After reading BIDER's
post on over-education in China, I went looking for a damning quote on education and I found a full book - something so much more enjoyable.
In writing briefs, it's generally considered poor form to cite to a case more than about 40 years old, no matter how dead on-point the language is, because whoever wrote it is probably dead and therefore the judge can't snipe at him if he or she disagrees.
Thankfully, in the real world, words are golden no matter who said them, and reading Aristotle will tell you more about humanity in 10 pages than [random politician/pundit/worthless academic] will tell you in five years.
With that in mind I give you
The Curse of Education, a 1901 book by Englishman Harold Gorst. I imagine this to be obscure, and I can find nothing about Gorst except
his father seemed to be a lawyer involved in English policy-making with regards to education. I know the book is real because the
New York Times reported on it, but it seems Gorst and the book are otherwise neglected.
The main idea of the book is that rigid, mechanical educational processes kill genuine intellectual development and, thus, human progress. From the preface:
It is with education systems, with the universal method of cramming the mind with facts, and particularly with the manufacture of uniformity and mediocrity by subjecting every individual to a common process, regardless of his natural bent, that I have chiefly to find fault....[T]he foundations of all existing education systems are absolutely false in principle; and that teaching itself, as opposed to natural development and self-culture, is the greatest obstacle to human progress that social evolution has ever had to encounter.
The book is heavily steeped in a 1901 mindset. There are hints of social darwinism throughout and the book overwhelmingly focuses on men, devoting a chapter to good old-fashioned misogyny (he basically says that even though women lack the brain capacity of men, they use their minds more efficiently and to better practical use, e.g. developing superior habits of observation, because they've been "saved" from education - do with that what you will).
But there are still broad passages of the book that read like something any one of us concerned about the state of education in this country could write today, even though it's more concerned with elementary education. The book is public domain, so I'm going to copy from it liberally. Here's the opening:
The average educated man possesses no real individuality. He is simply a manufactured article bearing the stamp of the maker.
Like "Harvard" or "Yale" or "Thomas Jefferson School of Law," right?
Perhaps the worst evil from which the world suffers in an educational sense is the misplaced individual. Nothing is more tragic, and yet nothing is more common, than to see men occupying positions for which they are unfitted by nature and therefore by inclination; whilst it is obvious that, had the circumstances of their early training been different, they might have followed with success and pleasure a natural bent of mind tending in a wholly opposite direction. . . .
One has only to exert ordinary powers of observation to perceive that the world is not at all well ordered in this respect. . . . [O]ne of the most potent causes of this unhappy state of affairs is the exquisite infallibility with which a blind system is constantly forcing square pegs into round holes. . . .
[N]othing is more common in the States than to find individuals brought up to exercise functions for which they are wholly unfitted by natural capacity and inclination. . . .
The only thing considered necessary to equip a child for the battle of life is to get him an education, and nobody bothers his head about the principles or the effects of the process. The parent leaves everything to the school, regardless of the fact that schools do not pretend to concern themselves about the natural tendencies of their pupils. He is satisfied if his son is receiving the same education as his neighbour's, and is quite contented to leave the question of his future career to be an after-consideration.. . . .
[And] it scarcely requires pointing out that the enormous sums of money spent by Governments, by municipalities, and by private persons upon education, in order to produce this lamentable state of affairs, is so much waste and extravagance. Not only does it bring in no practical return, but it works out in a precisely opposite direction. Schools and colleges that only serve to produce anomalous and unnatural social conditions, that stifle genius and talent, and that cause widespread misery among the unsuitably educated, must be reckoned as a national loss. . . .
Notice any parallels between then and now? Enormous sums of money wasted? False ideas about education being a key independent of what the person is suited for? Educated people in the wrong field for them winding up miserable? I'm only two chapters in.
