The Economy the American Curriculum Prepares You For

A common argument? Maybe, but this is the first time I can recall hearing it. That schools do, or ought to, prepare kids for their future careers, yes, but that it exposes them to career options outside of the very occasional talk by a parent or career day? News to me.

This doesn’t count home production. The other waking hours not spent working are spend in home production and leisure. It is likely that art, music appreciation, PE, and Spanish all make this non-work time more productive in the sense of allowing the recipients of this education to more enjoy activities like sports, television, listening to music, and simply being healthy.

The purpose of school is not only to maximize the production of a skilled workforce.

I’m not saying that these activities are being provided in appropriate quantities, simply that we cannot simply look at the mix of skills in the workforce to evaluate what should be taught in school.

It could be that by making school more fun it makes some students more productive in other subjects. Again, no reason to suspect that this is being done optimally but more reason to think that the direct workforce value understates its contribution to well-being and productivity.

Teaching technical writing to a first audit associate is much easier if that person has a solid grounding in basic writing principles taught in your usual composition courses.

It’s not just equipping students for their professional careers, but also giving them the necessary skills to write an effective cover letter, resume, e-mails that have the potential to signal to an employer what attributes you possess.

At the collegiate level, the traditional liberal arts curriculum was in no way meant to prepare students for “the economy.” Based on my understanding, the liberal arts curriculum was meant to do two things: (1) provide a foundation for a professional career (i.e. law, medicine, clergy, professor), or (2) provide the upper-class with “an education.”

This is why, until recently, non-upper-class, non-future-professionals (in the narrow sense) did not attend university.

Caplan seems to be referencing grade school & high school curricula, but insofar as he was referencing higher education, I thought this was appropriate.

How about instead:

The *Life* The American Curriculum Prepares You For

I think your percentages would look very different.

You don’t have to be a professional musician to experience the joy of sharing rich musical appreciation with your kids.

I think it is not a coincidence that America is the *only country* with a nearly ubiquitous liberal-arts curriculum, and also the country with unequivocally the best higher-education system. (At least judging by the global market response to that system.)

But still, I think you’re right. I’ve been informally polling friends and family for years. My sister was one of the key programmers (in assembler!) of those Visa mainframes that move billions of transactions a day. My friend Dayne is responsible for back-end compatibility for enterprise corporate software. My friend Bill uses neural networks to provide a financial recommendations and predictions feed to financial firms. I’ve asked at least a dozen others with similarly technical jobs.

I’ve asked all of them: do you ever use the calculus you studied? *Without exception,* the answer has been No. How about algebra? Nope. (My sister: “We generally add, subtract, multiply, and divide.”)

But my kids (whose current passions are photography and theater) spent, are still spending, hundreds of hours on those subjects. (My eldest had to do an online precalc class senior year in high school because she was dying to take the statistics elective, but colleges would have considered that a “gut” if she didn’t do the precalc elsewhere, at the same time. (The good news: she spent a couple of dozen hours on precalc — the grab-bag, whatever-we-couldn’t-shoehorn-in-elsewhere of math courses — instead of hundreds.)

Meanwhile, I’m shocked that any kid is allowed out of high school without having taken a dose of statistics, economics, and evolution — all of which are necessary to live a reasoned and reasonable life in our society. (Though not necessary for many/most jobs.) You need them to read or listen to the news with any discernment.

It’s time to be done with the trivium and the quadrivium of american mathematics instruction.

Oh and one other pet peeve: instead of all those hours practicing handwriting, shouldn’t they teach us to draw, just a little bit? Basic life skill, no? (I have bad handwriting despite all that practice, but I think I could at least draw a bit if I’d had some training, especially early.)

Schools are not, should not be, just voc-techs. Though voc-tech training should be available for those as wants it. And to the extent that they are voc-techs, they shouldn’t be teaching algebra, trig, and calculus to 95% of students.

