obama is promising more spending. Even if
approved, nothing will come out of it.
The
plans promise emphasis on testing and additional
funds for more programs and better teachers. These
are the same promises made for decades with no
visible results.
The solution involves
better selection of students and teachers -
and neither is in the plans.
A few factual reminders:
Governments have been meddling with education
in all Western countries, in some for centuries.
These countries have co-existing private and
public sectors for education.
Until the early 1970's the public school
system worked well in all these countries. In
France, the public schools actually provided far
better education than the private ones.
Underperforming students were thrown out of public
schools and sent to private ones.
Three decades later, the situation has
reversed itself. Public schools in France
encounter similar problems as their counterparts
in Canada and the US: a drastic decrease in the
quality of teaching and in the knowledge of
students.
The issue thus cannot
simplistically be ''private'' versus ''public''
education. Something else must be considered.
Until the 1970s most teachers were
talented, hard-working and dedicated women. Women
had few alternatives in the workplace other than
nursing. Other occupations were closed to them,
especially the professions.
So, women
became teachers and nurses. Having a large pool of
talented, confined women meant that society did
not have to pay too much for filling such jobs.
Women's liberation ended these
arrangements. The outflow of talent did not happen
overnight. Many women dedicated to teaching never
left the field. However, fewer of the best ones
remained, leading to a gradual decline in the
quality of teaching.
Had schools been
privatized as women's liberation unfolded,
entrepreneurs would have likely taken charge of
the sector. Many would probably have been women,
since they knew the 'business' of education. They
would have long ago broken ''glass ceilings''.
This, of course, did not happen. Instead,
regulations, government, and unions arose to
mandate pay and they introduced bureaucratic
criteria for advancement. They also re-wrote
curriculums, established grading standards, and
commissioned ''innovative'' papers about theories
of education.
The end result has been that
students in Western countries (and the US is no
exception) ended up knowing less arithmetic and
displayed fewer reading skills than students in
other countries that allocated far less money to
education.
The resulting self-selection of
teachers is also reflected in the declining
discipline and respect in classroom.
Respect diminishes not because teachers
earn less than skilled craftsmen. It declines
because smarter students can quickly recognize the
mediocrity of most teachers and textbooks. They
become bored.
The other part of the
''selection'' problem is the requirement that kids
must stay in school for as long as possible. That
is true even if they are neither smart enough nor
motivated. Yet keeping them in schools only makes
a mockery of educational statistics.
School bureaucracies measure
''achievement'' by passing statistics and grades.
They get many graduates who do not know much.
Matriculation has long stopped signaling
identification of smarter, harder working, more
ambitious kids. Gradually, most universities
became no better at selection.
Yet, the
older the children, the more important selection
becomes. The best universities do not differ so
much from the second and third tier ones because
of the knowledge of their professors or the
content of instruction that they deliver. The
quality of students makes the difference.
A bunch of brilliant kids in a classroom,
who ask great questions and who work and debate
with each other, will end up doing great stuff
despite an average professor.
But mediocre
students, even with the most brilliant professor,
will stay mediocre. It does not matter how much he
or she would try to tell them ''to think out of
the box.''
This does not mean that
mediocre students would not perform very well
under a great entrepreneur. It only means that
selecting better teachers without selecting better
students will not produce desired results that
were common before 1970.
Without better
selection at all levels of education, spending
more money on education will not be a worthy
''investment.'' It will only produce waste, and
meaningless papers; that is, diplomas.
There is nothing new about this
observation. As Swift wrote, Gulliver goes to the
country of Laputa and finds the country is in
ruin. Yet the professors and their students work
on ''how to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers!''
A better selection of students would not
only raise the level of education, but also allow
them to complete undergraduate studies in 15 years
instead of 16. Or at community colleges, they
could finish in thirteen rather than fourteen
years.
The indirect benefits from the
additional savings from this one year of education
would help mend more quickly the damaged balance
sheets of the United States and other Western
countries by increasing the percentage of working
versus non-working population.
It may also
be a partial solution to the Social Security
problem and other entitlements. Also, the better
selection would bring about greater discipline and
responsibility in all spheres of life.
The
era following World War II through the 1990's were
happy years for the youth of most Western
countries. They were insulated from competition by
tens of millions of promising youngsters in
underdeveloped countries.
This era has
ended.
After losing a significant portion
of their wealth, the middle class is now squeezed
by the high cost of education. They are
questioning the validity of such spending as
''investment.'' And they should.
Reuven Brenner hold the Repap
Chair at McGill's Desautels Faculty of
Management.
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