Rory Sutherland makes a valid point about education.
while we may want everyone else to be equally healthy (bee), we want our children to receive a better education than our neighbour’s children (chimp). If parents were more honest about their chimp heritage, they might also admit that, when choosing a school, they care less about the staff or the facilities (something government might solve) than about placing their children within an appropriate peer-group (something it can’t).
Pointer from Jason Collins. I agree that status-seeking plays a role in education, but I disagree that it plays no role in health care.
However, Sutherland goes overboard in his description of life as “Darwinist.” He focuses on status as a zero-sum game. The point that economists make is that while this game is going on, there is also a positive-sum game, involving trade, innovation, and growth.
Best quote: ‘They think we’re Nazis and we think they’re idiots.’
Perfectly captures the problem of someone trying to grapple publicly with the implications of taboo truths.
It may be that economists have a tendency to underestimate the zero-sum game aspect of the job market, though, which is what the sharp elbowed parenting is about. On balance most well-educated adults would prefer to spend their working time with other well-educated adults, so would prefer to be a badly paid adjunct than a well paid high school teacher. These jobs may or may not have status but they are in some sense “cushy” and there are only so many of them, because the market more democratically prevents people living in a Caplanian “bubble” and forces them to search for ways to trade with the masses. Which, while it may be optimally efficient, may not be particularly pleasant for those who in the educated class who don’t get into their chosen bubble.
Status seeking is not one-dimensional — even in education. There really is no ‘great chain of status’.
“we want our children to receive a better education than our neighbour’s children (chimp).”
Do we? The problem with that claim is that not all parent agree on what constitutes a ‘better education’. For some, the arts are paramount while for others, the arts are trivialities and what really matter are math and science. Some parents care (truly, madly, deeply) about athletic opportunities for their budding superstars. Still others care most about their children being taught within a particular religious tradition.
I don’t think most parents have strong broad views on what should be taught in schools, though they may have strong opinions on a few topics.
But whatever the parents think school should be about – they still care deeply about the peer groups to which their children will be exposed when they are doing that preferred thing.
And, in my experience, they mostly care about those peer groups in the same way: keeping their kids away from ‘bad apples’ who are also ‘bad influences’ who could ‘derail’ their kids off the success tracks with as high a probability as possible.
This question ties in directly with the signalling value of education thesis – usually constrained to higher education, but applicable to primary and secondary schooling as well. Besides basic intellectual skills and whatever has to be done to maximize attractiveness to college admissions personnel, most parents don’t seem to care much that their children don’t retain most of the informational content to which they spend the vast majority of their time being exposed.
If school were actually about learning the content, then it’s clear that for most people, most schooling is a gigantic waste of time in terms of knowledge which is its purported goal. That cries out for investigation and explanation, and the truth is not flattering. I hope Arnold Kling decides to discuss the connection.
Education is not for the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think
-Albert Einstein
Unfortunately, most schooling these days, including universities, perhaps especially the famous ones, no longer strive to help the student order their thoughts. “Education,” schooling really, is now about low order testing of short term fact retention.
“Thinking leads man to knowledge. He may see and hear, and read and learn whatever he pleases, and as much as he pleases; he will never know anything of it, except that which he has thought over, that which by thinking he has made the property of his own mind. Is it then saying too much if I say that man, by thinking only, becomes truly man? Take away thought from man’s life, and what remains?”
– Johann Pestalozzi
“The power of doing something not taught by nature or instinct; power or skill in the use of knowledge; the practical application of the rules or principles of science.”
– Johann Pestalozzi (defining education as the “generation of power”)