Some want football tickets, others poetry readings.
And the difference is?
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What Is Recreational Education?
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Metrics Column • July 2014
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It was probably Anne Isabella Ritchie in the 1880s who first wrote, “Give me a fish and I eat for a day, teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.” The lady understood the difference between consumption and investment. Investment produces more goods and services while consumption ends the process. A capital good is a tool that’s used to produce other things, sometimes consumer goods. There are two types of education, investment education and consumption education. You can give Johnny and Jane an appreciation for music, or you can teach them to make it. In the first case they become more accomplished consumers of music, in the second they make music for consumers. In fact, there are many artists who believe that you cannot be an artist until you have an audience. They argue that say, Emily Dickinson, was not a poet until her work was discovered posthumously and published.
It’s said that mass education in America has three major functions; to socialize students, to create a skilled work force, and to create critical thinkers. That first … the socializing thing … essentially means to assimilate youth into the American culture so that they’re aware of whatever we think is anti-social at any given moment, and consequently have them, well, not do stuff like that. Serious folks call that the acculturation process. We do that in almost all of the curriculum but it’s strongest dosage is contained in the arts and humanities courses like history, literature, government, and the like. It’s particularly used to make little boys behave more like little girls by sort of sedating their aggressiveness with the manners of novels written to entertain women during the 19th century. That curriculum is heavy on the “moral-of-the-story” which is usually consistent with the Golden Rule, or that good-triumphs-in-the-end. Like that.
The second big job of mass education, and the one that its consumers most willingly pay for, is skill creation.
Warning, here’s a digression. Consumers of any good or service are the people who pay for it. Consequently neither students, nor their parents, are consumers of K-12 public education. They are its product. Be very careful about this point, it’s crucial. Overwhelmingly those who pay for public education are taxpayers. They are its consumers.
Now back to my point about skill creation. Taxpayers, more or less willingly, pay for skill creation, as an investment in the creation of further goods and services. They expect a return on their money, and consequently that is what politicians and public educators promise them. From the days of Thaddeus Stevens, arguably the father of public education in America, the argument for a significant redistribution of money from taxpayers to educators was that the product of K-12 would be an investment good: An investment in human capital.
That human capital component … that return on the taxpayer’s investment … might be in more nurses, engineers, and mechanics, AND it might be in an overwhelming group of graduates who are less likely to be socially or even criminally disruptive … the acculturation thing. In both of those cases taxpayers can measure, either in employment data, or in criminal justice data, the return on their investment.
Then there’s the third “function” of mass education: Critical thinking.
It’s hard to nail down its definition. In a way it’s like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s legendary definition of obscenity when he wrote that it’s difficult to define, but you knows it when you sees it. After reading scores of definitions by learned scholars it seems as if critical thinking guides beliefs and seeks answers, actions, and conclusion through the evaluation of observation, experience, reflection, reasoning and communication. It teaches how to test beliefs against facts in order to act rationally. And that it is not only a usefully productive tool, but results in students who are more adaptive over a lifetime of workplace change. It’s supposed to be like creating logical umbrellas to open-up against emotional storms. (Does critical thinking create more adaptable graduates? I’ve analyzed mid career salaries of graduates in an article on our website,How Much Do College Grads Earn? 2013–14 Mid-Career salaries by college major—revealed at www.business2businessonline.com)
Remember now, it’s the keepers of the Arts and Humanities, who are in charge of revealing the morals of the stories used to civilize our little savages. Beyond teaching the very basic skills of literacy, the rest of the expenditures made on these disciplines involves that acculturation thing. Consequently, Arts and Humanities educators argue that critical thought is the other “skill” which they impart to their charges. In fact, to hear scholars in Liberal Arts tell it, you’d think that it was their monopoly.
In fact strategic thinking is an essential component of skill education … whether it be vocational or professional. According to experts, strategic thinking seeks innovation and imagines new and very different futures that may lead to redefining core beliefs and even life’s purpose. Strategic planning then supports strategies developed through strategic thinking to accomplish those beliefs and purposes. Strategic thinking not only involves the essentials of critical thought but deliberately separates planning from action. It clearly separates strategy developed from the evaluation of fact from rational tactics that are its result. Moreover there is no evidence that mastery in strategic thought renders students less adaptable to changing environments. In fact workplace success of engineers, lawyers, doctors, economists, and scientists seems to reveal exactly the opposite. A significant percent of the successful entrepreneurs in our markets boast technical training and degrees.
It’s pretty clear that the consumers of public education think they are paying for the development of strategicthinking when they are being sold critical thinking instead. And it’s also obvious that the Arts and Humanities folks neither have a monopoly on preparing informed and rational graduates, nor necessarily the best method in achieving that preparation. It’s probable that by third or fourth grade that the acculturation process can be handed off from the keepers-of-story-morals to the vocational and professional skill educators who can, and probably should, combine training in rational decision making with specific training in order to maximize the taxpayers investment in K-12 education.
Which brings us to higher education.
We hear politicians argue for ever-increasing “investments” in education at every level, but rarely do we hear specific tactics to increase the rate of return to education’s consumers, the taxpayers. We do know that increasing rigor results in increasing dropout rates, and vice versa. We also know that remedial instruction (most frequently in literacy, scientific, and analytical tools) is a larger cost to colleges and universities than ever before in history. Which is a clear indication of the decreasing return on that taxpayer “investment” in K-12. Yet there’s silence regarding the structure of higher education spending. Instead politicians and educators claim a need to increase all of it. Why? So that more people can be exposed to college.
And yet a considerable percentage of the core requirements in our colleges and universities involve recreational expenditures as opposed to investment in human capital. Under the guise of enhancing critical thinking skills, students are sold expensive required courses in the Liberal Arts that result in little or no productive use. And if that education is not useful in the production of further goods or services it is a consumer good. It is recreational education. Paying for courses that students enjoy, but which create little or no further value to society are identical to paying for them to attend concerts, movies, plays, sporting events, or to travel.
Colleges and universities make no distinction between an academic credit in Bio-Chem or in Music and Social Life, Plants in Folklore or Comics as Culture (all three are offered to satisfy expensive Arts & Humanities core requirements at “prestige” universities).
The institutions, and their accreditation agencies, for any number of reasons, are non-judgmental. Nor are the politicians who pour tax dollars into the support of students at those institutions. Liberal Arts faculties routinely argue that their various departments teach critical thinking skills. But even to the degree that exposure to the Arts and Humanities results in those skills, is no argument for a major in any one of those fields. It might make sense to enjoy survey courses in history, psychology, government, music/art appreciation, etc. to acculturate graduates a tad beyond K-12. But since strategic thinking is rigorously taught in the hard sciences, math, economics, engineering, business, and biological arenas, it’s not clear that Arts and Humanities majors are any better equipped in the erection of logical walls against emotional intrusion into the contributions their grads will make. Nor is there any evidence that their graduates are more malleable over their years of employment.
There’s a need for structural change as opposed to mere educational reform in taxpayer-supported education. Structural walls protecting recreational education’s claim upon large swaths of dollars that should be going to investment in human capital need to crumble. To some degree they are. Students and parents—the products of education—are becoming aware of the way labor markets value their lack of productive skills.
Recreational education has value, just as theater, symphonies, films, videos, sports, novels, and other challenging consumer services do. And taxpayer dollars do subsidize some of those areas. However those subsidies, like PBS grants, are understood as mass entertainment or consumer expenditures and not pimped up under a bling of investments. We may not need more dollars for higher education, but rather a massive structural change in the way the many billions are now spent by taxpayers who are promised that graduates will be prepared to eat for a lifetime.
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