The Case Against Education

The Case Against Education reveals why the schooling system is so broken, how it doesn’t fulfill its intended purposes but instead creates multiple problems for society, and what we might try to do to fix it.

Taking a physics class as part of a Civil Engineering degree doesn’t sound so crazy, right? But what if the subject matter focuses on light and relativity? I had this very experience and when I asked the dean about it in my exit interview before graduating he just told me that it was required for them to be accredited.

How ridiculous is it that governing bodies require such a useless class to have this certification? It certainly didn’t make it any easier to adjust to being an engineer once I graduated!

What’s worse is that few of the classes I took as part of my major made any difference when it was time to begin working. I remember many times thinking that it would be nice if someone fixed the system so I didn’t have to learn everything on the job!

Regardless of whether it’s college physics or high school Spanish, classes that provide no help in the real world are abundant in the school system. And when it comes to foreign languages, people only become fluent outside the classroom!

Educators will disagree with these notions, declaring that classes teach critical thinking and logic. But are they right? Science says no. Research identifies that while college does help with critical thinking skills, they don’t reach beyond the classroom.

In other words, a college degree does nothing to prevent you from using illogical thinking in the real world.

If you get a bachelor’s degree you earn more money. You learned a lot and developed new skills in school so you’re more valuable to employers, right? Actually, that’s not why a diploma gets you a higher salary. It’s simply because hardworking people are those that go to college and graduate. The character traits are already there, and getting the degree is evidence of that. But it doesn’t build those attributes. When economists try to explain why graduates make more, they use a flawed system called human capital theory. This is the idea that the classroom trains you to be a better employee by giving you those skills which you didn’t have before. A more accurate way is what’s known as signaling. In this view, employers will pay more if you have a college diploma because it’s a signal that you have preexisting profitable traits like diligence, obedience, and intelligence. In other words, school doesn’t give you those skills, it only proves that you already had them in the first place. Signaling theory also can explain things…