“Nancy and I always believed that if you didn’t want the kids to overspend their allowances, you didn’t give them the money in the first place.”
Ronald Reagan
As quoted by James Srodes in his excellent article, “The Great Recession of 2011-2012″ in the February issue of American Spectator.
No econometrics necessary. Just a smidge of parental common sense. Hopefully we are on the verge of the voters cutting the allowance to the irresponsible kids in Washington.
Imagine my surprise when a post I did a few weeks ago referencing Dierdre McCloskey was not only spotted by her (or, I’m guessing, a google search feed, considering how unlikely it would be for her to be ambling down this particularly new and untrod path), but referenced on her site and commented upon by her! Terrifically kind; thank you for that, Professor.
Thinking about that Western Civ class all those years ago reminded me of an important thing Professor McCloskey said about education: if you read four important books a year, real books, by the time you’re 40 or 50 you will have educated yourself to a significant degree. I have been following this advice for twenty years, and I have to say it’s some of the best advice I’ve gotten.
So Massachusetts is going to have its own public state law school . I can hear your cheers from here. YAY!
I’m not going to start this off by noting that Shakespeare was entirely correct (Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV), because that would be somewhat cliche. Oh, wait.
Let’s think about this for a moment. America is not exactly suffering from a paucity of lawyers, and recent graduates, even from the best schools, had difficulty finding jobs last year.
So the jesters “in charge” of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, facing a record $3 billion budget deficit (and that’s their number, so you know it will be higher, much higher), thought that NOW would be a good time to fund a state law school. I guess I was unaware THAT was the reason for the recent lawyer shortages I was reading about.
If we assume existing law schools don’t purposefully accept anyone other than the best potential students who apply, and in fact do want to accept the best potential students out of their pool of applicants, there ISN’T a shortage of seats for the BEST students. And therein lies one of the main problems.
I’m not saying it isn’t competitive, I’m sure when you put 500 baby sharks together in a tank with one bloody steak, something bad will happen to some of them, but isn’t that the idea? Isn’t it (at least on the face of it, before they tweak it to be all PC and “diverse”) a meritocratic method? I disagree with the notion that we should help every student “afford” whatever crazed delusion strikes his or her fancy. Didn’t get into any of the ten law schools to which you applied? Hmmm. Nobody will lend you the money to attend East BridgeBumble College of Law? Maybe you shouldn’t be a lawyer, didja think of that? And maybe taxpayers shouldn’t help you pay for it.
So, yes, I think what Massachusetts should do is squander more of our limited (and borrowed) resources to fund an unnecessary school to turn out sub-par graduates into an overpopulated profession. Seems eminently logical. We’re “helping” people. By definition this school will be third-tier out of the gates.
Ronald Reagan knew what America was supposed to be about, and knew whose fault it was if we failed to reach our potential. How sad that the goals of our current crop of “leaders” have strayed so very far from what they should be.
I had the distinct pleasure of taking a class from Professor McCloskey at the University of Iowa (Western Civilization, I believe), one of those 200+ student undergrad lecture affairs. He (she was a he, then) had certain rules, though, I will never forget: if you came to lecture (and he stated he didn’t really care if you did or not, we were “adults”) you were to be politely silent (unless, I suppose, asking a question, which rarely occurred), and, most importantly, you were not to sit and read the newspaper, which, at Iowa, was the Daily Iowan, a full-sized fold-out newspaper on the order of a Chicago Tribune (you couldn’t read that one, or any other one either). Students forgetting this rule were ejected from the lecture by Professor McCloskey; I remember it happening only once. But I digress.
The reason for this post is Professor McCloskey nails it: economics as practiced today is a sham and a waste of time with all the math and alleged “science.” To wit:
The progress of economic science has been seriously damaged. You can’t believe anything that comes out of [it]. Not a word. It is all nonsense, which future generations of economists are going to have to do all over again. Most of what appears in the best journals of economics is unscientific rubbish. I find this unspeakably sad. All my friends, my dear, dear friends in economics, have been wasting their time….They are vigorous, difficult, demanding activities, like hard chess problems. But they are worthless as science.
The physicist Richard Feynman called such activities Cargo Cult Science….By “cargo cult” he meant that they looked like science, had all that hard math and statistics, plenty of long words; but actual science, actual inquiry into the world, was not going on. I am afraid that my science of economics has come to the same point.
— (Deirdre McCloskey, The Secret Sins of Economics (2002), 41,
The irony, of course, is that a vastly superior form of economics preceded the dastardly Keynes, but is largely unheard of today and certainly untaught in all our finer (and not-so-fine) institutions of “higher learning”: The Austrian School. Learn all about its logical goodness here.
The idea of free public education is a fine one, a laudable goal, IF it’s carried out intelligently and well. It’s not.
