On April 1st I set the scene for the essays that I wanted to write for Learning from Dogs as follows:
I often ask myself just how effective the modern US schooling system is as a tool of education, and whether or not its costs outweigh its benefits. I hope to have at least a rough answer to this question in the
Elliot Engstrom
final post of this series.
In the following posts, I will examine three topics:
– In what ways does the modern schooling system function as a positive tool for education?
– What costs involved in modern schooling hinder its ability as an educative tool, and even make it a negative influence on students?
– Considering the analyses put forth in the first two posts, do the costs or benefits or this system outweigh the other? On the whole, are school and education complements or antagonists?
Here is the first one looking at the positive aspects of the American educational system.
Intellectual exploration
My kindergarten teacher told me to always start with something positive, so I’ll be beginning my analysis of American schooling by looking at how it is a positive tool for education.
One facet of the American education system that I once disapproved of but now find extremely useful and educative is the long period of time that students have before they must commit to a career choice.
I used to view this lag as a waste of resources. However, living in France and being a student at a French university changed my mind. The French system begins to lock children into a career path as early as the closing years of middle school. If a student in France wants to be a doctor, for example, they enter into medical school immediately upon leaving high school. The same is true for professions like pharmacology and law. There is very little opportunity for intellectual exploration in the country’s schools. Rather, one simply must make the best of wherever one ends up.
While the American system is more long-winded, it is a better tool for education in that it allows for a more dynamic range of studies. A liberal arts education forces students to delve into a wide range of subjects, giving students the chance to explore their interests and abilities.
Socrates (or Plato, depending on your interpretation of Plato’s dialogues), believed that a liberal arts education also encouraged the development of critical thinking skills. However, it should be noted that many of the greatest critical
John Stewart Mill, (1806–1873)
thinkers in history did not go through formal schooling. (Socrates himself and John Stewart Mill come to mind.)
This system also allows students to change their mind, pursuing those fields of study that truly interest them the most. It is amazing how many students in the American university system change majors during their tenure as students. This often is because they find that the career path they thought was for them is in fact not their liking – the number of students who abandon the premed track during college is a perfect example of this.
Education also entails socializing with other human beings. The American education system also facilitates this form of education quite well, as a liberal arts form of study at both the high school and university levels mixes together students of different interests.
Whereas in the French model a student studying medicine is constantly surrounded by other students of the same mindset, a premed student in the United States will have classes with students in other fields of study, expanding their social horizons and forcing them to relate to people with whom they may have little in common.
In my next post, I will examine the American schooling system as an antagonist to education, and will then close this series by attempting to weigh the system’s costs and benefits against each other.
Learning from Dogs has been publishing on a daily basis since July 15th, 2009. That’s over 460 posts and is a great tribute to the commitment of all the authors of this Blog. We are grateful that our regular readership is also measured in the hundreds and is growing steadily.
Elliot Engstrom
It seemed time to make a small change. We have decided to include articles from Guest Authors on a regular basis. Our first guest is Elliot Engstrom.
Elliot Engstrom is a senior French major at Wake Forest University, and aside from his schoolwork blogs for Young Americans for Liberty and writes at his own Web site, Rethinking the State
Elliot first post for Learning from Dogs is about the US Federal Government and Poverty. This also appeared in The Daily Caller.
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The federal government, which claims to be the greatest supporter of those in need, is anything but a friend of the impoverished.
Often times when conservatives speak of the government treating the rich differently than the poor, the discussion is framed around taxes and welfare, with the argument being made that the government forces the highest earners to pay a massive percentage of all taxes, both punishing success and stifling overall economic productivity and making it all the more difficult for anyone not in the upper echelons to accumulate wealth for themselves. I sincerely hope that I have not constructed a straw man version of this common conservative argument, as I certainly think it has a great deal of credibility. However, I also would like to draw attention to the fact that while government loots the rich through the direct means of taxation, it likewise loots the poor, albeit through a different set of means that is much more difficult to recognize, and thus much more difficult to counteract.
While looting the wealthy can often be construed as some kind of humanitarian effort to aid the poor, looting the impoverished is a much more difficult enterprise to disguise as a moral good. Thus we will find that the government’s means of taking money from the poor are much more difficult to detect, comprehend, and eliminate than the means of direct taxation that is used to extract money from the wealthier members of society.
The dollar in which the majority of Americans receive their wages or salary has no absolute, set value. We see this in the fact that the value of the dollar is constantly fluctuating when compared to gold, silver, or the currencies of other nations (which are all constantly fluctuating in value themselves). “Value” is determined by a wide range of factors, but is based in the fact that human beings are all rational maximizers who are all trying to get what they want while expending the least amount of resources possible to do so. The occurrence of this phenomenon in the mind of every single individual economic actor coordinates the price system in a free market economy.
A given worker making $10.50/hour may see himself as bringing home a constant source of income. However, this is not the case at all due to the constantly shifting value of the dollar. Even in a free and unhindered market, the value of the dollars that this worker takes home each day would fluctuate based on factors like how much liquid currency was actually in existence in the market, how many resources had been invested in banks or stocks, and what amount of resources had been converted into physical capital or products. In the end, the dollar itself has all the value of a flimsy piece of cotton paper – it derives its true value from the productive activities of economic actors who use it as a medium of exchange. In other words, the dollar is a widely accepted “I.O.U.” This would be the case even in the freest of economies. Values of commodities and currencies are always changing based on the effectual demand and effectual supply of the moment.
But, as we all know, we live in anything but a free and unhindered economy. Our supposed “free market” is criss-crossed with a Federal Reserve System that manipulates the value of the dollar at will, a corporate welfare system that socializes the losses of corporations at the expense of the rest of society, and law enforcement policies that weigh the heaviest on those who do not have the time or resources to easily deal with court and lawyer fees, jury duty, and detainments prior to trial, not to mention the fact that the War on Drugs does substantially greater damage to the lower classes of American society than it does good, particularly when speaking of poor African-Americans.
And here’s the scary part – this was all the case before the bailouts and stimulus package that George Bush began and Barack Obama continued and amplified. Not only do these bailouts threaten to massively inflate our currency, spelling disaster for those whose livelihood is based in hourly wages paid in dollars, but it also directly took from all of society, not just the rich or the poor, and gave to a few select corporate entities such as Goldman-Sachs and Wells Fargo. We know this because every new dollar created by the government in the stimulus plan detracted from the value of every dollar already existing in the pre-stimulus economy (or will do so when released into the economy).
Does this sound confusing? It should, because it is, and that’s exactly how the federal government likes it.
While the federal government would tell us that they protect the poor from the exploitation of the rich, economics would tell us that it is in fact the federal government itself that is the greatest exploiter of our nation’s impoverished, and it is this institution that in fact facilitates much of the disparity in wealth between wealthy national corporations and impoverished local communities.
Those of the small government mindset who wish to rally more people to their cause should not go about proclaiming that we should be immediately getting rid of affirmative action and welfare for the poor, but instead should be putting forth a rallying cry against corporate welfare, an inflation-minded Federal Reserve System, and a law enforcement system whose economic penalties weigh heaviest on those with the least money in their savings accounts. It does not have to be out of selfishness that we advocate for a reduction of the federal nanny-state. It can, and should, instead be out of a concern for the poverty and destruction of wealth that is directly generated by this institution’s misguided policies.
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