Music, art, literature? Reverse that percentage.

@Steve Roth:

How can you say in one sentance that you are “shocked that any kid is allowed out of high school without having taken a dose of statistics, economics, and evolution” and then end your point with “they shouldn’t be teaching algebra…to 95% of students”?!?

Learning statistics or economics without a knowledge of algebra would have to be one of the most worthless wastes of time I could imagine. I would argue that math, and especially algebra, is the single most important subject you could teach a child. Not because you will need it in day to day life, but because it teaches problem solving better then any other subject. I would rather my child never pick up an instrument or read a line of poetry then miss out on algebra.

I’m all for non-traditional improvements for my children and for society, but these are lame arguments.

Gym, music, and history are all valued for indirect benefits. The direct job skill potential of these things is obviously very small.

Very few parents believe their kids will become pro athletes, but most, including myself, want schools to provide gym class so that their kids get physical exercise, and get the physical and social development benefits that go with that.

Every over-achiever parent wants their kid to practice music, not because they expect their child to be a professional musician, but because it’s generally believed to help children developmentally, and leads to success in other areas.

History also has more complex indirect benefits. I’m sure there are ways to improve it, but until I see better evidence, I want my children to get history education as well.

Most parents realize, subconsciously at least, that a liberal arts curriculum is about signaling certain things, mostly intelligence and class (uselessness and high class go hand-in-hand). Through a mixture of self-delusion and hope, parents want their children to be educated in the same manner as the smart and/or rich kids, because maybe it will make their kids smart and/or rich!

My preferred story about the explosion in college attendance rates is this: In the old days people had enough humility to admit it when their children were not (highly) intelligent or high class (or both). “We’re a working-class family, and Junior scored in the 65th percentile of the SAT. Of course he’s not going to college!” An assembly line worker at the Ford plant in the 1940s wouldn’t think twice about bragging to his co-workers that his son was admitted to the electrician’s guild; these days he’d blush upon delivering that same news, and would rather tell his friends that Johnnie is a business major at South Eastern Michigan State University.

I suppose another way of approaching the same issue would be to ask, What would you teach your children if you were home-schooling them? How would your plans change if the children were very bright or very dull? If they showed a strong interest in baseball and none in the piano (or vice versa), would you let them pursue that interest and ignore the other, or would you require some exposure to both?

It seems to me we teach what we teach because that’s how we’ve always done it. Long summer vacations are nice, too, but arguably a waste of time.

Going beyond the idea about job training, in my day, there was a dearth of education about practical information about handling adult responsibilities. Are kids taught about personal finance these days?

History commonly taught in schools like Augustus of Rome, the Declaration of Independence, or the Battle of the Bulge has very little to do with modern government. The evidence on the value of music study in making people creative is a bit mixed. Studies of both music and history tend to avoid considering counterfactuals. What would they do instead? My guess is working at a retail store teaches high school students a lot more than reading treble clef.

Kids spend at least 10% of their time on P.E. This would make sense if 10% of the workforce were professional athletes.

I agree with some of your point, but this part is just willfully stupid. Kids spend more than 10% of their time at lunch too. Would that only make sense if 10% of the workforce were professional eaters?

JP98’s homeschooling point is important – homeschoolers are very keen on maintaining what they call a ‘classical’ education (very humanities-centric) on exactly GU’s idea of an all purpose foundation. You can more cynically say that it’s about conspicuous leisure (look at all the parents putting videos of their kids playing piano on YouTube).

Gary Cross’ book ‘Kid’s Stuff’ paints a broader picture of an increasing disconnection between the world of the child and the adult – instead of aspiring to be train drivers or playing at doctors they wanted to be Luke Skywalker (my generation) or these days Harry Potter. The big exception to this is computers in the 80s, where there were tons of kids learning as a hobby skills that would serve their careers.

