As Javier Milei has just been reminded, in Argentina – and in many other countries – it is widely assumed that education is a basic human right so society – that is to say the state – is duty-bound to provide it without asking for anything much in return. However, unless young people and those responsible for them are eager to take full advantage of what is on offer, merely setting up the appropriate institutions and spending large amounts of money on them will have little effect. Distasteful as it may seem to many, familiarising oneself with the knowledge and the ways of making sense of it that are considered necessary at any given time requires a great deal of effort and a strong desire to learn.
Living as we do in an egalitarian age, many educationalists are reluctant to take into account another unfortunate fact: people have different talents. Some may find it easy to master Homeric Greek or Tang-dynasty Chinese but are flummoxed when it comes to higher mathematics, while others would be far better off devoting themselves to perfectly respectable lines of work such as carpentry or plumbing.
As a result of well-meaning misconceptions, efforts to ensure that half the population or even more in prosperous countries receive a university education has inevitably led to dumbing down, grade inflation and a proliferation of politicised courses (usually with the word “studies” attached), which have been designed by propagandists for some allegedly worthy cause and are determined to spread their ideas among those willing to take them seriously.
This has been encouraged by supporters of underperforming minorities who demand not just equality of opportunity but also equality of outcomes. In the United States, they have done much to bring once prestigious academic institutions such as Harvard into disrepute by blatantly favouring certain ethnic groups and discriminating against others, beginning with Jews and people of East Asian origin.
Since the university reform of 1918, which empowered students at the expense of those who wanted to teach them something worthwhile or, as is now fashionable just about everywhere, something economically useful, higher education in Argentina has been dominated by the notion that anyone who feels like it should be entitled to attend classes for free without having to pass a tough preliminary examination. In theory, this is wonderfully democratic because, as is often pointed out, many youngsters come from backgrounds in which academic opportunities are hard to come by, but in practice it has led to the institutionalisation of mediocrity. The Argentine model, in which the large numbers who enter university get quickly whittled down as students belatedly become aware that book-learning is not for them and only a small minority eventually graduates, has few admirers in the rest of the world.
Paradoxical as it may seem to local leftists who loudly protest against any attempt to tamper with the academic status quo, in Communist countries the people who are in charge of educational institutions have long been rigorously elitist. In the Soviet Union and its satellites, lazy students were given short shrift, while today in Xi Jinping’s China, anyone who dreams of getting a degree from a top university will have to go through one “examination hell” after another, an ordeal schoolchildren train for like world-class athletes, with many studying for up to 16 hours a day and sleeping for, at most, five or six hours. Of course, when it comes to gruelling examinations for those seeking public office, the Chinese have a tradition that stretches back thousands of years, with some historians dating its inauguration to well before 2000 BC. In neighbouring countries such as Japan and Korea a similar approach is now taken for granted, as it is in parts of India.
Can Argentines, or, for that matter, other Latin Americans, North Americans and Europeans, compete with the products of such relentless educational systems? A few who are very gifted will manage to do so without much difficulty, but, if what is happening in the United States and other Western countries that have admitted large numbers of immigrants is anything to go by, most will have to settle for a subsidiary position in the social hierarchy unless they are helped by affirmative-action measures that make life easier for low achievers by discriminating against those who exert themselves. In the US, this sort of thing has been going on for years; instead of reducing ethnic tensions, it has aggravated them.
In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, the drive to push as many people as possible through university because, it is assumed, an increasingly high-tech economy will need a better qualified workforce, has had some unforeseen effects. In societies in which, several decades ago, degree-holders were entitled to consider themselves members of a small elite, many of their far more numerous successors naturally expected to be treated in a similar manner but, as is the case with banknotes when inflation picks up, most soon discovered that when there is much more of something its relative worth declines. Some degrees will have retained their value, but many have not, even though students may have borrowed large sums of money, which one day they will have to pay back, in order to get them.
As well as causing what some analysts call “elite overproduction” – that is, an excessive number of people who expected to be near the top of the social heap but soon found there were no places available for them up there – the policies aimed at increasing university attendance have discredited occupations that are suitable for the kind of people who benefit little, if at all, from what they hear in the lecture room. For such men and women, an apprenticeship in which they could learn a demanding trade – as remains frequent in Germany – would be a much better option.
What is more, their personal economic prospects would be far more promising than those facing the many young people with degrees in humanities or social sciences who, in order to keep body and soul together, must flip hamburgers or perform other menial tasks. Though Artificial Intelligence may be about to take over a huge number of jobs of the kind that have long kept lawyers, accountants and the like busy and enabled them to earn good money, a great many years will have to pass before competent electricians, mechanics and plumbers are rendered obsolete by computerised contraptions.
Comments