Wasted on the Young?

On Sunday mornings, my local public radio station broadcasts a BBC News segment called “More or Less” – a regular feature exploring key statistics which describe our changing world.

This Sunday, presenter Ruth Alexander interviewed Dr. Hans Rosling, a Swedish expert on international public health.  Dr. Rosling, who possesses a delightful sense of humor, is founder of the “Ignorance Project” – an attempt to bring citizens of the Western world up-to-date about shifting realities in what they insist on calling the “developing world”.

Reversing roles, Dr. Rosling posed three questions to Ms. Alexander.

First, he asked about measles vaccines, which public health experts agree is the most important vaccine for preventing deaths among young children.  What percentage of the world’s children receive the measles vaccine?  The choices were 20%, 50%, or 80%.

Second, Dr. Rosling asked about the world’s population of children under fifteen.  In 1950, there were fewer than one billion children.  This number had doubled by 2000.  What is the projected number of children in the year 2100?  The options were 2, 3 or 4 billion.

Finally, he turned to the percentage of the world’s population living in desperate poverty.  What trend has prevailed over the past twenty years?  Has that percentage doubled, remained stable, or decreased by half?

Listening, I made my guesses along with the presenter.  I actually got two right.  More than 80% of the world’s children receive the life-saving measles vaccine.  The percentage of people living in extreme poverty has been halved in the past two decades.

I was quite wrong about population trends.  At the end of this century, the projected population of children will be back around 2 billion – about what it was in 2000.  But this will be a crowded century.  World population will rise to 10 or 11 billion before it starts to decline.

I had no idea.

Dr. Rosling asked these same questions to attendees at the prestigious World Economic Forum – at Davos, Switzerland.  The world’s political and corporate leaders did poorly, outscoring random guessing on only one question in three. 

Most educated people, Dr. Rosling said, would do worse – for this reason:  We don’t continue to educate ourselves after we leave college or graduate school.  Our image of the world might be more or less accurate in our early 20s, but thereafter, in grows increasingly outdated. 

Now, here, I must stop referring to Dr. Rosling.  “More or Less” is great radio – and I intend to sign up for the podcast – but it only runs ten minutes.  Ms. Alexander had to thank Dr. Rosling and sign off.

But the lesson of these three questions remains to be examined.  In a sense, it's no marvel that even the Davos crowd did so poorly on the Dr. Rosling’s pop quiz.  Our educational system - our very view of what education is - concerns itself almost entirely with young people.

From time immemorial, the notion of education has focused on transferring knowledge about the world – as it is – to young people. 

Consider our images of education:  parents teaching toddlers their letters; a professor in front of a classroom; a scoutmaster conducting a knot-tying session in a forest glade; a coach helping an athlete improve his technique. 

Each involves an older person passing along time-honored lore to a younger one.

And there’s nothing wrong with that – except that it doesn’t always work, for three reasons:

First, we live in a world which is changing at a faster rate than it has ever changed – at least, since humans evolved.

Second, we live longer lives, on average, than humans have lived in the past.  Thus, the amount of change which takes place between childhood and the end of active adulthood is enormous – and would be, even if change weren’t happening so fast.

Third, as citizens of a republic – and citizens of a planet which, with technology, seems to be moving in a more democratic direction – our need to keep up with our changing world is greater than ever.

The fact that most of us don’t keep up is usually blamed on the fact that we’re busy.

But, looked at another way, it might be said that we're too busy because we divide up the tasks of a lifetime in a way that no longer makes sense.  When we're young,  we're too busy learning, and not busy enough dealing with the "real world".  Thereafter, we're too busy with everyday problems to continue educating ourselves.

And it doesn't have to be that way.

An infant born today, in America, can expect to spend twenty of her first twenty-four years in school.   More, if she wants to enter a profession.

After that, with the exception of job-related training, she will likely spend sixty or seventy years outside the realm of public education – ending her life in a world she simply doesn’t understand.

Perhaps it’s time we moved away from front-loading education so entirely - giving young people a taste of reality before their mid-20s, and building serious continuing education into the lives of adults.

Perhaps we need to get young people into the adult world a few years earlier – re-organizing public education, through a range of technologies, so that it continues to take place throughout a citizen’s entire lifespan.

