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logo    Education and Federal Intervention


As a retired professor of philosophy, I was recently pleased to receive two pamphlets from Hillsdale College, two issues of Imprimis, but I found both to be somewhat devious.

One, A Conversation with Milton Friedman, I found dull. No hard questions were asked and no soft answers were probed. Despite Milton Friedman's national acclaim, I never found either this work or his essays to be impressive. I viewed him as intellectually dishonest, and his association with Augusto Pinochet in Chile made a mockery of the claims to being an advocate of freedom. The printed interview is unworthy of further comment.

The other, The Crisis and Politics of Higher Education, is another matter. Written by Hillsdale's President, Larry P. Arnn, it, in some convoluted fashion, argues that America's educational problems are the fault of federal governmental intervention in how educational institutions are operated, yet he fails to point out that anti-intellectualism in America has long and deep historical roots. He bemoans the corrupting influence of federal regulations which come with federal aid, but he proudly points out that Hillsdale doesnt accept such aid, so how would he know how burdensome the regulations that come with it are? He dates the start of this corrupting federal intervention to 1965 with the passage of the Higher Education Act. I began my teaching career in 1961, so most of my teaching was done after the beginning of this intervention. Oddly enough, I dont recall ever having a single federal rule imposed on my classroom teaching. I was always free to teach what I knew and to debunk what I new to be false.

Certainly, American education is not currently a high quality endeavor, but the problems cannot be blamed on the federal government. America's colleges and universities were woefully unprepared for the onslaught of baby-boomers who began matriculating in the 1960s. Not only did adequate facilities not exist, there was an enormous shortage of qualified professors. Institutions all over the nation not only scraped the bottom of the barrel, they scraped through it into the gravel to find instructors. Graduate students suddenly became full-fledged professors, professors took on enormous classes taught in amphitheaters and even over closed-circuit television, and since the shortage of facilities and professors could not be filled instantly, these conditions lasted long enough to become institutionalized, and quality, never very high to begin with, plummeted. To those of us teaching then, the decline was very disquieting. We watched as university education took on the status of middle school teaching.

The need for professors and facilities required enormous sums of money and the colleges and universities were delighted to get as much of it as they could get from the federal government. When that wasn't enough, raising tuition was the answer. The nation began to pay more and more for less and less.

Of course, politics had a lot to do with it, but not federal politics. Many colleges and universities in this country are state funded, and state legislatures always have been and still are stingy.

The essay's examples of the results of American education prior to this federal intervention are also unconvincing. Bell's invention of the telephone is mentioned, but Faraday's discovery of electricity's basics is not. The invention of the laser is mentioned, but Maxwell's wave theory is not. While Americans are famous for their trinkets, Europeans are famous for their pure science. We got to the moon with the help of people educated in Germany, we built the atomic bomb with the help of people educated in Italy. Radar was invented in England, the jet engine in Europe, the radio in Italy. American greatness was never predicated on discovery.

The contents of these two pamphlets may seem unrelated to one another, but they are not. Both have an underlying theme, although neither justifies it. The theme is government intervention is bad. But not even Adam Smith believed that to be universally true.

Beliefs other than religious can be held religiously. The defining characteristic of a religiously held belief is its lack of justification. Clausius, for example, while on his way to discovering the second law of thermodynamics noted that the caloric theory has become more like a religion than a science, and Michael Faraday noted that "By adherence to a favorite theory, many errors have at times been introduced into general science which have required much labour for their removal." The idea that government intervention is bad is one of those favorite and erroneous ideas.

The idea, of course, emanates from Adam Smith. It is encompassed in laissez faire. But to the people who are attached to this idea, results do not seem to matter. A characteristic of  knowledge is that it produces the same results everywhere. Laissez faire, whether in economics or government, does not. And even where laissez faire economics seems to work, the results have been spotty.

Laissez faire economics has been tried now in Western civilization for more than two centuries. It has brought great wealth to some, a measure of prosperity to many, and not very much to the rest. It has never been totally satisfactory and has been abandoned in most of Western Europe in favor of more socialized economic systems which involve considerable governmental intervention. So why is this idea held so religiously by so many Americans? There is one and only one answer--the American educational system has been and still is a fraud, and the people running America's educational institutions, along with their political cohorts are to blame. American education has never really been about education; it has always been about vocational training. Every successful student in arts and letters has been asked, what can you do with that?

This, then, is the deviousness I find in these two little pamphlets. They promote a favorite ideology rather than genuine knowledge. No college or university worthy of the name should be engaged in that kind of nefarious activity. (8/6/2007)