Skipping ahead a bit, we have this gem about the failure of the British elementary schools, which at the time (if I understand things correctly) was seen as a badge to a good career:
[T]he truth is, as we all know, that the product of the public elementary school is utterly useless, and generally wanting in intelligence. But these facts are only discovered by the victims themselves after years of bitter experience. Totally unfitted for any station in life, many of them leave school full of self-confidence in the belief that their superior education will secure them a good opening. Despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks, shop-assistants, and such-like. The result is, of course, an over-supply of candidates for employment of this kind.
An over-supply of white collar candidates who are "too good" for manual labor? Was this really written 109 years ago?
Schoolmasters are like mothers. They imagine that because a boy happens to have survived their system of teaching the latter must necessarily be the one perfect method—just as the fond mother, whose infant has been enabled by means of a phenomenal digestion to outlive a particular food, believes that it is the only food upon which babies can possibly be brought up.
The next time you heard a college dean bragging about the top students or the school while 70% of the graduates fail in real terms, remember this analogy. And when you read a story about college grads making minimum wage, recall that people across the ocean had the same reality check three generations ago.
After he has left school the same process is carried on at the university. Here he is crammed again with the same facts, the same rules, and the same ideas, borrowed from the same people, that are being dinned into scores of other young men who are working for their degree. Having gone conscientiously through this routine, he takes his degree with the rest.
This aim being accomplished, his educational career is over. He has graduated; that is to say, he has obtained a certificate to the effect that he has acquired a certain regulation stock of knowledge.
What happens next?
The unhappy graduate suddenly makes the discovery that his university qualification is not the ready passport to employment that he had fondly{64} imagined it to be. Unless he has a reasonable chance of a curacy and chooses to enter the Church, or can scrape together a few pupils to coach, or has the means to go on reading for the Bar or cramming for the public examinations, his prospects of immediate starvation are excessively favourable.
It was remarked some years ago by a writer who had spent a great deal of time in investigating life at common lodging-houses in the poorer districts of the Metropolis, that a startling number of university men seemed to drift into them. Yet these are the men who are supposed to have qualified themselves most highly for the holding of good positions. In some way, therefore, it is clear that this academic training has disadvantages which serve to handicap its victims severely in practical life. It cannot be mere accident that those who, according to all educational tradition, are classed as the most fit for responsible employment necessitating good mental ability, actually labour under obvious disabilities in this connection.
No, Virginia, it's not a new phenomenon.
Nature never intended all men to be cast in the same mould, and it is only the perversity of man himself that has brought the human race down to such a level. The stupidity of giving every scholar the same mental outfit is so self-evident as scarcely to need further comment. Even following the modern plan of stuffing minds instead of developing them, one would have thought that common sense would dictate the necessity of manufacturing as much variety as possible.
...
Competition amongst the 'well-educated' is not the result of over-population or of a too liberal supply of competent men. It is caused by uniformity of attainment; and until this is generally realized, one of the most pressing social problems cannot hope to find a solution.
Doesn't this damn the entire concept of giving out uniform degrees that are supposed to represent some kind of long-term accomplishment?
I've only combed out pertinent passages from the first half of the book, so feel free to explore the second half if curiosity so takes you there.
The grand message I got from this exercise is that even though Gorst's book is about education in the abstract, and mostly about elementary education in practical application (he's more concerned with mental development than the education of adult minds), there's quite a bit in there that speaks directly to the educational crisis in America.
Many of our problems, it seems, are universal. The trend towards uniformity, over-education, parental/counselor negligence, false faith in the education system: all of these show there is something innate about a recognized educational system that is wrong.
If Gorst noticed these flaws 109 years ago, surely any good, ethically-minded scholar or administrator in higher education would have noticed them by now, right? And maybe would have sought to correct the flaws, or prevent them from developing?
It's pretty clear to me that we have a system in the U.S. that promotes getting mechanized, uniform education at the cost of individuality, and that people often make dumb choices based on an irrational faith in the education system turning their little cogs into beautiful, money-making machines.
To win the battle over education in this country - or any other, it appears - we have to kill that faith and that mindset that seems, tragically, universal, or at the very least fully ground in by capitalist educators' perverse advertising.