Education

Knowledge is power.

Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826

Child labor laws exist at least in part to promote education for children.  Of course, there are issues of safety, cruelty, health and disparity of pay since the children are unfair competition for adults who do the same job.  Children, you see, were paid less for the same amount of work. 

In 1832, the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen argued that “Children should not be allowed to labor in the factories from morning till night, without any time for healthy recreation and mental culture,” and because it “endangers their . . . well-being and health”

The first federal laws against child labor were passed in 1916.

It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.

James Russell Lowell, 1819-1891

It is hard to say whether individualism (libertarianism), anti-intellectualism or sheer greed is driving the efforts to eliminate public education, or at least reduce it to an ineffective shell of its former glory.  Perhaps all three to different degrees lead conservatives to denigrate public education and simultaneously work to defund it. 

At one time, public schools were held responsible for decreasing competitiveness of American students compared with students from other countries.  Studies were conducted to see how to fix the system, but there have been no initiatives that have significantly improved the public education system.  Rather than attempt to make public schools more effective, many parents and legislators have made the decision that “alternative” education should replace public education, at least for some children.

Simultaneously, two trends in public education have taken hold for apparently similar reasons.  First, many people became enamored of Home Schooling.  Second, private schools were put forth as an example of excellence in education, and some states have promoted transferring public funds to private schools in order to support the education of children who would otherwise have only been able to afford public schools.

Some of the reasons behind these trends reveal something about the motives of the parents and legislators.  Public schools cannot endorse religion.  Public schools were said to be dangerous because of the high percentage of children from backgrounds that some associate with a tendency towards criminal activity (or a lack of morality).  Public schools were decaying physically, and the teachers were not accountable to the public.  Public schools teach evolution and other scientific ideas that may conflict with an interpretation of the Bible. 

(NCES)

Reason for homeschooling	Number of homeschooled students	Percent	s.e.
Can give child better education at home	415,000	48.9	3.79
Religious reason	327,000	38.4	4.44
Poor learning environment at school	218,000	25.6	3.44
Family reasons	143,000	16.8	2.79
To develop character/morality	128,000	15.1	3.39
Object to what school teaches	103,000	12.1	2.11
School does not challenge child	98,000	11.6	2.39
Other problems with available schools	76,000	9.0	2.40
Child has special needs/disability	69,000	8.2	1.89
Transportation/convenience	23,000	2.7	1.48
Child not old enough to enter school	15,000	1.8	1.13
Parent's career	12,000	1.5	0.80
Could not get into desired school	12,000	1.5	0.99
Other reasons*	189,000	22.2	2.90

Advocates of home or private schooling have conducted studies to prove that home or private schooling produced better (or at least similar) outcomes for students, but the results are disputed for various reasons.  Philosophically, public schools are intended to be an equalizing force in society for the economically disadvantaged under the assumption that equal opportunity for advancement is related to equal educational opportunity.  Opposition to home schooling also derives from a potential for social isolationism, child abuse and even religious extremism. 

There are also advocates for a complete lack of any formal teaching at home or elsewhere.  This idea is called “unschooling” or “natural learning” and assumes that children will learn what they need to know on their own without formal instruction.

When I reviewed the studies that examine home schooling, I found an overwhelming number of organizations whose agenda was specifically to promote home schooling.  Organizations with strong “right wing” philosophies from the Cato Institute to the TEA party have endorsed studies, but there is virtually no information from well conducted multicenter mainstream educational organizations.  This may be due in part due to the disorganization of home schooling (by design). 

I can’t say what the ultimate effect of such efforts to dismantle public schooling will be, but clearly home and private schooling are being promoted at the expense of public schools.

My suspicion, based in part on personal experience, is that many children who are home schooled (or “unschooled”) will be unable to be competitive with children who have had opportunities provided by public education.  My experience was that, despite a sincere effort to home school my son (at significant personal expense), my son has become trapped in a job that is relatively low paying with no opportunity for advancement.  Perhaps my son was never destined to compete for high paying jobs or great academic success, or perhaps it is just my personal failure, but how many other home schooled children did not receive scholarships for college, or simply “aimed lower” academically and financially because of their lack of exposure to competitive environments provided by public schools?

