The Case Against Education – Quick Summary

1-Sentence Description of The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan

Despite being immensely popular and immensely lucrative, education is grossly overrated.

1. Education mostly signals traits, rather than building them. Specifically, school signals intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity, all of which employers want in their workers. The education wage premium is real, but most of it would exist even if we didn’t have as much schooling.

2. Education largely fails at its intended goals, both at training people with practical skills and enriching their lives.

3. If you accept 1 and 2, it’s pretty much guaranteed that society spends too much time and money on education. We should reduce or eliminate subsidies, and probably tax it, too.

“Now we’re up to three broad traits that education signals: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. We could easily extent this list: education also signals a prosperous family, cosmopolitan attitudes, and fondness for foreign films. For a profit-maximizing employer, however, the extensions are a distraction. The road to academic success is paved with the trinit of intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity.”

“Learning doesn’t have to be useful. Learning doesn’t have to be inspiring. When learning is neither useful nor inspirational, though, how can we call it anything but wasteful?”

“Frederick: Vocational education may be better economically, but you’re cutting kids’ childhoods short. Our society is rich enough to let teenagers delay the drudgery of adult jobs and adult responsibilities.

“Bryan: What about the drudgery of school?

“Frederick: It’s all part of life.

“Bryan: Such a double standard. When kids feel bored and resentful at work, we pity them as victims and call for regulation. When kids feel bored and resentful in school, we roll our eyes and tell them to suck it up. The wise question to pose, for young students and young workers alike, is whether the pain is worth the gain.”

“As a 51-year-old pursing a Masters degree in Mathematics so that I can teach “high school mathematics” at the community college level (when I already have high school teaching experience, a Masters in Education, and teaching certifications), I’m currently living this book, as almost all of the courses I’m taking are irrelevant and a waste of my time.

This book is spot-on.”

“I consider it important to read genuine works of scholarship that present an opinion or position that is diametrically opposed to my own, especially as pertains to my profession in collegiate-level education. Thus reading a book called, “The Case Against Education,” is an important activity in that it potentially will reveal facts and opinions that might not be comfortable to come to terms with but are nevertheless genuine and potentially position-shifting.

However, this is anecdotal, frustrated, reductionist, extremist tripe that will change no one’s opinions and will only serve to further entrench those on the many sides of the educational divide and create conflict where there is none. The positions arrived at are so extreme (complete separation of government funding from public education with no voucher system, relaxing child-labor laws, etc…) that even an independent with libertarian leanings like myself can’t help but wonder what has happened to professor Caplan to publish such a work so divorced from reality and genuinely empty of helpful suggestions. This is not a step forward, it’s an abandonment of responsibility to find solutions to the few genuine problems identified.”

Summary 1

Summary 2

Summary 3

1. Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything
2. Freefall of the American University: How Our Colleges Are Corrupting the Minds and Morals of the Next Generation.
3. Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream

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