Essay Critiquing Educational Curriculum and Elite Priorities

What Can We Do About [t? 207 of how something works and the next we know, schools are teaching that theory as a prelude to actually doing the work. Scholarship has been equated with education. You do not have to know calculus to re- pair an engine. You might want to know calculus to design an engine, but that is no excuse for forcing every engineer to learn it. Similarly, you do not have to know theoretical physics to master the seas. Mari- ners do know physics, of course—practical physics about load balanc- ing, for example—but they do not have to know how to derive the equations that describe it. What I am saying here about the shipping industry holds true for every other area of life as well. Twenty-first-century skills are no dif- ferent from 1st-century skills. Interestingly, Petronius, a 1st-century Roman author, complained that Roman schools were teaching “young men to grow up to be idiots, because they neither see nor hear one single thing connected with the usual circumstances of everyday life.” In other words, schools have always been about educating the elite in things that don’t matter much to anyone. This is fine as long as the elite don’t have to work. But today the elite have extrapolated from what they learned at Harvard and decided that every single schoolchild needs to know the same stuff. So, they whine and complain about math scores going down without once asking why this could possible matter. Math is not a 21st-century skill any more than it was a 1st-century skill. Algebra is nice for those who need it, and useless for those who don’t. Skill in mathematics is certainly not going to make any industrial nation more competitive with any other, no matter how many times our “ex- perts” assert that it will. One wonders how politicians can even say this junk, but they all do. Why? My own guess is that, apart from the fact that they all took these subjects in school (and were probably bad at them—you don’t become a politician or a newspaper person because you were great at calculus), there is another issue: They don’t know what else to suggest. Thinking about the 1st-century will help us figure out what the real issues are. People then and people now had to learn how to func- tion in the world they inhabit. This means being able to communi- cate, get along with others, function economically and physically, and in general reason about issues that confront them. It didn’t mean then, and doesn’t mean now, science and mathematics, at least not for 95% of the population. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023953