The role of education

"Good Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions."


Jerry Falwell



How do you get a full-grown adult to believe the world was created in seven days? This claim should seem outright inane to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of science - any field of science - and the same could have been said 200 years ago. So how should we account for the opinions of 61% of Americans?  One answer seems that it should be right, in fact I've had difficulty surrendering it: Americans are religious because our schools are failing. We often see our standardized test scores compared to other countries' scores, and there are many countries that out-perform us in math, science and reading. However, if we look at precisely which countries are ahead of us, then two things are screaming to be addressed. First, the countries at the very top are generally in East Asia, where religion and education both exist in a very different context. Second, the other countries that out-do us are very small, or otherwise not very populous. 5 Million people can become well-educated much more easily than 313 million can.

Let's look at this index cited by The Guardian. It indicates that we out-perform the Swedish, the Germans, the Irish, the French, the Danish, the British, the Portuguese, the Italians, the Spanish, the Luxembourgers, Austrians ... these are the "intellectual" secular countries that laugh at us for being a bunch of yokels. Most of these countries write far more books, per-capita, than the US, but these are generally not the countries winning Nobel Prizes. So why does Darwin continue to elude us? Maybe the Bible was right all along. To be honest, I'm not fully prepared to answer this question. I will answer it with reference to what I know about primary, secondary, tertiary and graduate education in the US. I conclude by identifying many aspects of the problem. The first, which is not necessarily problematic, is that our education system is becoming more career-oriented, mainly because more people are becoming educated, while liberal arts are not becoming more useful. The second reason is that our society has remained about equally conservative over the past few decades, and will probably continue to do so, so the schools have delayed making substantive changes in their curricula. Lastly, as I have discussed in another blog post, censorship is a profound problem in our society, with obvious consequences, and schools are right in the center of it.

I attended a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Education by former Gen. Colin Powell. The talk had a cozy, informal feel, taking place in not-so-big room with not-so-many people, and Powell took on a loose, spontaneous manner that contradicted my previous impression of him. He spoke with so much charisma that I didn't want him to finish. Powell was the founder of America's Promise, an organization, albeit one of many, intended to help with some problems in primary and secondary education. He had no difficulty identifying these problems. He talked briefly about his military career, and how the quality of his new soldiers declined after conscription was abolished, because the only people willing to join the military poorly educated. About 25 years later, this is still the case, but much more so: Powell told us that 75% of American youths could not enlist in the military. According to search results, the main reason seems to be obesity. He gave some other reasons: either these youths did not finish high school, or they cannot pass basic math and (English) literary tests, or they were convicted of a felony, or they have drug problems.


Powell emphasized that he himself came from very a rough, hard-up inner-city background. He opted for a military career, and was extremely successful, meanwhile his siblings and cousins were becoming lawyers and businessmen and women ... so why did they succeed while many inner-city Americans do not? The most obvious answer is that he had a full family. He noted that most inner-city youths have only one parent, and that this parent was someone who never valued education more than most people. He also gave us an anecdote of a more extreme scenario, albeit a common one. In it he was giving an address to children who are being served by America's Promise. The children in attendance were of every age group, from kindergarten to 12th grade. Powell took questions from students in every age group, so some were childish, while others were flippant, but a ten-year-old offered a question that was very sincere and also very mature and pertinent: "what if my parents don't care if I live or die?" Powell told us his observation that all kids are enthusiastic to start kindergarten, but they and their peers learn to stigmatize school, and some reach a tipping point quickly: he said that by third grade he can see which students will succeed and which won't. How does this relate to religion? Well, the relation will seem to contradict my observation that Americans are more religious despite being more educated. But bare with me through the next paragraph.

