Positive Liberty

Oh, what the hell. I’m a low-level public intellectual, so I get to say crazy stuff like this.

Education is overrated. Not just the BA, which Charles Murray rightly critiques at Cato Unbound. It’s worse than that. Education itself is overrated. For a wide variety of reasons, it can’t possibly be as important as we think.

Murray came to the Cato Institute a couple of weeks ago for a discussion of his new book, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. Christopher Nelson, president of St. John’s College, spent much time agreeing with him on the value of the classical curriculum, at least for the cognitive elite.

I’m less inclined to agree. Although I adore the classical curriculum, I feel I’ve also learned one of its harshest lessons: Education doesn’t produce virtue. Nor, for that matter, is it especially good at producing wealth — at least not compared to division of labor, specialization, and trade, which together make a general education relatively less valuable, while rewarding the individual who finds extraordinary (though often quirky) innovations.

It should be pretty clear by now that education doesn’t produce virtue. All of the most awful events of the twentieth century were the creations of educated men. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot were all products of higher education. Weimar Germany was if anything the most urbane and educated place in the world at the time. I don’t mean that any of these mass slaughters would have been avoided without education, but I do mean that education clearly doesn’t seem to have stopped them — not even a highly educated society could do that.

That’s because what education really produces are elites — well-connected, sophisticated people who know how to tailor their messages to many different interest groups, to modulate their appeal depending on the situation, and to communicate in several different registers and languages. In other words, they know how to schmooze. None of this makes the elite morally better than their educational inferiors. And it’s a little puzzling to me to think that this idea is ever seriously believed, what with the spectacle that the elites have put on for everyone else in the last century or so.

Education, particularly higher education, only reliably produces social elites. And they become social elites because of their power to convince. But social elites are not necessarily what we need to improve material well-being. Indeed, the figure of the socially elite individual who has come to believe that he knows the job of the specialist better than even the specialist himself, and who therefore feels he has every moral right to restructure a given sector of society — well, this figure is the great enemy of human progress as I understand it.

And the great friend of human progress? The ability to divide labor, to specialize, and to realize gains from trade. The ability, in other words, to be an entrepreneur in whatever field one can succeed in. This ability sometimes requires strikingly little education, and rarely, I think, does it require particularly good schmoozing skills. (Certainly the correlation between “education” and “political elite” seems stronger than the correlation between “education” and “self-made millionaire.” But I’m not aware that anyone has done empirical work here.)

Entrepreneurship has been defined as alertness to hitherto undiscovered opportunities. An army of networking message-tailors is not obviously more fit to accomplish this. Technical skills are required, but technical skills need not come from our traditional educational system. They often come from on-the-job training, from self-teaching, and from plain dumb luck. Productivity returns on planned research and development are lower, and take longer to materialize, than most people generally think. It’s the unplanned stuff that’s interesting, and unplanned breakthroughs are terribly hard to produce using a standardized educational curriculum.

It’s also not clear to me that a failing education system — funny how our education system is always failing — means social collapse. Everyone is aware of this supposed fact. And yet if it did produce social collapse, our society surely would have collapsed already. Wouldn’t it? If we accept the premises that America’s schools are failing, that they have been for years, and that America is still not all that terrible a place to live, we have to wonder about how important education really is to begin with.

Now the premises may be wrong: America’s schools might not really be failing in any meaningful sense. Or perhaps America is worse off than we realize, or maybe we just haven’t felt the full effects of what educational failure is eventually going to do to us. But I tend to be skeptical of people who think the sky is about to fall, whatever their reasons may be.

No, I’m not making a populist, anti-education argument. I’m issuing a caution, and a caution to which I’m not completely sure I really want to stake even my low-level reputation on. I’m curious what you think. That’s all. Pretty much always is.

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