One parent’s disappointment with home schooling does not justify a prohibition against home schooling of course.  In fact, I suspect that many highly motivated parents will do better than teachers in public schools, but how many are simply lost to follow up?  How many would we classify as “dropouts”?  Studies of home schooling hopefully include all children that stay at home instead of attending public schools.  If they focus only on SAT scores, ACT scores or college admission testing, they will have missed children like my son.  He never took any of those tests, and he never obtained a college degree.  He would be invisible to any measure of success or failure of home schooling.

I have been wondering about the ultimate fate of these home-schooled children.  How do they fare in society at large?  How many become college educated?  How many enter the teaching profession?  How many obtain advanced degrees?  I have read at least one study that claims these children generally become productive members of society active in their communities.  That certainly sounds better than becoming a drug-addicted prostitute or gangster, but how does their achievement compare with their potential?  Are these children reaching some limited goals their parents are setting, or are they going beyond their parents’ expectations?  Can a genius accomplish as much with home schooling as he or she could have with the support of an educational establishment with resources to bring them to the pinnacle of their abilities?  Perhaps studies may reveal the impact of home schooling on a large scale, but measuring potential and matching that to accomplishment may be impossible. 

Charter, or private, schools are perhaps more capable of providing an environment that is at least similar to public schools in terms of socialization, although many private schools specifically cater to the prejudices of people who oppose public schooling because of sincerely mistaken ideas about science, history or race.  In some cases, indoctrination replaces teaching, and critical thinking is discouraged.

Can a private school that will not teach evolution produce students that are competitive in biological sciences?  Can parents who are themselves uneducated or otherwise ignorant consistently teach their children chemistry and mathematics and “graduate” students that can become chemists and mathematicians?

The diversion of public funds to private educational organizations via voucher programs facilitates a profit-based system less interested in education than profit.  Private enterprise does things only as well as necessary to continue to receive funds.  One must wonder though, what will become of voucher programs and public assistance to charter schools as public funds dry up because of declining revenue.  Won’t their incentive to promote universal education suffer from the same fate as public schools? 

There was recently a charter school in Michigan designed to provide educational opportunities for pregnant underprivileged children.  As part of the state’s austerity program, the school is being closed.  It seems that providing these kinds of services to these kinds of children was not the aim of the charter school program.  What now?  “Home schooling”?

If I were to speculate about the kind of society that we are “designing” for a future without public schools, I envision an agrarian society, or perhaps an industrial society where there are no opportunities for employment other than “unskilled labor” or, at best, skilled trade school graduates.  The rich and their progeny will always be educated, and for the accumulation of wealth, education provides a major advantage.

It is only the ignorant who despise education.

Publilius Syrus, First century B.C.

Corporations

Corporations do not have a conscience.  That may seem odd given that they are organizations that are composed of human beings, but although the individuals may have a conscience, they are required to act on behalf of the corporation, not their own sense of morality.  On the other hand, in the absence of accountability, greed can overcome patriotism, empathy, loyalty or any other human characteristic.

Individuals are good at self-deception, and we can convince ourselves of the benefits to society generally even though we recognize that actions may be harmful to large numbers of people.  There is a filter for decisions in corporations that judges actions based on the benefit of any action to the corporation and by extension to the profits of the corporation.  The overriding purpose of corporations is not to better society, but to maximize profit. 

The idea that a corporation might care about pollution, workers’ rights or health, or even the quality of the product of the corporation comes from the fact that adverse consequences hurt the bottom line.  Pollution can result in fines and bad publicity.  Workers can sue.  Liability for dangerous or ineffective products can drain money from the profits.  Corporations weigh the benefits and risks of their actions, and when the penalties for actions are sufficiently harmful, they change their ways.

The flip side is that corporations do a lot of good.  They provide jobs, goods and services, and without these our standard of living would be dismal indeed.  They donate to charities, help out the community, pay taxes (sometimes), and provide benefits for their employees over and above salaries.  Even if everything they do is somehow to improve their public relations and ultimately benefit the bottom line, it cannot be said that everything they do is harmful.