The general state of inner-city youths in the US today is a symptom of the profound social disorder in our society. And, of course, religion is a both a cause and a result of social dysfunction. Compared to other high-income democracies, all of which are less religious than us, we have far, far, far more murders, abortions and teen pregnancy, all of which are generally signs of social dysfunction. Here are some other sources that will tell you the same thing. Don't get me wrong, I think that kids who would otherwise be hopeless should become educated by whatever means possible. So, given the conventional thinking that kids without means or parental guidance or a safe environment require tough love and tough guidance to prop them up, I would advocate it as long as it works. However, I have one caveat, which is that these environments - in schools, in churches, in after-school and out-of-school programs, in families, in orphanages, in military officer training - are not the best for fostering independent thinking. If we look at Catholic colleges across the country, we can easily see that there is much less student activity taking place on campus than at secular schools. I used to live very close to Loyola Marymount University in LA. Whereas at USC, where I attended college, was a classic "beehive," the Loyola Marymount campus would be dead after 7 PM. Meanwhile, students would be packing the bars, mostly sports bars, seven days per week. This hardly seems to be the right environment for having earnest debates about Plato. I am not condemning this type of education, though, especially since it is the right environment for training electrical engineers, and other things that "intellectual" types are less willing to do. Another downside, of course, is that the day after these students enjoyed a night of revelry, we did not enjoy walking through a sidewalk covered in trash.

Let's look at a similar example. A couple months ago I started up a conversation with my wife about trees - it was a frivolous subject to us, yet we were very serious about the accuracy and likelihood of what we said. I mentioned a tree in my hometown that was documented to have been in the same place for more than 300 years. However, I conceded to her that in China, where she comes from, there must be trees that are known to have stood for much longer. I then began making an induction, based primarily on intuition: the oldest existing trees had probably been alive since ... my wife then offered her guess: "dinosaur times?" First I ignored her. But then I considered it too much to ignore, and asked: "you mean an individual tree could have stood in place for 65 million years?" About an hour later I asked her, just to be absolutely certain: "were you joking earlier about trees going back to the age of dinosaurs?" She was fully serious.

Let's look at her education history. She attended primary school and middle school in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province. While in middle school she was selected among a handful of students in her school, to join a few dozen in her province to study in Singapore on a full scholarship. While there she studied math, English, science, computer science, among other things. She worked with scholars from China, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and some students from elsewhere. She told me about the agonizing stress involved in maintaining  the required grade point average, because no one wanted to be sent home. One student cracked under the pressure and jumped five stories from her dormitory (without achieving her goal). But my wife was fortunate enough to pull through to the end, concluding five years of her life that she absolutely loathed, albeit in the country out-performs every country in education by leaps and bounds. And any serious source will agree to this. After this she began her tertiary studies at USC, where she studied modern art, then obtained an MFA from UCLA.

So it seems she's decently educated. Personally I had the chance to get some idea what her early years were like, because I spent one year teaching English in China. Wow. There are so many things I learned that I would've never thought of otherwise. Here's one thing about Chinese society right now for young people: its a society where everyone has to succeed, especially with the one-child policy, since it means parents have only one chance to bring respect to their family. Let's note, there is only one way of making sure everyone succeeds. Parents endorse this method, so do teachers and administrators, because they all want a good name. It's cheating. By the end of the year this was a well-worn truth for me, and my foreign-born colleagues had picked up on it more quickly. Yet cheating will not satisfy all their obligations, because they are also expected to attend college, and that requires passing the College Entrance Examination, a 3-day exam that tests everything they studied since primary school, and is the only admissions criterion. In other words, they need to know everything the exam, and they need to put all their effort into studying it, starting from the age of 11 or so.

When I was in China I taught at a college during the week, and on weekends I taught at a variety of "English schools" for children and adolescents. I had some moments that were hilarious, but also unfortunate and disturbing. On Sundays I worked at the Global Kids English School in Danfeng, which seems to be a bootleg location because it isn't on the website. The curriculum seemed very carefully planned, to make sure it prepares them for the College Entrance Exam, as well as the TOEFL and its rival, the IELTS. At first I did not stick closely to my supervisor's directions, but I started to when I realized she really wanted me to. It's not my nature to teach a foreign language, because I don't like drilling. I like explaining. However, from my discourse, some of the native-born teachers seemed to think very highly of my intellectual ability. One time in December, we were holding a Christmas-themed class. One of the teachers asked a question that she thought I would know: "Where does Christmas come from?" She continued "America or England?" A few weeks prior, our supervisor had generously planned a dinner for us at a lavish buffet-style restaurant. In attendance was the entire staff: me, two teachers from Canada, two native-born teachers, our supervisor, and her husband. We foreigners kept to ourselves most of he evening, not least because the natives were busy planning a competition, at their school, for children and adolescents all across town. However, one of the natives consulted me with a question that she wasn't sure of "what is the world's longest river?"


