In the News
Education was all over the front page of my phone in the last few weeks. Forbes listed its rankings of the best universities in the country. Cal was happy, Harvard not so much. President Biden signed an executive order reducing student loan debt for most middle-class families. Both the far-right and the far-left were unhappy, so it must be a good thing.
A gaggle of state governors and legislatures called for changes in how history is taught and what can be taught. The papers and the airwaves bemoaned the lack of teachers; so many have left the profession and so few joined. Peter Coy wrote an op-ed in the NYT the other day. It was about how grammar was not particularly important. His readers gave him a B-minus. I would be harsher.
I do not believe that the way it was is always better; at least I try to hide the thought from time to time. But up-to-date education news, in general, raises questions about education in general.
A National View
Don’t we want our citizens to be well educated? Don’t we want citizens who can problem solve, tell truth from fiction, and vote wisely? Why is education a “local” issue and not a national issue? It is, and it should be a national imperative. No politician, however, is willing to call for a national set of standards. We should want our students to meet national standards in basic subjects like math, science, languages, literature, and the social sciences. A student in Alabama should have the same math course as a student in Wisconsin. No matter where one lives, two plus two always equals four. The teaching of the history of our country, including warts, needs to be the same. We cannot have the kids up North studying the Civil War while the kids down South fret over the War of Northern Aggression. Why can’t we have one set of educational standards?
Several governors and legislatures have enacted policies that forbid teaching anything about our history that might create negative feelings among students: read White students. Policymakers do not want students to learn about the forced marches of native people from Florida, and the Trail of Tears. They do not want students to know about the horrors of slavery, and the taking of land called Manifest Destiny. They do not want students to know that some people are not treated equally. A democracy can only survive when most of the people are well educated.
Why not Elites?
Generalities are often, well, generalities, but my observation is that it is the well-educated that move society forward with innovative products, increased manufacturing productivity, and superiority in the digital world. India and China educate over eighty-five million high school students each year compared to only fifteen million high school students in the U.S. Consider that the top ten percent of students in China and India, nine million of them, compete with our one and a half million top percenters. China and India are our major economic competitors. To win the economic battles, we need highly educated citizens which makes education a national strategic issue. We need well-educated elites.
The educated elite has become a pejorative when it should not be. Even well-educated elites in the House and Senate, think Harvard undergraduate and Yale Law School, try to convince their constituents that they are only regular folks trying to protect constituents from elites. The lower their state’s education level, the more successful the elites screaming against elitism seem to be.
I do not remember much use of the word elite back when. People were encouraged to get the best education they could; some might argue that was truer for men than for women. The better students went off to the Ivies and highly rated state universities. Those with a science bent often matriculated at Poly’s, MIT, or RPI. Others made other choices, but the aim was to get a good education because the nation needed well-educated people who could reason, invent, manage, implement, and deal with ideas and ideals. There was an understanding that the well-educated and well-trained tradespersons would lead us to a better place, a better life, and a more perfect union.
How did that change? Do we want the uneducated leading us?
Lower Standards?
Peter Coy’s feedback included comments about good grammar being a left-over of the privileged class. But privileged class is another discussion. No matter your station in life, however, you cannot communicate well using lousy grammar. You cannot encourage, discourage, build up, conceptualize, criticize, or hook your reader or your audience with words poorly chosen or connected. OK, rappers can do it, but … So yes, let us build up our supply of well-educated elites. We need them to move the country forward instead of backward. I wish I had studied harder.
What can we do?
How do we get this large contingent of highly educated elite leaders? We might consider, again, national standards for basic educational levels. We might consider making university, college, and trade school an affordable experience for anyone who qualifies and wants to attend. The average college graduate is saddled with about $39,000 in student loan debt. Why should it be that expensive to go to college? Trade schools are expensive as well. Most industrial countries provide university education and trade schools for nearly nothing. Oxford, the Sorbonne, and other prestige schools have incredibly low fees. Most state colleges and universities were once nearly free. We can do it again. We could stop denigrating those who are well educated in our political discourse. We might pay our teachers salaries that compete with the business world or government agencies.
We might … We might consider education for education’s sake, not just for job training.
