Education Isn’t Everything

2008.08.05   prev     next

strongamericanschools.org is heavily running a TV commercial in which a boy raises a set of national flags on a flagpole, with the American flag at the bottom. The narrator tells us:

I’m calling BS.

1. How far is America behind the #1 country in science and math? Could there be a good thirty-or-so countries that are all doing about as good a job as can be done in teaching their children math and science, and position 20 is about as good as position 1? I don’t know the answer myself, but “25th” doesn’t help me to find out.

2. Is America 21st or 25th in income? How about quality of life? Or anything else that people actually want to have, besides just being “number one” on some nation-rating test?

3. What does this rating system measure — the percentage of children who are good at math and science? How many of those children will wind up in jobs that require high competence in math and science? Do those kind of jobs just materialize out of thin air to meet the number of graduates who could competently perform them? Everyone doesn’t need to be good at everything in the real-world economy.

4. Most of what I learned about advanced math and science came from reading books (and more recently websites) on my own, not from school. And what I did get from school, as I found out later, was sometimes wrong or at least badly obfuscated. Having to go to bad schools certainly sucks, but I don’t think it keeps down anyone who is capable of understanding complex subjects.

5. China is exploding economically and seems on-track to become the most economically powerful nation on Earth. Is that because China’s schools got a lot better in just the past few decades? I doubt it. China, formerly (and still nominally) communist, has recently adopted a strongly free-market approach to economic development, while America stays mired in quasi-socialism.

Can the economic problems caused by income redistribution be overcome by government programs to teach math and science better? No, they can’t. Can that boy raising the flags on the flagpole use his math and science skills to avoid federal and local taxes that promise to confiscate 50% of his income if he becomes one of our best earners? Or to avoid the 8% sales taxes he will pay when he goes out to spend his remaining 50%? No, he can’t — unless he wants to wind up in a federal prison cell. A cell in which he won’t need any school-taught skills at all. His job will be to sit and rot and wish he had been born in China.

Update 2008.12.25 — “to to” corrected to “me to”