I was not entirely sure either. I responded "I think it's the Nile."

Another foreigner filled me in: "Yeah it's the Nile."

However, she kept looking at me, and didn't bother looking at the other foreigner. She had another question: "And where is it, Britain? Germany?"


In our culture, most of us are used to hearing that "there are no stupid questions." Well, of course, that's not true. "Why did God create us" is an outrageously stupid question. In liberal arts programs at decent universities, these questions are met with a combination of pity and discrete ridicule. But many teachers, in primary and secondary schools, would say otherwise, and they would want their students to agree with them.  It seems that 16% of high school science teachers believe in creation, including 38% in Ohio and 69% in Kentucky. What has allowed these teachers to get through college and carry on a career as a science teacher ... without accepting that creation is just a story written thousands of years before science became available? My answer is this: the more remote parts of the country, in addition to certain demographic minorities, have their own subcultures which are very authority-oriented. Granted, the American "mainstream," if you will, is extremely educated, cosmopolitan, progressive, open-minded, etc, but the mainstream is in fact a small part of the population. I would estimate that it comprises about 20-30% of the population. The rest of the population includes those above the age of 50, in addition to most Southerners and "Evangelicals," blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, first-generation immigrants from just about anywhere, Mormons (despite being extremely educated), and I guess the radical sects of every religion. Granted, at a high school in Detroit, it might not seem like blacks and Hispanics value authority tremendously. However, if you visit these students' families, it will quickly become clear that the family culture is different from a waspy family like. And there is clear evidence that the values of these niche cultures translate into certain expectations about the schools. Consider this: besides South Korea, the US is the one and only high-income democracy where corporal punishment is allowed in schools. Corporal punishment is legal in private schools in 48 states, and in public schools in 19 states. In most states it is rarely used. However, according to a widely-cited estimate, it is believed to be used on 200,000 students every year in the US. And this estimate only includes very overt, blatant practices of corporal punishment. So I would guess that many of these teachers won't be argued with easily. So is this why our test scores are decent, but general understanding of the world isn't? Let's approach this question from a different angle.

One of my foreign-born colleagues in China was a middle-class professional from Canada who retired to work in China, remained there for several years, and by the time I arrived he had become the grandmaster among foreign teachers. This man, Travis, had been a political observer his entire life, meanwhile living with a Chinese women and two kids. Travis was very political, and seemed to have a quasi-Marxist slant, which I inferred from his frequent criticisms of various aspects of American society and Chinese society. He spoke of quality liberal arts programs diminishing, or becoming prohibitively expensive, and giving way to programs that trains us to become "factors of production" rather than "training [us] to think."

But conventional wisdom has it that the quality liberal arts schools are concentrated in the US, whereas European programs are assembly lines for acquiring technical skills. I think that was true at one time, but it's becoming less true. There are many efforts to determine the world's best universities - liberal arts and otherwise. Here's the first one that came up from a Google search. Now let's look at their ranking of philosophy programs, or Geography & Area Studies programs or psychology or history or politics and international studies programs. Still largely the US, and if not then other English-speaking countries, but that's changing rapidly. I found an article in the Guardian about somebody's reckoning of the top 100 universities in the world built in the past 50 years. There are not many American ones listed. Why are American universities on the want? Well, one reason is structural. Here's a graph that's been passed around on the internet, comparing the rise in college tuition, over the past 30-some years, with that of home prices: (graph). The rise in home prices was pretty damn dramatic, but here we have a problem that's gone hopelessly out of control and reached hysterical proportions. And for all the money that college students and grad students pay - whether with their parents' money, or with loans, scholarships, or tips - precisely what is it used for?

Well, let's look at my story. While studying at USC, an outrageously expensive school, I always told my peers and professors that I intended to pursue a PhD in political science, and afterwards to take what comes my way. I always received encouragement after telling people this, but I was cautioned that the PhD program would be very difficult. However, when I graduated and applied for PhD programs, I decided to network with academics in the schools where I intended to do my graduate studies, and they had some different words of caution. One of them, I won't disclose which one, told me that his program had about 20 spots for usually more than 500 applicants. Another school gave me a similar estimate. I was also told twice the I should probably obtain a masters degree first. And lastly, I was told that doctoral political science programs were typically seven years long a few decades ago, but now are almost always five years. Even more ironic, in my opinion, is that my professors never told me things would be grim with just a liberal arts degree. My inference: they don't want the word to get out.

