Big and powerful as it is, the edu-class has never been so vulnerable. Never before have so many people been so open, or even eager, to doing without its services. Whatever reservoir of faith and heartfelt support America’s established schools and universities formerly enjoyed is gone. The edu-class’s continuing massive presence depends more on legacy sources of money—mostly government—than anything else. This is the edu-class’s life support. In fact, it has no other resource.
The political task for those of us whose interest lies in rebuilding an educational system that sustains our civilization is to cut off that life support, allowing the edu-class and its offerings compete on the merits of what they deliver. Even more complex and demanding, it must now provide and promote education that actually fortifies and replenishes our civilization. Cutting the edu-class’s financial life support will take neither more nor less than spreading the truth about what it does and does not do and why, given its officials’ hearts and minds, reasonable persons cannot expect it to improve upon what it already delivers.
Elections for school boards are the best ways of rearranging the attitudes of those in control of school financing at the K–12 level. America suffers from excessive concentration of educational power in too few school boards. Campaigning to split present boards into many such entities, each more closely controlled by parents, must go hand in glove with arguments for what should and should not be taught. Tying what government does to willingness to support it with taxes has helped define our civilization since the Magna Carta.
Governments will tax for, and compel, education. Legislating parents’ right to direct to which schools—public, private, or home—both tax revenue and pupils go is essential, not only for disciplining public school boards, but for ensuring genuine diversity, providing the relevant communities with knowledge about what kinds of teaching has which results.
With higher education being further removed from democratic control, political methods for remedying it are necessarily indirect, with one exception: undoing the massive student loan programs that have swollen and deformed colleges while shrinking the middle class and creating a generation of graduates both indebted and useless. Justice and political sense point the way. Since colleges in general and administrators in particular have been the loans’ chief beneficiaries, and since what they have done and not done is the prime reason why so many graduates are dysfunctional, legislatively transferring responsibility for the loans from taxpayers to the colleges would at once reduce their ability to pay themselves and to spend for frivolities, and ensure that, as students default, the consequences fall where they should. Taxpayers will shed no tears for the golden archipelago’s dwellers.
Government’s encouragement of science and technology and support for militarily relevant research pose the same problem today as they did the day Sputnik first circled the globe—more so, because China’s threat to the United States is bigger quantitatively and more focused on technology than Russia’s ever was. The challenge for us is to stop repeating the mistake we made by turning the National Defense Education Act and support for education in general into supporting more gender studies than genetics. Intellectually, keeping priorities straight is easy. Politically, it requires the courage publicly to tell hard truths about what is worth to our civilization and to our power as a nation.
Cutting the life support of higher education institutions requires exposing how little—if any—good they do by comparison with the price and opportunity costs of attending them. A little political action can go a long way in this regard by imposing on them the same requirements for transparency about the effects they have on those they serve as apply to other providers of goods and services.
Reputation (i.e., prestige) is literally the main product that they dispense. What do you get for four years at Old State U.? What about at Old Ivy? These questions deserve empirical answers. Institutions advertise the percentage of students they admit, and sometimes the entrants’ test scores, implying that they select the best and make them better. But the edu-class rejects categorically comparing students’ test scores (absolute and/or relative) before and after they attend. The vehemence of the rejection has increased as the amount of study required for graduation has fallen.
Legislating transparency in educational outcomes is the most potent weapon against scams. Fact-based challenges to established colleges’ hazy claims to beneficence can also help those who start up replacement institutions. But beyond empirical demonstration is that the substance of what is being taught, especially as it flows down from the peaks of academe, has corrupted America. All manner of corruption is so immanent from America’s commanding heights on down as to make superfluous the presentation of facts and arguments about it.
Whoever would reset education in America from its current path must begin by noting and denouncing its corruption of our civilization. Each new generation internalizes civilization as it does its maternal language. Restoring the integrity of the civilization into which we educate succeeding generations requires educators to pay attention to its language’s every word.