The problem is that without some incentive, direct or indirect, for doing good, corporations would do nothing good.  If it were legal to just take money without providing anything in return, and there were no adverse consequences that would redound to lower profits, fines or loss of employees (by injury, resignation or strike), they would.  We give the name “subsidy” to this practice.  If their actions (through pollution, monopolistic practices or unsafe working conditions) created profit without any penalties, they would have no compunction about continuing the same practices.  If there were no minimum wage and no restrictions on child labor, corporations would certainly take advantage of the labor force.  Well, until the labor force rebelled, quit or went on strike.

By analogy, a person walking a dog would be less likely to pick up the poop if there was no penalty. And smokers would not voluntarily segregate themselves or refrain from smoking in public restaurants if no one asked them to do so.

It has been argued that the absence of accountability led to unrestrained greed that resulted in the recent Recession.  Stockholders were left to pay the penalties for the malfeasance of the executives in corporations, while the executives themselves left with their pockets lined with gold.  Or stayed and continue to stuff their pockets to this day.  Governments provide some accountability (assuming that the legislators and regulators are not in bed with the companies they purport to regulate), but even then the executives are rarely (or never) held personally liable for their own misconduct, even if that misconduct results in illegal actions on the part of the corporation.

When Ayn Rand wrote of John Galt, the protagonist of Atlas Shrugs who persuaded the wealthy industrialists to leave the country, she wrote of an amoral culture of greed and personal aggrandizement at the expense of everyone else.  Corporations are the ultimate Galts; without loyalty or patriotism, not beholding to any system of ethics, incapable of mercy, compassion or sympathy, acting solely on the principle of “rational self-interest”. 

It may seem that corporations, workers, government and the public have reached an uneasy truce.  This would be incorrect.  They aren’t all being good corporate “citizens”; many are “Going Galt.”

The cost of manufacturing goods overseas is significantly lower than here in the United States, and corporations have no qualms about taking advantage of the appetite of Americans for cheap goods imported from other countries.  They have found a way to avoid laws against pollution.  They have found a workforce that will work for less than minimum wage, no benefits, in unsafe conditions.  They have found ways to avoid paying taxes. 

The transfer of manufacturing to these foreign countries obviously benefits the corporations.  They made a calculated gamble that Americans would rather pay less for their goods than seriously engage in a campaign of “Buy American!”  They see the negatives as less than the positives, and whatever ill will they may be engendering on the part of the average American is overshadowed by the abundant profits they have garnered.

Some people on the right see the workers as having shot themselves in the foot by demanding safe working conditions, generous benefits and high salaries.  The American workforce, they contend, negotiated itself out of the jobs they lost to foreigners.

Carrying this criticism to its logical conclusion, the American workforce should become like the Chinese workforce to be competitive. 

Really?

Without adequate financial incentives to keep Americans employed (or adequate disincentives in the form of taxes or other penalties for exporting jobs), there is little doubt that this downward spiral will continue until the United States is unable to afford to pay for even imported goods. 

Jobs, jobs, jobs

There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.

            ▪          Warren Buffet, New York Times, November 26, 2006.

The signs are there.  Granted, there are many ways to interpret the signs showing the economic status of the United States, but I see signs all around me that say the United States is in decline.  Every day I pass the building that housed the Buster Brown Shoe Company and I am reminded that almost all of the shoes worn in the United States are manufactured in other countries.  I live in a building that housed the manufacturers of shoes, Catholic school uniforms, gun holsters and party supplies.  It’s a loft apartment building now.  On my way to work, I pass closed factories and abandoned burned out buildings.

Michael T. Snyder writes, “What we are witnessing is the slow-motion deindustrialization of the United States.” 

There are statistics that back up this assertion.

 The statistics and graphics show what is also plainly obvious; that manufacturing is a less significant part of the American economy.  The difference between manufacturing and finance is that the latter does not employ a large labor force.  It does not, therefore, contribute to the standard of living of the average American. 

From the diagram below, it can be seen that the number of people employed by manufacturing has declined significantly.  Even if the total amount of manufacturing has increased, the labor force necessary to maintain the factories and do the work has clearly declined.  Several factors including automation have led to less need for laborers.  

