The Value of Education

Rod Dreher: The soft bigotry of high expectations:

"Crawford makes a philosophical case for choosing the trades over college in his brilliant new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work , which launches an intellectually formidable attack on the way our culture has come to devalue manual labor. This bracingly countercultural book, written by a scholar who left white-collar work to open a motorcycle repair shop, defiantly rejects received wisdom about the meaning of work in America today.

We have constructed an economy and a society based on the idea that work has no essential relation to human nature, and thus to human flourishing and human happiness. A good society, says Crawford (after Aristotle), is one in which men and women are free to pursue excellence, according to their individual natures. It's not like that with us. Say that a particular high school senior might be happier and more productive going to trade school than enrolling in college, and you risk being denounced for harboring the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Crawford denounces this as false egalitarianism. 'The best sort of democratic education is neither snobbish nor egalitarian,' he writes. 'Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best.' "

Read the reviews too.

An interesting idea, and a changing perspective. Although a degree does opens up doors, it should be valued for it's educational merits, and not only as an utilitarian objective. Education opens and broadens the mind, and enriches one's life. A good education teaches one how to think, how to reason and problem solve. All very necessary in "non-intellectual" fields. Which makes me think how sad it is that grade schools have been dumbed down in recent generations.

My father's grade school education in the 1940's and early 1950's was much more challenging. I'll never forget him complaining to the school when he found out we were reading Jack London in eleventh grade English, a book he read in sixth grade! Maybe a degree wouldn't be so important if a high school degree actually meant something. Anyway, I think a good number of trade vocations require an associates degree, probably to make up for the lack of education in grade school. I know too many of my classmates who could not read or write well after being graduated for high school, but eventually caught up in community college remedial classes.

As I browse through old readers from the turn of the century through the early 1920's at Google Books, I realize what we've lost along the way. Meanwhile Obama is unveiling a $4 billion school improvement plan. I'm not sure throwing money at the issue is a great idea. Education should be simple - teach the basics well with excellent materials and curricula. Much of the school books for public schools that I've seen are junk. I wouldn't use them for homeschool even if they were free. And most importantly, let the teacher's do their magic rather than micromanaging them with standards which require them to teach to test. Let them teach children a love for learning. A child's potential can not be measured.