Could education channel us into curiosity and self-discovery?
Are young Chinese overeducated?
| Albert Einstein said, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Yet even average minds encounter opposition in conventional schools. Later, the “best educated” students find insufficient job opportunity in the labor market. We trim, blend, and append two 2010 articles from (1) The Christian Science Monitor, Mar 9, on China by Matthew E. Kahn, economics Professor at UCLA and author of Green Cities and Heroes and Cowards with Dora L. Costa; and (2) Co-Exist, Feb 28, on schools by Pippa Bartolotti. |
by Matthew E. Kahn by Pippa Bartolotti
- Are young Chinese overeducated?
The returns to skill have increased over time in the U.S. Now the New York Times is arguing that the returns to college education are declining in China in the year 2010.
How to reduce unemployment among the skilled?
1. Are college degrees valuable in China in terms of human development and problem solving? Or have students been memorizing a lot of stuff? Has China suffered from the brain drain and needs more of their best graduates who have gone abroad to return home?
2. In America, if Los Angeles offers a UCLA graduate few opportunities then she can move to Dallas or Cleveland. For years, China had restricted migration. Regional differences in job opportunities is useful information. Does someone broadcast where there is local job demand for the skilled? Demand tends to attract supply!
3. In a new economy where worker skills and job requirements must be discovered it makes sense to let firms dismiss at will. If firms know they can fire workers, they will be more likely to hire workers to see if they are a good fit within the organization.
4. Self employment. To start your own firm requires capital. If skilled young people are liquidity constrained and can't post collateral then they will have trouble starting their own firms. The government could start a program to take an equity share in companies (irony of a Communist Party as Venture Capitalist!)
5. Given how high home prices [actually, prices for home sites] are in the big cities (such as Shanghai and Beijing), workers require very high nominal wages to work in those cities. Such high wages discourage employers from hiring. The government should encourage some job clusters to move to low land-rent cities and this would set off an agglomeration in those cities.
JJS: Or, government could recover those values of land, which are generated by society, and use them to pay dividends to citizens. Thus, as land values go up, people’s rent dividends go up. Residents would always be able to afford to live where they want to work.
- A real education would channel us into curiosity and self-discovery
Why do we send our children to school?
To be prepared for life? Survival and creativity are way down the list in the average syllabus. Or …
To keep kids out of the way for a few hours? Mums enticed into the workplace so that they too can pay taxes need to place their children somewhere.
To be good workers? What parent brings a child into this world to ‘be a good worker’?
Because the law demands it?
In Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All In The Head, biologist Dr. Carla Hannaford states that almost all children are born as “whole brain” thinkers. However, by the time the child is 7 years old, due to parental, religious, and scholastic programming in the modern world, we see a definite trend toward the left-brain orientation. Intuition and creativity are lost.
A real education is not achieved through memorizing data and ticking the boxes in multiple choice questionnaires.
The ancient Greeks discovered thousands of years ago that rules and ironclad procedures burn out imagination, stifle courage, and wipe the leadership clean of resourcefulness. Greek education was much more like play, with studies undertaken for their own sake, to satisfy curiosity. It assumed that sane children want to grow up and recognized that childhood ends much earlier than modern society typically allows.
Children other societies can make their own clothes, grow their own food, and build their own houses. Most so-called educated kids never learn practicalities of life because they are too busy learning how to sit still in a classroom.
Society needs people who will take care of the elderly with love and who know how to be compassionate and honest. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're affectional.
School is neither in the business of teaching survival (playground survival is usually self-taught and a major life lesson) nor creativity. Survival and creativity, compassion and honesty are the main requirements for an uncertain future. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Left to their own devices, people might learn to un-divide themselves, band together in the common interest, and take control of the institutions that stunt their lives.
JJS: Sharing the value of Earth, while ridding ourselves of taxes and subsidies, is the essence of geonomics. Enjoying extra income with less outgo would let us curtail the workweek. Then we’d need to know the Polynesian Play Ethic, which a liberated and responsive school system could teach us.
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Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.
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Also see: 10 Pricey Cities That Pay Off
Are they criminals or unabashed pranksters?
Just Cause for Great Alarm |
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