Can Education Save Us?

Obama’s invitation for questions yesterday brought over 100,000 inquiries from people across the country. Among the top categories was education, with over 13,000 questions voted on by 28,000 people. In times of massive layoffs, complete financial insecurity, and national struggles with homeownership and health care, why are Americans asking about education?

For starters, we’ve gotten to a point where we require or expect a costly and time-consuming college education for the majority of our workforce. With this expectation, Americans want to know how they will pay for college, or how they will get out of the debt they accumulated when they attended college ten, five, or even two years ago. These questions hinge on financial concerns, but they speak to a larger issue. In the last 20 years, we’ve turned to colleges and universities as a critical contributor to individual success. While this can be partially explained by the increase in specialization and growth of the knowledge economy in a post-industrial society, I don’t think this explains it all. Perhaps we’ve transformed higher education into a nearly mandatory task because these institutions aren’t as regulated by the government and therefore don’t seem to be failing us in the same way that our K-12 schools are. In some ways, we are unique in this situation; in many countries, secondary education is sufficient schooling for individuals to be deemed able to participate and engage in society in an informed and articulate way.

In the underbelly of all these questions about college loans and elementary school music programs, I think that Americans want to know how education might save us. An inadequate education system, in which students continue to fail against our nation’s own measures of success, can only hurt us. But an adequate or even innovative system, one that empowers all citizens with the ability to be productive, to think critically and creatively, and to master new tasks will make for a better equipped, more efficient workforce, a globally competitive American population, and, perhaps most importantly, a broader base of Americans able to say, “what were we thinking.”

As a superpower, we have very few colleagues to check us. We are able to behave irrationally or irresponsibly without too many peers to talk us down or call us out. What if we were able to check ourselves? What if within our population, we had diverse constituents equipped with the tools and the means to provide our own balances? This is the formula we rely upon for our government—why not rely upon it for our society as well?

Maybe America is sensing this. If we can turn our schools into 13-year breeding grounds of citizenship and articulation, rather than holding pens for rambunctious or starved (in any sense of the word) children, we may see one of the central social welfare mechanisms of our society transformed into the great arbitration tool of our nation. If our financial bailouts fail and the quality of life that most of us experience suffers, could our schools, the place where we train the next generation how to behave responsibly and act civilly, be what saves this nation in the long-run?

In my next post I’ll make some recommendations. These are lofty goals that require innovative thinking coupled with tangible reform. I’ll focus on how we can tweak our approach to school financing to ensure appropriate taxpayer contributions to education, and how we can reform how we use these dollars to ensure that the most valuable resources in schools are prioritized. It’s a meager start, but if we are to reverse the trends that got us to this awful place where we are now, we must begin at the beginning.