The Education Myth

Learning is Power

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.” – Paul Simon, opening lyrics to Kodachrome, 1973

Paul Simon made a great counterculture point in 1973. A lot of what was called education was crap. But it didn’t hurt us. Not then. Now, a half century later, it is hurting us. There is no measure by which we should be satisfied with the performance of our education system. The costs are ridiculous. Yet we persist in a failed methodology. Today, we can’t seem to read the writing on the wall.

The cultural equation goes like this. Lifetime earnings are higher for high school graduates than non-graduates, and subsequently for college and higher-level degrees. This, it is claimed, demonstrates that economic earnings justify more (always more) incremental spending on education. Instinctively, I’m suspicious of that equation. Every society has some mechanism to sort people into the work of running itself. Right now, the principal sorting method we use is education level. Based on that, the results of the equation are self-fulfilling. The equation seems correct, but it misleads.

Taken to extreme, if everyone had a PhD, would everyone earn a lot more? Even if they were waiting tables? There must be a point of diminishing returns. President Biden’s recent push to forgive student debt implicitly recognizes this. To the other extreme, if nobody graduated from high school, would the scale of earnings be compressed downward such that everyone earned nearly the same? That would imply that the only way to learn anything advantageous is through institutional education. That is not true. Ambitious people have always found a way to learn and take advantage of the knowledge, degree or not.

That is the key. The problem with the cultural equation is the word “educate” as a proxy for the word “learn.” There is a subtle but meaningful distinction. “Educate” is something a teacher does. “Learn” is something a student does. Education only has value if the students learn. It is common sense that the more time students spend in an educational setting, the more they will learn. But we’ve over-saturated that technique. Telltales on this point are our declining global rank, and the recent trend to ignore standardized tests. The equation encourages the funding of education whether students are learning or not, and whether what they’re being taught even matters.

If the metric was “learning,” I suspect the equation would be more revealing. I suspect it would show economic spoils flowing even more disproportionately to those who know how to learn, lifelong, as opposed to those who have simply been educated. It would make the same point, but without attributing success to a system that is so obviously failing.

My own education indisputably opened the doors to my career and advancement. My engineering degree was largely funded by a scholarship from Martin Marietta, at the time, 1976, a conglomerate with interests in aerospace, missile defense, construction materials and other goods. They also offered summer employment as a laborer at one of their cement plants proximate to my home. My last summer I interned in their electrical and instrumentation department. So, both as a user and troubleshooter, I was introduced to sophisticated industrial controls. My first professional employment was as a controls engineer at a factory that processed aluminum into the most demanding of applications such as aircraft wings. Five years later, I joined a tech startup in robotic applications, which job I held, off and on, for the rest of my career. Without a degree, neither the internship nor professional jobs would have been accessible.

Only upon later reflection have I recognized how I learned my job skills, and how little of my education applied to my work. For just one example, Iowa State electrical engineering (EE) graduates in 1980 were required to take a math course every term, beginning with calculus. I could not have assimilated the EE material without the first two years of math. But I’ve never used what math I learned the last two years. (Had I continued into a master’s program, those two years would be necessary. But according to the data I’ve seen, less than 15% of engineering graduates continue.) I could identify many other required courses that added no value to anything I did professionally. Maybe half.

Although a degree was required, my education was an extremely inefficient way to prepare for my professional jobs. However, summer work was a huge advantage. Those experiences taught me that to accomplish things in the real world, the skills of my less educated co-workers were often more valuable than my education. In turn, the work put my courses in context and inspired me to learn. I could have done the same professional jobs with just the summer experiences and a more focused, pared down curriculum.

This idea is not new. It was the basis of apprenticeships for generations. But today, we reflexively assume that any change to the education system that doesn’t keep students in classrooms more hours of their day, and more years of their life, will impede their learning. The arguments are whether educational funds should follow students or school systems, private or public, trade school or university, blah, blah, blah… Wouldn’t it be great if a 15-year-old student could take his or her chit to an auto repair shop, bakery, hospital, factory (my favorite), or whatever, and use it to offset that employer’s cost of an internship? That could be easily coupled with directly relevant education resources, institutional or otherwise. Some variant of that could accelerate know-how back into our work force, which I claim is one of our competitive advantages (see my prior post https://joelelorentzen.substack.com/p/an-invitation-to-know-how).

As a qualifying note, this essay comments on how our system of education prepares us to operate the nuts and bolts of our society. It isn’t intended to diminish research, liberal arts, or humanities. Truth and beauty matter to us. I really loved the math I learned and the literature I read in college, even if it was worthless for my occupation. As I’ve aged, I wish I had a better understanding of philosophy, physics, and astronomy. Every education should include this topical awareness. Such subjects should be accessible for those willing to sacrifice and do the work of learning, whenever that occurs throughout life. In my opinion, shoehorning them into four to six years following high school risks misallocating both the educational resource and students’ time.

Paul Simon was educated. He studied English and math in college. I thought his words just a clever rhyme at the time (get it?), but maybe we should have taken his lyrics more seriously.