So it seems student tuition is spent, essentially, on inflation, without giving students much in return. I guess liberal arts programs are silently becoming an anachronism. So are we becoming, increasingly, a technocratic society? And if so, then is our education becoming more authoritarian, top-down and dogmatic? I would yes and no to each of these questions. Let's first look at the first of them. If you go to the website of any major university you will probably see that it began by teaching liberal arts (or theology at the older universities), then expanded into law, business, medicine, government, engineering, public health, fine arts, communications, etc. Science is a quasi-liberal art, and it joined these universities in their later days. So if the trend now is away from liberal arts, well, I think that's been the case for a long time. And I think this is for good reasons. Seriously. How many Shakespeare scholars do we need at one time? In an ideal world, we would all have the opportunity, and the motivation, to read Shakespearean plays and Socratic dialogues and the Rig Veda, and to study these works under the guidance of an expert. However, it's difficult to find money to pay for a liberal arts education, either before or after it occurs. A liberal arts education used to be a more favored option a couple generations ago, the reason being that much fewer people received a college education, which means a BA was sufficient to get above the competition. Since then college enrollment has increased enormously (although not as much as I thought), so people are choosing majors that prepare them more directly for their careers. There are still liberal arts majors, but these people expect to either get a graduate degree or become housewives. And that's another matter, which is an integral part of the same trend. Consider, for instance, that these days, there are people who get numerous masters and doctoral degrees because they never succeeded in starting a career. Two generations ago there were very few people who considered attending graduate school.

I think that by choosing these career-oriented majors, and by getting graduate degrees, young people are making our future workforce more productive and capable, and of course they are making themselves more capable intellectually. The only problem, of course, is the money involved in funding their education, but students are better prepared to profit from their education if they study anything besides liberal arts. And why are liberal arts not profitable? Well, essentially, it's because they're not useful. Anyone who has studies a social science at the graduate level knows how difficult it is to make an empirical argument. Our methods are primitive. I know that my future as a political scientist will be difficult because the social sciences give us very little to say that's worthwhile. However, that might be changing soon. The reason is the future of neuroscience. Developments in neuroscience are already transforming some aspects of our science, and they have a long, long, long way to go. I admit I've only read one book on this subject, The Neuro Revolution by Zack Lynch, but I have spoken to people who have insider knowledge and confirm Lynch's argument. One thing he discusses in his book is the future role of neuroscience in the social sciences. I was very excited by this prediction, because it meant that social scientists could finally benefit from the advantages of "real" science.

And that takes us back to the beginning. Our education system, for all its profound problems, is still competitive, and our workforce is still hyper-competitive as a result. But for the most part, our education is still very parochial in ways most of us aren't aware of. Some schools are more obviously authoritarian in nature. However, even the more typical schools are failing to modernize us in some ways. In their teaching methods, some of my teachers were the envy of the most radical hippies. The teachers also receive highly trained in teaching methods, since in "smart" states like California they often cannot stay competitive without at least a masters degree, and their training is primarily in method. However, in the content of their curriculum, many of my teachers were thoroughly retro. I should note that the school district I attended was considered extremely progressive, competitive and cosmopolitan. However, before beginning college, I never heard a teacher criticize a religious belief or doctrine (except religious violence, but they pretended this wasn't a doctrine). And I think my history classes were starved of new perspectives. Did the US triumph over the rest of the world because a few people in the 18th century said we value freedom? I think it has more to do with physical realities - geography, economics, technology, and the general guns, germs and steel. Meanwhile, history and English teachers know that they can lose their career over any word they say, since it's either racist or offensive of someone's religion or male chauvinist or it promotes alcohol ...