Let’s begin with the seasonal nature of public education. The “summer break” began a hundred years ago with the necessity of childrens’ assistance with the crop harvest. I haven’t checked recently, but I grew up in a state that actually has farms, and no one I knew was needed on a farm during the summertime. In fact, many of the farmers were no longer needed on the farm at any time, efficiencies and mechanization making farming a larger-scale enterprise. It is time to give up the idea that kids “deserve a break” of three months every year and keep them going year-round, with perhaps three or four longer vacation periods (say, two or three weeks, max). The benefits of a three-month holiday do not come close to offsetting the negatives.
Oh, I can hear you saying “but the classrooms aren’t air-conditioned.” Well, I guess the little darlings will just have to deal. Yes, even in the South. Who was the braintrust who built schools without air-conditioning in the South, anyway?
I can also hear you saying “the teachers need a break to plan, and organize, and rest up” and other various and sundry excuses. To which I respond: why are teachers the only group that requires 25% of their year as vacation to plan things? I don’t get 25% of my year to “plan” and “rest,” and neither do any other groups outside of teaching that I can think of. Everyone else seems to be chugging along just fine. Plus, even with all this “planning” and “resting” and so forth the vast majority of public schools seem to still be failing, even by their own knee-high goals.
Which, of course, leads us to one of the two root problems within the larger problem: the teachers unions. Judging simply by the vitriol the unions spew about charter schools and vouchers (both of which work, of course, and save money at the same time) the teacher unions are well aware their model is broken, vast numbers of their teachers unable or unwilling to teach, not to mention overpaid and overstaffed. Did I cover everything there? Methinks thou dost protest too much. Ideas such as seniority-based pay or LIFO staffing and a layer-cake of overstuffed “administrators” are over. Please step out of the way and let the market tell you what the model should be.
Which brings us of course to the largest problem with public education: it’s run by the government. Nothing the government does, by definition, is done efficiently or well. This includes educating our youths. Turning out uneducated drones with no curiosity, no ability to think for themselves, no creativity, no personality, least-common-denominator voters is what the present system does well. I’m not saying there are no exceptions; miraculously, some manage to run this gauntlet of mediocrity and apathy and, on their own, not only actually learn things, but somehow figure out a way to prosper intellectually despite the smothering lackadaisical government figureheads in the front of their classrooms. I have no idea how it happens. Law of large numbers, I guess.
Let me add that I went to public school through high school, and it was painful and it was an immense waste of my time. Time that I will never get back, experiences I would never relive for all the gold at the NY Fed. What I could have achieved with an actual education I will never know. I do know that because of the schools I attended, I was never challenged and thus never had to develop any sort of study habits, habits which might have come in handy when I faced private school-educated peers in college who didn’t seem to be drowning in the deluge of material at the private college I attended.
Enough ranting, time for the solution:
1) Take the limits off charter schools. Let the market decide if a charter school is a good idea or not.
2) Give taxpayers with children a voucher, good at ANY school of their choosing, or even as a direct tax credit if they choose to homeschool, for precisely HALF what the district spent the prior year per pupil.
3) When the bad public school’s student population drops to less than half the original population, shut it down. Consolidate the remaining students at the remaining schools. Sell or lease the empty facilities to the charter schools, if they’ll take them. Fire or re-assign the teachers, but the teacher population has to shrink overall by the number at the failed school (ie, if they are re-assigned, another teacher will have to be fired in order to keep them – see, I anticipated the unions there).
4) Don’t negotiate with the teacher’s union. This is not a negotiation. This is a broken, failed system, and the teachers unions are culpable. If their members want to keep teaching, they’re welcome to interview at the charter schools for a new position. With their experience in education and seniority, that should be a piece of cake, right? Particularly with all the “planning” they’ve been doing with their summers since college?
5) Educate year-round, 225 school days up from the standard 170 or whatever it is now. That gives our youths five weeks of holiday a year, two or three weeks more than any working adult on the planet except the French. Last I checked, we weren’t France, so I think we can handle it. Break it up however you want through the year.
With a plan like this, I predict that within ten years over 50% of public school students will be in a charter school. Scratch that. FIVE years. The other half of students will be in a vastly different reality in public school. Municipalities will save billions. Taxpayers (aka “voters”) will save billions, and their children will actually get an education. And the bad teachers will have all the time they want to “rest” and “plan.” [I think I've identified the only losers in this little plan of mine.]
“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.”
(attributed to) Jack London
(emphasis mine.)
While there is some debate as to whether Jack London ever said this, for my purposes the words stand on their own.
It seems a young man from Arkansas, age 10, has his own opinion on the
Pledge of Allegiance.
I don’t think my kids even have the Pledge in their school these days. Do yours?
“No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result.”
Ludwig von Mises, 1922