‘I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.’
– Ray Bradbury, author and screenwriter
Self-motivated autodidacts like Bradbury probably remember much of what they learn, especially if it’s directed toward a goal. On the other hand, any person on the wrong side of 40 will look at you quizzically if you ask them this question: ‘Do you remember most of what you learned in high school? Like calculus, probability theory, the customs of a remote tribe in Africa, or organic chemistry?’
Four hundred years ago, an apothecary who learned how to read and write at 15, would not dare have forgotten it by 30. A warrior who learned sword fighting at 16 would most likely be better at it at 26. During the Renaissance, even the most cognitive elite did not receive 12, let alone 16 years, of an extended general education, prior to a training tailored to a specific occupation.
But governments today spend an increasing portion of GDP toward ‘educating’ their citizens. They are also making low-interest or interest-free loans for undertaking a college education, instead of private lenders in the market making an assessment of the student’s commitment and prospects for a relevant job.
The expansion of general education into an inflexible K-12 system is a global phenomenon. This move toward a lengthy, one-size-fits-all, broad-based schooling, and today, in 135 countries, compulsory, is hailed as progressivism’s greatest achievement. This is ‘social engineering’ – the use of centralised planning to manage social change and regulate the future development of a society.
But is it a wise move? To answer that, we must first ask two foundational questions:
What is the quintessential nature of human knowledge?
What is the purpose of ‘general’ education prior to tailoring it for a vocation?
The answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first.
The Nature of Human Knowledge
Knowledge is an edifice of integrated and interconnected abstractions.
All human knowledge is built upon concepts. Concepts allow an innumerable number of concretes to be subsumed by a categorisation. Integration across concepts facilitates more complex hypotheses, discoveries, and inventions. This storage of knowledge in abstractions means subsequent generations can stand on the shoulders of predecessors, that is, absorb, relatively quickly, knowledge already established within the human species. Scientific progress would be impossible if each generation started afresh with a blank slate. (For an eloquent exposition of the theory of knowledge, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand).
What a general education ought to do, therefore, is to encourage and reward a conceptual way of thinking. We want a general education to impart some foundational knowledge, but, in the main, inculcate a skill in logical and creative thinking in the process of acquiring this foundation. Once that’s done, children are ready to be individuated, and search inward for their passion and outward for which of their talents work best in the external world to earn a living.
We May All Be More Gifted Than We Think We Are
Seth was seven when he announced that he wanted to be a military archaeologist. At 12, he became a freshman at Faulkner University, doing what he loved. Keith, 14, is already a college senior, studying finite mathematics. Hannah passed her college entrance exams at 12, and, at 17, became Auburn University Montgomery’s youngest ever graduate, with a B.S. in mathematics. She then obtained master’s degrees in mathematics and mechanical engineering, and was designing spacecraft by age 22.
Seth, Keith, and Hannah are siblings. They are part of ten siblings – four of whom are still under ten, while each of the other six began college by 12.
Gifted children? Maybe not.
The parents insist that none of the children are gifted. The mother studied nursing but became a stay-at-home mother, while the father didn’t graduate till he was 25. They insist none of the twelve (the parents plus the ten children) are brilliant.
The secret?
The family ‘credit their achievements to homeschooling’ and a strong focus on finding and celebrating their passions. Australian research inferred that homeschooled children scored ‘significantly above the overall NSW [state] average in nearly every test. The differences were largest in reading, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy’.
But, in fact, the secret is not homeschooling per se. The elixir lies in motivation and the inculcation of a conceptual mentality, which any schooling program, including state-sponsored ones, can use, but often don’t. We shall shortly see why.
Motivation
Researching human motivation has been the career focus, for several decades, of academic psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci. Their theory of motivation is called Self Determination Theory (SDT). ‘[It] begins with the assumption that people are active organisms, with evolved tendencies toward growing, mastering ambient challenges, and integrating new experiences into a coherent sense of self.’ Ryan and Deci postulate that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are key psychological needs of the evolved human organism. Relatedness is best characterised as being psychologically visible, being noticed, respected, and loved.
But the key ingredient in motivation is autonomy. This we all know from introspection and common observation – sticks and carrots work, but nothing works as well as internally generated enthusiasm – no wonder we call it passion. What ignites our desire will get a read now with enthusiasm. What the exams will examine will also get students to read, out of fear of the consequences of failure.
Even if learning occurs from the carrot-and-stick of consequences, a person habituated to a conceptual mentality will seek to understand by seeking a conceptual integration of the material. Such integration is not lost as quickly as memorised material. But the brain cannot store endless amounts, even of conceptual knowledge. What isn’t used repeatedly is not available at will. Upon extended disuse, it’s eventually lost. Some of my friends, adept at learning for exams, scored a Distinction in French taken as an additional language at school for four years, but could hardly remember what they learned even a few years later. Worse, they didn’t care. On the other hand, a TED-talk speaker claims that any adult, if inspired and driven, can learn a new language to native level in six months using the best techniques.
