In todays's Dallas Morning New's, John Ellis Price takes the U.S. education establishment to task for failing to meet the needs of students, and by extension the nation. If students do not go to college, they will not get good paying jobs. Neither will they gain the technical or scientific expertise the U.S. needs to maintain its superiority over the world. Just as bad, lower income means less revenue. Progress requires money. Price laments that the U.S. does not have a "college-going culture." The solution as he sees it is to create one.
How does one go about creating a "college going culture"? How does one go about creating any kind of culture? The solution as Price and many other progressives see it is to create one through coercion and bribery: two methods that have served them well over the years. You provide tax breaks to encourage desired behavior and penalties to discourage undesired behavior. If the right balance is struck, the desired outcome is almost guaranteed. For Price, the desired outcome is a "college going culture."
To this end, Price proposes a series of plans and methods such as praising college attendance and demanding high performance. It is assumed that by expecting achievement and success from children we can assure ourselves that children will achieve and succeed. Somewhere, ability and aptitude must enter the equation but Price does not address those factors. Like many, Price believes that everyone can achieve their goals, whether it is to be a plumber or an astronaut, if they are encouraged and educated correctly. The trick is to find just the right balance of propoganda, coercion, and bribery.
A major flaw in Price's proposal is that the children who tend to do poorly in school more often than not come from the lower income strata of American society. The homes most of these children come from are not affluent at all. Because of this, those homes are largely immune to manipulations of the tax code and deaf to the exhortations of men like Price.
Price's scientific approach to the problem no doubt is largely due to the wealth of statistics available on the subject. Statistics represent correlations and it is widely believed that correlations can be manipulated. Price cites the group CEOs for Cities that a simple 1 percent increase in the number of children who attend college in 51 U.S. cities would lead to an increased revenue of $124 billion nationally, $4.6 billion in Dallas alone. If this can be achieved, cities "will reap a 'talent dividend'" of many billions nation wide. The next step then would be to find a way to increase the number of college graduates by 2%, and then three. Presumably the bulk of those additional degrees would not be in philosophy or English literature. Such degrees would be almost guaranteed to lead to a drop in income. We can assume that Price was speaking of technical and scientific degrees: pursuits that will inevitably lead to further statistical evaluations of American society.
Price's diagnosis of the problem along with his solution is made possible by the growth of statistical information and the quickly growing faith in the efficacy of policy to manipulate those numbers. The opaqueness and unpredictability of human motivation and behavior is ignored in light of statistical correlations. But the power of statistics to guide policy is an illusion. Human beings are not mice in a lab, nor are they balls on a slope. There may be a pattern to human behavior, but there is not causality. People may at times accept being enticed or prodded, but they will not be coerced or compelled without resistance.
Price is a man that has a vision of what society can and should be. Like so many progressives, Price believes that society should be led to achieve that vision. What society is must be brought into harmony with what society should be. Ideally, society can be persuaded to adopt that vision. If it will not, we can attempt to bribe it into compliance. If that fails, we must resort to compulsion to bring it into line.
If for some reason Price's vision is achieved and everyone graduates from college, who is going to work at Walmart? I suppose we can always count on philosophy and English majors to pick up the slack.
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