DADI.org

Charley Reese
Commentary

Published in The Orlando Sentinel, November 1, 1998

A person may educate himself without attending an institution; a person may graduate from an educational institution without having received an education.

The big fad this year is education. As usual, most of the politicians and Rolodex experts on television are talking nonsense.

The first thing to do, in order to think clearly about education, is to understand that education and attendance at institutions are two different subjects.

A person may educate himself without attending an institution; a person may graduate from an educational institution without having received an education.

If you ask me, the biggest consumer fraud in America today is university education. Most of the kids' parents aren't getting what they are paying through the nose for. Outside the fields of engineering and the hard sciences, where fraud is difficult, most universities are peddling 1960s heifer dust in lieu of an education.

But a second aspect that needs consideration is the question, educate for what purpose?

The canard thrown at Americans to the point of upchuck is, ``We must educate our children to compete in the global economy.'' This is false for a number of reasons.

In the first place, only a small percentage of the American gross domestic product involves international trade.

In the second place, about half of that is not real international trade but merely intercorporate transfers between a multinational corporation's factories in foreign countries and its U.S. sales and distribution outlets.

A farmer or timber cutter doesn't need to know Japanese just because the end product of his labor may be sold to someone in Tokyo.

There are, in fact, only a tiny percentage of jobs that involve direct work with foreigners.

A more evil aspect of the big lie is that you can't train American assembly-line workers to compete with the Chinese and others in poor nations unless you know how to train them to live on $4 a day or less.

Nobody moves factories out of America to get better-trained and better-educated workers. They move them out to get cheap labor and to avoid health, safety or environmental requirements.

These chief executive officers are making an immoral and unpatriotic decision. They are putting Americans out of work in order to make more profit and to evade what ought to be human and moral responsibilities toward all workers and the environment. If Americans had sense enough to pound sand down a rat hole, they would despise these (expletive deleted) and anybody, conservative or liberal, who carries water for them.

Free trade, as actually practiced by the United States government, is a fraud.

But to get back to education, about 85 percent of all students need commercial and vocational training so that they can make a living. Only about 15 percent have the intelligence quotient necessary or any need to go to college.

The fact that businesses require college degrees for jobs that don't in fact need them is part of the problem.

University education should be reserved for people in the sciences and for people who aspire to public leadership positions. You don't need a big, expensive university campus to learn law, accounting, journalism or business. You certainly don't need these God-awful colleges of education -- a world-class misnomer -- to train teachers.

But in dumbed-down America -- dumbed down, thanks to government education -- the education bureaucratic tail wags the dog.

For $400 billion a year spent on government education, the American taxpayers aren't getting much for their money.

The answer is to abandon public education. Pull your children out and let it collapse.

It's bad to waste a mind; it's even worse to ruin one.