From across the political spectrum, voters rural and urban and suburban, everyone I talk to has a theory about what has gone so wrong with American education.
From cellphones to laptops, the culture wars and the pandemic, teacher pay and teacher burnout, weak discipline and bad curriculum to collapsing standards, there are no shortage of suspects and an endless catalogue of explanations. Recently, the New York Times offered a scatter plot of solutions based on responses from education researchers. But the authors arrived at a woefully academic conclusion that “no single idea was enough on its own” to solve the problem.
Meanwhile, 10 years ago, 57% of the public still had confidence in our institutions of higher education; now, it’s just 38%. K-12 fares no better, with 67% of people, according to Gallup, saying they’re dissatisfied with the type of education students receive.
Yet, despite all the public-opinion polling, education commissions, white papers, and proliferations of headlines, there is still an unrelenting pattern of failure.
So, if you’re like me and have been feeling highly suspicious that things in education have gone utterly insane, you’re hardly alone.
U.S. education has been brought to its knees. Harmful innovations and disastrous interventions have created a loss of trust and decline in outcomes. Still, American education progresses forward in its infinite capacity to mistake motion for mastery.
But the Trump administration appears unwilling to keep subsidizing the collapse. As the Los Angeles Times reports, the Department of Education will institute a new rule in which federal student loans will longer support degrees where a graduate earns less than they likely would have without enrolling: “The highest percentage of failed programs is expected to be undergraduate certificates, especially for cosmetology, massage therapy and film.”
It’s a pragmatic solution. After all we are, as Publius notes in Federalist #6, a “commercial republic,” so measuring whether education produces material advancement is hardly any betrayal of America’s first principles. But the idea that education has outlived its usefulness to society, however, requires asking whether usefulness can be merely reduced to returns on investment.
American education is full of hairsplitting contradictions being pulled toward different functions of competing purposes. Part of this tension can be seen through the aperture of the past decade; whether it be the rapid advancement, and integration, of technology that has upset the false pretenses between teacher and student or the erroneous assumption that education was some neutral creation to foster enlightened intelligence. Now we have competing claims of wanting education to do both: return students to a more “civics” focused education while, also, creating a return for the market.
Both tangible and intangible benefits flow from these contrasts. Still, given that American education has accumulated a multitude of errors of astounding consequence, the task of a type of return —whether it be of a tradition or “on investment”—should be the establishment of purpose.
As we have seen now, and as Thomas Jefferson bemoaned more than 200 years ago, there would be those who “commit their pupils to the theatre of the world with just taste enough of learning to be alienated from industrious pursuits, and not enough to do service in the ranks of science.” But what, then, is the character that actually marks the necessity of education?
The twin ends are distinct and still representative of the purely American ethos. The double meaning of a type of “return” for education requires a consideration of human nature and the form of government appropriate to it. It is the same question Publius asked in Federalist #51: “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”
The trouble with this scheme is that there is a dispute between a “return” that guides the fundamental beliefs of the body of human beings under one flag.
A market return is a test of America as a commercial republic.
A return to the American tradition is measure of its sustainability. Without an accurate understanding of both, the purpose of what kind of “return” for education is needed is reduced to mere life and mere income.