Improving Education as It Now Exists Will Not Advance the Economic Interests of Middle and Low-Middle Income People— Plutocrats and Politicians Are Lying to Us

07 March 2011

The President’s mantra about improving education hides the real problem with the economy

A while back, I wrote three essays (here, here, and here) about education that quarreled with the idea that trying to educate everyone in this country (to achieve arbitrary federal and state standards) was a panacea for our economic woes.

I made two basic arguments.

First, our current system forces the talents of a wide spectrum of people toward an imposed mediocrity that discourages brilliance (with the system’s tedium) and alienates the less gifted (with the system’s lack of individualized suitability).

Second, enforced educational mediocrity (pulling the gifted down and the unsuited up) is not actually necessary to achieving the levels of innovation the United States allegedly requires in order to compete globally.

Today, our economy is distributed disproportionately toward two ends, the increasingly richer rich and the increasingly poorer poor/near-poor.

The center, where the middle class used to reside, is declining, and the decline has almost nothing to do with American education’s admitted shortcomings.

Reasons for this decline of middle income include:

(i) The United States’ abandonment of manufacturing under the superficially analyzed pretext that wages are too high —

compare, for example, Germany’s collaborative success in holding onto its well-paid manufacturing base;

(ii) the increasing offshoring of previously skilled/professional (now web-transferable) work —

like medical imagining interpretation, as a very high level example;

and

(iii) the automation of previously skilled and/or professional information-related employment —

like aspects of legal discovery and computer chip design.

Economist Paul Krugman reinforced some of these points yesterday

Dr. Krugman’s column attacked conventional thinking about the economic return on educational reform:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill.

But what everyone knows is wrong.

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind.

And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking.

It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly.

“Building that society directly” is the key concept

The United States has thoughtlessly adopted the mantra that markets should decide everything, apparently not having the wit to recognize that our competitors are using our unexamined concept of free markets against us.

China, for example, is not at all a free market. Its leaders have been skilled about outwitting ours in the game of “who comes out on top.”

I find the contest bitterly amusing in that the Chinese government is using our self-damaging philosophy against us (as a martial artist would), while it demonstrates the economic superiority of its protectionist, intellectual property-stealing own.

Similarly, Germany, exhibiting its historic ability to engineer what laissez faire won’t, has insisted that its manufacturing base remain strong. German government policy brings all stakeholders to the policy table. Germany is exemplary, when one considers that the true democratic purpose of the nation state is to advance the well-being of that nation’s people.

In comparison, the United States has evolved a too-often laissez faire system in which personal and corporate Wealth go their own international ways, regardless of the American people’s needs.

Given that American and multi-national corporations operate in this country solely by virtue of the American people’s laws, their profligacy with our combined well-being makes no sense.

American praise of free markets as the ultimate arbiters of everything sacred is a canard that too many Americans buy into. Most of us have not thought about how that free market aphorism is a duck, whose teeth strip our economic bones bare, without laying any golden eggs.

As with almost everything else in life, balance is the answer.

Education alone is not going to get us to where we want to go. There aren’t the jobs. And there will not be, until we decide that keeping Americans gainfully employed is part of our national purpose.

The moral?

When plutocrats and politicians tell you something, think about where their money is coming from and whether they have any incentive to tell you the truth.

Right now they don’t. In part because too many of us have bought into their empty ideological lies.

PeteFree.com

Improving Education as It Now Exists Will Not Advance the Economic Interests of Middle and Low-Middle Income People— Plutocrats and Politicians Are Lying to Us