Whether privately or publicly funded, education still bears in its symbolism and subject matter the traces of the European tradition training for the church and civil service (Latin, history, literature) then the culture of the aristocrats and the bourgeois salon (music, art), then the 19th century rise of the sciences (which even now retain their 2nd division prestige status). Harry Potter cleverly combines a lot of these tropes. When they sell to the parents, they don’t show an imaginary picture of the adult child dressed as lawyer or a doctor, but a kid bent over a book or holding a violin, i.e., a kid you’d be proud to show to other parents.

Still, literature and composition are still a pretty good basis for studying law, journalism, publishing, marketing – it wouldn’t make sense to teach law in high school, likewise maths for accounting, etc.

Bryan,

While there are rampant problems with our educational system, your suggested “solution” pretty much misses the boat. I can only conclude that you would not bother teaching that the world is round in schools, because who needs to know that as part of their job? Maybe a few astronomers? Meh! Forget it.

If you don’t mind if our civilization reverts to burning witches, then your implied solution to the problem of education is just great.

Steve Roth,

I’ve asked all of them: do you ever use the calculus you studied? *Without exception,* the answer has been No. How about algebra? Nope. (My sister: “We generally add, subtract, multiply, and divide.”)

Go back and ask them how many times they’ve used concepts from calculus, algebra, etc, since they got out of college. I can assure you that *without exception*, there is not a practicing engineer out there that won’t have admit they use it all the time. Ditto for software people who do *anything* at all with math.

Do you know how complex mathematical functions are ultimately dealt with in computer code? Primarily through the use of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This does not render the higher level mathematical functions meaningless. Nor does it change the fact that the most complex mathematical functions known to man, are ultimately implemented through the use of 1’s and 0’s in a digital computer.

We live in an increasingly complicated world of technology. I’m out on the tail of the curve because I’m an R&D engineer, but — I contend that the bigger percentage of our population have a poor grasp of reality (and so support incredibly stupid ideas) because they don’t understand technology.

They are unable to understand technology, first and foremost, because they don’t know enough math to get their arms around the physics.

You may never solve a coupled set of linear algebraic equations in your life, after getting out of the classroom. But you will be able to understand conceptually what it means, if I tell you that some particular technology represents a highly coupled type of problem.

Unless you didn’t bother learning algebra of course, in which case you won’t have a clue.

Upon which we might as well start burning witches for all practical purposes, because we decided to give up on learning how to think. Burning witches is not too bad of an analog to use for clueless people who are trying to deal with — and make decisions about — technology-laden problems.

But who ever said that thinking ever made anybody money? Why, only a trivial, tiny percentage of the population will ever start a company and earn a fortune, and these are about the only people we need to have trained such that they can think. So from a purely Caplan-esque perspective, why train people to think?

All they need to know is how to run an Excel spreadsheet. Although they won’t have any idea what Excel is good for because they won’t have learned any math.

And if we don’t bother teaching people any history, they won’t be able to perceive the government as much of anything beyond, say, the gods of Rain, War, and Homecoming Parties. If you dance just right, the gods will shower blessings on you (or send welfare checks).

Not that history is taught well in public schools, for by and large it surely isn’t. But need I take this further, or have we already cut our educational system back to the point that this is all just too complicated to grok?

The point of studying maths beyond basic arithmetic is, for most of the population, to improve your ability to do basic arithmetic. It takes years of practice to really cement in skills.

We could do it by just drilling the same concepts for years, or we could do it by teaching new skills that need practising those basic concepts.

The second is more interesting, and it also helps with those students who will go on to use more maths later on.

Furthermore, education should be about opening doors for the future. Very often people at age 18 change their minds about what they want to do, a student just out of high school should, ideally, be as capable of changing from studying more English to Physics as the other way around.

In school you spend almost 100% of your time listening to people make boring presentations, performing arbitrary tasks and obtaining approval for them.

That is the experience of almost the entire American workforce, so I don’t really see how the curriculum could be any more suited.