More School = More Opportunities
….well, that’s a lie. — Your #1 Newsletter for Accelerated Learning
“Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them.”
-William Arthur Ward
School Doesn’t Increase Your Optionality — It Decreases It. Here’s How.
“Education is the great equalizer,” or so the story goes.
Discussions by pundits and politicians about opportunity and helping individuals unleash new opportunity for themselves and their families almost always devolve into points about school funding or extending the unbelievably long swath of time that school dominates our lives either through extending Pre-K or subsidizing higher education.
The idea generally goes like this:
- People want new opportunities.
- People who have accessed “new opportunities” in the past have traditionally had higher levels of education. (The definition of “new opportunities” is usually left up to whichever talking head or politician is speaking at the time.)
- Therefore, education must be extended to the people who want the new opportunities, either through expanded Pre-K or subsidizing higher education.
Somewhere along the line somebody may pull out a reference to an obscure, bleak European social democracy that has universal pre-K or universal higher education as a way to justify their belief that expanding higher education or pre-K education leads to higher levels of happiness or prosperity (never asking which came first — higher levels of education are always a product of a wealthier society, not the other way around. Only already-wealthy societies can afford to subsidize people studying Underwater Basket Weaving).
Without getting too political, there’s a really big flaw in this reasoning. That flaw comes from the assumption that more school is the path to more opportunities. That assumption may come from a few places.
First, people may look at other countries where people have opportunities and confound the fact that they also have more school. Having more school is a product of having more opportunities, not the other way around.
Second, people may look at degree inflation and assume that because more and more jobs require degrees, decreeing more people is the way to give more people access to more jobs. This misses the fact that more jobs require degrees because the degree as a signal is so weak because too many people have degrees. Adding a larger pool of people with degrees to the overall pool won’t open up more opportunities in the long run — it will just lead employers to require more credentials to gain access to jobs that otherwise wouldn’t require them.
Third, and more fundamentally, people confound education with schooling. Education is not schooling and school is oftentimes contrary to education. Most people do not learn best through subject-learning in a passive environment where they are fed facts and tested on those facts. Most people learn best through trial-and-error, experimentation, and true interdisciplinary work in the field. School has long-established its monopoly on education, so much so to the point that people who choose not to send their children to schools are expected to “homeschool,” not to “home educate.”
I want to go a step further and argue that school not only is not the path to new opportunities for most people but that it also decreases opportunities over time.
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