What word there is incomprehensible to me? "Consume"--the idea that education is something that people consume seems utterly wrong to me. Is this misunderstanding because the debaters are economists? That hardly seems likely. Even they can't conceive of education, vice "learning" as I understand it, as a pile of some material that students come to class and consume. But I don't even think that education is a service that universities provide to their student-clients, though it almost seems like that. No, education or learning is a process that students go through and it is one that is largely self-administered. Some of us are life-long students. If you decide you want to learn something then you set out on a journey of sorts. You don't consume a journey and a journey is not exactly a service. Mind you, other people can provide certain services to you that can aid your journey of learning.Suppose you strongly desire to drastically increase the amount of education that people consume. What should you do?The obvious answer: Make education completely free of charge – and have the government pay the the entire cost.I say this obvious answer is obviously right. As I explain in The Case Against Education, I favor extreme educational austerity, because I think the education system is a waste of time and money. Nevertheless, given the goal of drastically increasing educational attainment, completely shifting the cost burden from consumers to taxpayers is highly effective.
Strongly desiring to increase the amount of education or learning that people consume is like pushing on a string. You have the causality all wrong! You can provide opportunities for those people who wish to learn such as professors, courses, programs, libraries and so on. But there is absolutely nothing you can do that can ensure that anyone actually learns something. The quantity of learning that occurs is really only a function of two things: the student's desire or propensity to learn something and their ability to do so. Government can have all the strong desires it wants, but that will have very little effect on how much learning takes place.
Does anyone else find this very peculiar?
7 comments:
It's not peculiar in accounting/economic areas. For every sector that has a cost there is a cost center associated with it. If you are asking about benefit then you have opened the issue of economic utility. In the socio/educational/ biological sciences there is the related issue of external validation. For example if some behavior can be demonstrated in the laboratory does it also occur outside the laboratory. In education that would be whether X training produces Y economic or job benefit after graduation. That is a difficult/expensive question to test and is often avoided.
Frankly there is no way around this given that goods and services have a cost. I think the Arts community is making a big mistake not lumping themselves more definitively in with education. In medieval times they had the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy taught with the trivium of grammar logic rhetoric. Just looking at that list makes one see the devolution of common education.
The use of "consume" like this bugs me to no end. We "consume" education, we "consume" music, we "consume" lectures. It's like they imagine us as pigs at a trough.
I have the same reaction to being called a "consumer" instead of a "customer". I get a bovine feeling, like I need to watch out for the cowboy herding me into the chute.
I feel much the same about "Human Resource" departments. Like we're lumber.
The abstractions in economics textbooks somehow escaped into the wild and have colonized people's imaginations. It's really offensive.
I love both these comments! Thanks Maury for clueing us in on how economists/accountants work on this. As you say, education has a real world cost. Also as you say, the actual economic value of that education can be hard to measure. I suppose I am looking at it from the point of view of someone, nearly all of whose experience was in music education, where measuring the economic value is pretty much impossible. And thanks Craig for giving us a sense of how badly we normal humans are treated by the abstractions of the ruling intelligentsia.
Craig, I share your distaste for the reification you identify but funds are no longer distributed from an aristocrat's money chest to support the fine arts. The popular arts are supported by many avid voluntary customers and so you don't see this kind of talk there. But once you ask or lay claim to taxpayer/foundation money you are captive to governmental or NGO accounting. It is no shame to assert that the fine arts are part of a person's education and should be supported as such.
All the talk of consuming makes it sound like art and experiences are something to be shoved down your gullet as quickly as possible so you can move onto the next one. Repeat thousands, possibly millions, of time over several decades until you die. After all, why waste time revisiting or dwelling on something when you've already consumed it?
With a mentality like this, it's no wonder the web experience has moved away from surfing and towards linear content feeds like twitter or facebook where you get an endless line of status updates beamed into your eyeballs for your consumption.
I went to a few schools and even now I'm enrolled in another Certificate program (Finance and Deployment of Clean Energy). But in the end I consider myself mostly self-educated. I read hours most days, I interview almost anyone who will talk to me, and finally almost 5 years ago I resolved to learn some musical instruments. Bryan, you're right that education is ultimately self-administered, though getting oneself to school can be an important component at times, so long as one knows how to learn and, most importantly, is genuinely hungry for it.
Absolutely! I am mostly self-taught myself, even though I have eight years of university. Actually getting on campus was a crucial step because just walking around in the library gave me a sense of the enormity of the intellectual history and tradition. And the presence of so many highly learned people was keenly felt. Now? I'm not sure how people feel on campus, since the predominance of all this woke nonsense.
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