Education and Super Power Status
In an op ed piece in today’s NY Times David Brooks tells us that the single biggest reason that the US emerged as the economic super power of the 20th. century was “our quality work force.”
There is no hard evidence in support of his claim. In fact, only in mid-century did most young people even attend, let alone finish high school. Whatever our work force was during the last century it was not well-educated. Also, the emergence of our “great power” status in the first years of the century came well before the time when most of our citizens even attended school beyond the 8th grade.
Furthermore, the manufacturing jobs that were mostly driving our economy during the last century needed little if any higher education. They certainly did not need a college preparatory program in high school, let alone college.
What these jobs needed most of all were good work habits, being on time, being attentive to details, assuming responsibility, habits that were most of all learned in strong, often immigrant families, not during the relatively short time spent in school and in class.
Much more plausible as the single most important cause of our emergence as a great power was the availability, just when it was most needed, of lots of unskilled labor, first from Ireland, Germany and China, and later from eastern and southern Europe.
In fact our success (then and now) is most of all fired by our immigrant pool, and the latter results more from hands-off government policies (such as readily obtained work visas and no fences along the border), policies that don’t get in the way of a growing, vibrant, innovative, entrepreneurial class of workers and managers.
Government or public education policies and programs just don’t do this. Such efforts do not make good workers. Nor do they make entrepreneurs. People will work well and be inventive and innovative because of the economic opportunities available to them, because of what they can achieve by doing so, because of the American Dream which is still alive today and still the principal reason people come to our shores. It is most of all incumbent on government to stay out of the people’s way.
What government (public) educational program or policy has been instrumental in fostering our economic success? You might want to say the GI Bill, but wasn’t this the government providing opportunity to people and then getting out of their way?
What government backed public school reform during the past 100 years or so, has succeeded in correcting the widely recognized failure of our public schools to “educate?” Our economy continues to thrive in spite of, not because of our schools.
The present system of public or government schools was established during the 100 years between Horace Mann’s Common School in 1850 and James Bryant Conant’s Comprehensive High School in 1950. While it’s true that these same 100 years also witnessed our country’s emergence as the world’s greatest economic power there is no evidence of a cause and effect relationship between the two.
What might have happened if education, like so many other things, had been left to the free market for its realization? Would we now be saying that we not only had the wealthiest nation on earth, but also the best educated?
As it is we deplore the poor standing of our schools in the world, just as much as we applaud the productivity of our free market economy.
