The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

The heralded social dividends of education are largely illusory: rising education’s main fruit is not broad-based prosperity, but credential inflation

Once everyone can enrich their souls for free, government subsidies for enrichment forfeit their rationale. To object, 'But most people don't use the Internet for spiritual enrichment' is actually a damaging admission that eager students are few and far between. Subsidized education's real aim isn't to make ideas and culture accessible to anyone who's interested, but to make them mandatory for everyone who *isn't* interested . . . The rise of the Internet has two unsettling lessons . . . First: the humanist case for education subsidies is flimsy today because the Internet makes enlightenment practically free. Second: the humanist case for education subsidies was flimsy all along because the Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience. Behold: when the price of enlightenment drops to zero, remains embarrassingly scarce.

It is precisely because education is so affordable that the labor market expects us to possess so much. Without the subsidies, you would no longer need the education you can no longer afford.

the less education applicants have, the less applicants need to convince employers they’re worth hiring.

When spending collective resources, in contrast, second-guessing popular ideas is selfishly futile. Taxpayers who discover a beloved program is junk must pay their taxes like everyone else. Don’t like it? You’re only one person. Without the prominence and charisma to reverse public opinion, nay-saying won’t save you money but will make you enemies. The moral: in politics, critical thinking is an act of charity. Objective truth has to beg for spare change to survive. Owing to these perverse incentives, almost any political idea that becomes popular tends to remain popular. Even if it’s false. Even if it’s always been false.

By analogy, both sculptors and appraisers have the power to raise the market value of a piece of stone. The sculptor raises the market value of a piece of stone by shaping it. The appraiser raises the market value of a piece of stone by judging it. Teachers need to ask ourselves, “How much of what we do is sculpting, and how much is appraising?

Education can be glorious. At its best, to quote Roman philosopher Lucretius, it is a “voyage in mind throughout infinity.

Government heavily subsidizes education. In 2011, U.S. federal, state, and local governments spent almost a trillion dollars on it.5 The simplest way to get less education, then, is to cut the subsidies.

Higher education is the only product where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible. —Arnold Kling, “College Customers vs. Suppliers