Educating young people is essential, but it’s not enough. 

Perhaps – as with youth – too much of our educational effort is wasted on the young. 

Things Worth Learning

To return to a familiar theme, I posit this:  American education lacks a sense of mission, and consequently, manages to spend colossal sums without accomplishing much.

Having no mission, American educators – and the politicians who have invaded and usurped the educational system – have adopted two default positions.

First, because both political parties are entirely subservient to the lords of unsustainable, corporate consumer capitalism, education has increasingly come to be linked to the sort of job-training responsible companies once did for themselves.

Today’s great corporations – which already avoid paying their fair share of taxes – demand that the burden of training their employees be funded by those of us who do.

For the corporations, this not only represents an enormous savings.  It also means that – having invested little or nothing in training their workers – they can casually discard individual employees, or whole battalions of them.

For the nation, it means that young people are, year by year, less prepared for their primary responsibility – that of citizenship in a self-governing republic.

Second, under the leadership of George W. Bush – who benefitted less from his own education than any president since Warren Harding – the United States adopted politicians’ pet project of imposing high-stakes standardized testing at the Federal level.

High-stakes testing is a politician’s dream.  By making teachers and local administrators strictly responsible for whether students memorize a finite body of useless information, politicians can have it both ways.  If the kids do well filling in their bubble-sheets, politicians can claim credit for how well schools are doing.  If the kids do poorly, citizens will be inclined to blame the teachers – not the politicians.

Heads, I win.  Tails, you lose.

As a result of these two trends – the replacement of education for citizenship by training for vanishing jobs, and the replacement of teacher-led pedagogy by a top-down testing regime – our schools increasingly turn out young people who can’t see beyond the present.

Offered nothing of enduring value upon which to exercise their curiosity and critical intelligence, today’s kids are ever more focused upon the evanescent fascinations of the internet.

What’s timeless yields to what’s trending.  And the schools offer no resistance.

Of course, it’s inevitable that youth will be drawn to novelty.  It’s the nature of adolescence to attend to the new, the fashionable, even the outrageous.

But the job of education – in every civilization worthy of the name – has involved balancing this natural proclivity for ephemera with the disciplined study of enduring classics.

Schools dedicated to achieving this balance produce graduates who will grow into citizens capable of sustaining the nation.  Schools that fail turn out herds of perpetually-distracted sheep, willing to perform mindless – even soulless – work in return for the means to purchase ever more useless stuff. 

And here’s the great irony of it all:  The products of post-classical education are, of all American generations, the most insistent upon their own individualism – even as they follow the herd into the electronic marketplace, the mega-church, or two-option voting booth.

For forty years now, America’s schools – even its elite universities – have done nothing so well as turn out people who insist on thinking for themselves, but who lack the essential equipment for doing so.

 

People who know no history, no philosophy, no literature – nothing of the classics of humanity’s past – lack the capacity to challenge the present or imagine a different future.

Stuck in the Valley of the Present, they cannot even imagine the vistas open to the few who climb the slopes and gaze out on the sunlit mountaintops and dark valleys of the past – or the mist-shrouded topography of the future.

It isn’t difficult to believe we live at the end of an age – not in the apocalyptic sense, but in the historical sense.  Our particular brand of modernity has become both irrational and unsustainable. 

Just look at how we live.  Our particular brand of capitalism is not based – as was Adam Smith’s – on more efficiently meeting basic human needs, but on mindless consumerism, driven by inescapable, non-stop advertising.   When we started building enormous complexes of rental units to store the stuff we cannot cram into our closets, attics, basements and garages, that mindlessness became apparent.

But it’s more than that.  Our economy is also based on recklessly plundering finite natural resources; heedlessly fouling the only planet yet known to be capable of supporting human life; and destroying the habitats of other species upon whom our own lives – and our sense of beauty and wonder – depend.

And there are far too many of us, living increasingly longer lives.  As our lives decrease in meaning and quality, we substitute quantity – both in numbers and in years.

Indeed, our mad insistence on mere human existence as being valuable in itself is proof enough that we no longer understand the notion that there are things – beyond having a pulse or minimal brain-stem function – which make human life worth living.

But then, how could we?  Our schools no longer teach these things.