Personally I never felt an urge to hurl insults at the teacher during class, or to approach the teacher's supervisor and denounce him or her. However, I did make impersonal comments that were informed by my own interest in other parts of the world. Looking back, I don't blame my teachers, but I blame American culture for being insular, and I guess for emphasizing skits and posters rather than information. As I said, my school was considered extremely cosmopolitan, and the town was about 30% Asian and 20% Hispanic. However, the history curriculum was about 80% white, and 70% white American. World War I received four or five class periods in my freshman year world history class, but the teacher never mentioned Bismarck and unification of Germany and Italy, the Spanish Civil War, the reconstruction and re-ordering of Europe after WWII. In my four years of high school all I learned about Latin American history was from unassigned reading to satisfy my own curiosity (with the exception of the Mexican-American War and some give-and-take between European monarchs). Also, looking at things from the rest of the world's perspective, don't you think the Korean War was more significant than the Vietnam War? But how much time do we learn about the Korean War? The Cultural Revolution was never mentioned, and the Great Leap Forward was only discussed as a side note for a few minutes. The Mongol Empire was not mentioned once in my world history class, my 8th grade sorry-attempt-at-world cultures class, or any other social studies class prior to college. Nor were the Maurya Empire, the Gupta Empire or the Mogul Empire, the second of which invented the "0" and introduced it to the Chinese number system, and to the Middle Eastern number systems, the latter of which introduced it to Europeans in addition to the "Arabic numerals." And how many world history teachers know that the Arabs gave us the words algebra, algorithm, chemistry (via "alchemy"), and a long list of other words. Granted, it's common knowledge that other civilizations were profoundly more sophisticated than the Europeans during their "dark ages," so of course our world history teachers are aware of that, but they don't seem determined to make their students aware. In my case, the criticisms that came most easily were of my teachers' pronunciations of Pinyin spellings of Chinese proper nouns: Xi Jinping, Deng Xiaoping, Ci Xi, Guangzhou, the Qing Dynasty ... some teachers have probably learned some Pinyin, given China's ascendancy as a world power, but I think most world history teachers have not. And why is it that my high school was the only one in a vast radius that offered Chinese as a foreign language? And while we're at it, why don't we learn about the Taiping Rebellion in the 19th Century, an attempt to institute Christianity in China that was not suppressed in a timely manner, and consequently initiated a war that caused more deaths than World War I? And why don't teachers talk about Christianity and Islam being used to justify female genital mutilation, or stoning to death a 13-year-old girl for having been raped? Or how about the Jirgas settling disputes by marrying a man from the plaintiff's family to a woman from the defendant's family who is often a teenager and sometimes an infant? Or why not talk about the history of the Bible, and its historical context? Why the Old Testament is so atrocious because it was written for an expanding empire, meanwhile the New Testament was written by a beleaguered group of dissidents afraid of raising their voice, so their message is generally dovish and insubstantive, and therefore more familiar to them because it's more suited for a church service.

So, we seem to have confirmed a stereotype: Americans live in a pragmatic culture, and our education system reinforces pragmatic values. Most of us are not under-educated, but we're generally not very cosmopolitan, and not very intellectual. This has been our reputation since Tocqueville's time, and probably well before. Granted, if it's also true now, the reason might be pure coincidence. Either way, our society now seems rather utilitarian - we make money, and we invent things, but we don't sit back and reflect. And as I said in the beginning of this blog post, Europeans write far, far more books, per capita, than we do. Many also have a higher rate of passport ownership, even though most Europeans do not need a passport to enter a country in the Schengen Zone. And, for structural reasons, our monopoly on first-rate liberal arts schools is dissolving. We will inevitably become more cosmopolitan as a result of immigration, however these immigrants tend to be extremely religious. In any case, change is inevitable, so whether our society becomes more liberal or conservative, it will take a different form. Despite immigration and the rise of evangelism, young people are becoming more secular one way or another, and they are becoming more educated. And from our television we know that criticism of religion is increasingly a part of our zeitgeist. Secularization seems to have happened in Europe earlier, but I doubt it'll miss us. And lastly, the age of political correctness seems to have been tapering away for the past decade or so. So I think teachers and students are both becoming willing to give and receive insight that is not politically correct, or is politically correct but not superficially, and either way is not racist at all. Of course, it's universal etiquette that teachers don't give political opinions. But politics should not be religious, nor should people. I think this message should, over the next few decades, become carefully communicated. But very carefully, because the bible is still considered constitutional.