How a Market Would Reward Autonomy and Thinking Skills
Such a general schooling need not take a fixed 12 years if it’s set as modules that students complete at their own rate. The higher institutions of learning could set their own standards in a free market of what they expect of new entrants in terms of minimum age, a minimal level of linguistic proficiency, reasoning skills, and any special knowledge (physics, anatomy, chemistry etc.) for each particular course. This would enable students as young as 14, or younger, to begin university should they meet the institution’s standards. Institutions would be free to rely on certifications obtained from certain schools, or could conduct their own entrance exam or do one jointly with like-minded course providers (such as the LSAT).
Regimented schooling during the later high-school years when mature students are forced to choose prescribed curricula for ‘general’ education, is wholly unnecessary. If universities wish to stipulate 12 years of a general education before they would let pupils undertake certain courses, it’s up to them, but if the government did not force a regimented system on one and all, such universities would not miss out on those who were ready and willing earlier.
One of the great benefits of the internet era is how inexpensive it has become to acquire knowledge in the humanities in a structured way. Autodidacts could always learn subjects such as law and economics from books alone, bought second-hand or even borrowed from the library – learning in itself was not expensive, unless they needed instruments (e.g., a piano), access to a specialised laboratory (for medicine or engineering), or expensive equipment (e.g., if one wanted to learn how to fly an airplane or scuba diving). Educational institutions can and do place recorded lectures and journals online, as well as letting out e-books for borrowing. It’s possible to gain conceptual knowledge with a minimal requirement of the traditional classroom, other than for some occasional examinations, and presenting at interactive seminars, dramatically lessening the ratio of teachers to students, and the need for maintaining large campuses with multiple lecture halls and theatres.
At least some universities would then become primarily accreditation institutions specialising in examinations, testing, and awarding credits and degrees, rather than teaching.
There’s even more cost reduction to be had if one gets rid of bureaucratic meddling and the need for appeasement, if an institution can set its own standards for entrance and assessment.
As an aside, redirecting much of learning to online autodidactic work isn’t going to give one the coming-of-age experience so celebrated in American culture. In a free market, that too would be available on a large campus, but at a high cost, while the job market may have no regard for it.
Would a free market in higher education lead to corruption any more than is already the case? No, because prospective employers would have a keen interest in the reputation of institutions. Reputation for excellence and integrity is an educational institution’s most valuable intellectual property. They have an enormous commercial incentive to not let it perish for a few cases of bias. In turn, that attracts the best students. None of this interplay needs bureaucratic meddling. The market would discipline the rich who ‘buy’ degrees – when accreditation monopolies are removed, the consumers will do their due diligence on the candidates and their alma maters.
The Real Motive Behind Social Engineering
The West has been increasingly infected with neo-Marxist philosophy from the 1960s. Neo-Marxism seeks to undermine human confidence in an independently real, in-principle knowable, world. Its social strand is derived from the Marxist notion of inevitable class wars, except that it sees these battles everywhere – race wars, gender exploitation, ethnic and national domination, and conflicts over sexuality. It takes aim at everything that’s dominant – the white heterosexual male, modernism, the triumph of reason … indeed, a triumph of any kind. The State and its ‘Global Deep State’ satellites – the media, state-owned agencies, and the professoriate – are all deeply neo-Marxist.
Even schools propagate scientific swindles as established fact. High-school economics courses are crammed with Keynesianism, a practice built around an absurd hypothesis that assumes the government (via a central bank) should step in to fix the boom and bust cycle supposedly inherent in a free-enterprise economy. But there’s no such cycle intrinsic to the workings of the true free market – no problem to fix in the first place. Another swindle, the anthropogenic global warming climate hysteria, unsupported by theory or evidence, is labelled ‘climate change,’ and sold to the gullible young as though it is science as well established as the law of gravity.
And the good that is still being taught – reading, writing, science, history, literature – is either attacked by revisionism (e.g., in history), a scorn for reason and a right answer, falsified (science), or otherwise swamped by a barrage of additional courses to choose a few from – such as second and third languages, the environment, gender studies, civics, law, music, indigenous studies, botany, dance, sport, home studies … the list is endless.
Social engineering in education thus creates at least five serious problems:
Racism in school and college admissions via DEI.
Indoctrination, disguised as science.
Needless and extreme cognitive overload, via a curriculum and necessary amount of credits set by bureaucrats, not by students acting autonomously to gain knowledge.
Stress – the forced cognitive overload causes needless stress, and sometimes stress-related mental illnesses, to all except the most gifted students while teachers suffer at both ends – at the hands of ungrateful students as well as from relentless, bureaucratic, ‘standardsed’ testing.
Cheapening of tertiary education (so that everyone can obtain paper certificates).
A thing that can be learned in a few weeks can be turned into a tertiary course as vocational-course offerors turn into ‘universities’ to expand places far and wide – the idea is to make everyone into graduates, because surveys tell the social engineers that it will reduce income inequality. There are now tertiary degrees tailored for real-estate agents just so they can tell us: ‘This is the kitchen. These stairs, here … they lead to the basement.’ Simple things that could be learned on the job in a week now need a TAFE degree.
Clearly, the social-engineering education system is not what it claims to be. Instead of lowering one and all to the collectivist lowest common denominator, we should let the market help our young to discover their competitive edge while nurturing a unique passion.
You must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all. Thoreau said, ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Don’t be resigned to that. Break out!’
– John Keating, Dead Poets Society (1989)
