Indeed, Caplan has done us a service by compelling us to pay attention to a number of distressing facts: U.S. adults who have gone through our public schooling system are astonishingly ignorant of basic civics, history and science. Millions of people who start college will never finish. And the payoff for schooling is primarily about how many hours we have sat in classrooms rather than how much we have actually learned. Tick the boxes, get your degree and employers will smile on you, regardless of whether you gained any real skills and knowledge along the way.But Caplan’s instrumental, bottom-line solutions of practical subject matter and financial austerity certainly won’t help. Indeed, there is a twisted logic at play when we use dismal average student outcomes to justify the call for public divestment from education. When the most vulnerable students fail to thrive in inferior schools, we attribute their sub-par performance to their own inferiority. To tell these students they need fewer credentials in the name of social efficiency is a gross injustice.Surely, schools should be in the business of opening rather than closing doors.
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