This game could have been so much shorter. (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)
As part of a New York Times series of essays headed “What is school for,” economist Dr. Bryan Caplan suggested that “school is for wasting time and money,” a case that he has made before in a 2019 book entitled The Case Against Education.
His main argument in the NYT essay boils down to, “people don’t remember most of the academic material they learned in school.” There are three problems with his argument— problems that are shared by some other critics of schooling.
First, the argument that adults don’t remember much of what they learned in school (a version of the student complaint “When will we ever use this stuff”) is that it requires the use of a time machine to buttress a kind of retroactive utility.
In Game 6 of the 2021 World series, the Atlanta Braves won 7-0 over the Houston Astros. Those runs were scored in the 3rd, 5th and 7th innings. So, clearly, the time spent letting the Astros bat was wasted, nor was there any need to play any of the other innings in which nobody scored. It was, an economist might argue, a waste of time and money to play all those parts of the game that did not obviously affect the final outcome.
The problem, of course, is that we only know which parts of the game affect the outcome when the game has been played. It’s easy to say of students “that only a tiny fraction of what they learn durably stays in their heads.” Even if that is true (and I have some questions about how well we can measure what “durably stays”), it is impossible to know what that tiny fraction will include before the fact.
But there is also the issue of foundational learning. Let’s switch sports analogies for a moment.
In the 2021 Super Bowl (31-9, Tampa Bay Buccaneers over the Kansas City Chiefs), one of the biggest plays of the game was a beautiful little eight-yard pass that took Tampa Bay into the end zone from the 8 yard line. We could argue, in the interests of efficiency, that the game could be much shorter if we just played the crucial plays that resulted in obvious effects on the final score. But that touchdown pass was only possible because of a series of other plays that did not result in an actual score.
Learning is built on top of learning. What students learn this year is the foundation for what comes next, and often those foundations become taken for granted, housed in a body of knowledge that we often assume everyone “just knows.” Future learning, in or out of school, rests on a foundation built in previous years. The foundation stones helping hold up your house may not be readily visible or part of the house’s curb appeal, but it would still be a mistake to build the house without them.
Finally, it’s a mistake to frame learning as simply the business of pouring knowledge into an empty head in the hopes that it will not leak out later.
Athletes spend off-season time training, working out in weight rooms. Why bother? At no point in an athletic contest do game officials stop play action and have a leg press competition between players. The action of operating a weight machine is something they will never, ever use during competition.
The answer, obviously, is that they are building muscle power and endurance that will be used in competition. For students, school provides a variety of mental exercise and strengthening apart from any specific collection of facts. They can’t build that strength without course content (any more than an athlete benefits from working on a weight machine with no weights), but even after the actual content may be forgotten, the mental “muscle” remains.
If we could fast forward through our lives and know exactly what we were going to need, then perhaps we could design a perfectly efficient educational program. But we can’t.
So instead, we design a system that provides students the opportunity to collect all the tools they can, which in turn leads to other opportunities and choices to design their future as they wish. As a country, we don’t provide all students with all the opportunities that we ideally should. But to provide them with fewer opportunities so we can be efficient, so we can avoid wasting time and money, would produce a mean and meager education system.
