What Ails Education - Road to the Middle Class

WHAT’S wrong with education in the United States? It used to be that Americans were the most educated people in the world. Yet eduational performance seems to have peaked in the late 1960s, according to David Brooks.

[H]igh school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

So what went wrong? Researcher James Heckman says that it’s not falling school quality.

Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

What we need to do is boost educational attainment at the bottom, according to Brooks. And on this the GOP is largely irrelevant. It is in Barack Obama’s education proposals that you can find attempts to improve early childhood education. McCain talks about school choice rather than “human capital policies”

Óf course this takes for granted the old progressive template: problem + expert research + government program = solution. Is it, David Brooks?

Maybe the problem is not so much the education system but the decline in family environment. The Economist ran an article a year ago about marriage (sub) in the United States.

Since 1964 the percentage of children raised by single mothers has gone up from five percent to 10 percent — for college graduate mothers. But it’s gone up from 12 percent to 40 percent for mothers with less than high school education.

Now that sort of result goes beyond misfortune or even the monstrous injustice of the liberal welfare state.

This is nothing less than a disaster. Forty percent of kids of high-school dropouts being raised without a father?

It’s not just a question of fairness you know. It’s a question of safety. A child living with mother and boy-friend is 35 times more likely to suffer abuse that a child living with its married biological mother and father.

This is not a question about who has the best policy analysis of recent research in education. It goes back to the enormous social changes that have been visited on the poor by the last forty years of liberal social policy.

And every year that we just sit and do nothing the liberal welfare state dumps another cohort of kids in the garbage.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

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Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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