 There are now fewer jobs for manufacturing than at the end of the Great Depression.  It is ironic that many of these jobs consist of assembling parts that are manufactured in other countries.  Even those jobs are in danger of extinction.

Here is an example of a job that is decreasing if not vanishing because of automation:  Lathe and Turning Machine Tool Setters, Operators.  From an article on job losses:

“Turns out there are still people who make things in this country, cutting and shaping metals and plastics with these old but faithful machines. The main reason this job will be declining in the next decade is due to a gradual switch to computer-controlled machines. Oh, and did we mention robots? That’s right, companies will start to rely more on robots to do the tasks that people once did in order to cut costs and be more competitive. So these tool setters will gradually be phased out and switched with computer programmers who understand how to run the new technology.”   

There are dozens more jobs being replaced with automation described in the article which can be found at the following address (URL):  http://www.mainstreet.com/slideshow/career/employment/endangered-professions-25-declining-jobs?cm_ven=outbrain&psv=outbrainselectedarticle&obref=obnetwork

Jobs being shipped overseas have received a lot of attention in the news.  Even if other jobs in other sectors are available, there is downward wage pressure from the increase in overseas employment by American companies.  Wages and income have been virtually stagnant since the 1980s. 

From an article entitled “The Only Things That Matter… And No One Talks About” written by Phoenix Capital Research comes a summary of the problem that is concise and understandable.  Here is a small excerpt:

“The fact of the matter is that the US economy, on a structural basis, is BROKEN. Starting in the early ‘70s, we outsourced our manufacturing and began shifting to a services economy (particularly financial services). We also outsourced our wealth to Asia, OPEC, and Wall Street.

“Because of this, the average American has seen his income decline dramatically in the last 30 years. This is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain. Forty years ago one parent worked and people got by. Today both parents work (if they can find jobs) and still can’t have a decent quality life.

“THESE are the items that matter for economic growth: jobs and income. If you want people to have money for them to spend and consequently boost economic growth, they need to have decent jobs that pay them well.”

When I read this, I was reminded of a story about Henry Ford who reportedly gave his employees good wages so that they would be able to purchase his automobiles (and to reduce turnover at his factory).  Of course, for most manufacturing jobs, the employer could not assume that giving his employees better wages would result in increased demand for his particular product, but as a general principle, the better the wages for the most people, the greater the demand for products of all kinds.

Increasing profits by employing an overseas workforce is both shortsighted and ultimately self-destructive. 

On some level, I am sure that companies shipping their manufacturing jobs overseas realize this, but it seems that they are not persuaded by arguments such as the above because they assume that their small stake in employment will not significantly affect the purchasing power of the public.  Other companies will pay the wages that will buy their products.  On the other hand, some executives have taken a decidedly anti-labor and anti-United States attitude.  Remarks from an editorial by Bill McClellan in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from May 2, 2011 are revealing:

David Farr received the Citizen of the Year award in March. He is the CEO of Emerson. He is best known for complaining about labor laws, environmental regulations and health care reform. In November of 2009, he spoke at a luncheon in Chicago and said, "What do you think I'm going to do? I'm not going to hire anybody in the United States." He would instead expand in what he called "best-cost" countries.

…

We're not hiring in the U.S.

This is serious stuff. Farr, and others of his mind-set, are talking about breaking a social contract. It's an unwritten contract, but it's real. It's what we've always told our young people: If you work hard and do the right thing, you'll have an opportunity. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but there is a job.

In Farr's defense, it really is cheaper to send work overseas. People in developing countries — "best-cost" countries — will work for very little.

On the other hand, Farr made $24.8 million last year. That's $476,923 a week. Figuring a five-day workweek, that's $95,384 a day. Which means $47,692 each morning before lunch.

The signs say that if this trend continues, we will cross a line beyond which the demand for products will drop.  It is a downward spiral fed by corporate greed and consumer frugality, and it portends poorly for the United States.

It’s a long way down, and it will take a while, but we will see abundant blame and recriminations, political opportunism, and proposals for solutions that are self-serving and frequently counterproductive.  Fasten your seatbelt, because it has already started.