Before this week I had never purchased and read a book written by a politician. Without turning the front cover one can intuit that the politician, through this book, is trying to sell her/himself. I ignored this reasonable “intuition” and went ahead and started reading Barack Obama’s, The Audacity of Hope. Senator Obama is trying to sell himself with this book and trying to make the reader comfortable with his way of thinking about politics. Not that this is a bad thing but might as well call a duck a duck. Obama’s book is a duck… uuh, I mean – he wrote about himself so that you will like him and that is what politicians do. I would recommend this book to people who are interested in reading Senator Obama’s view of politics in the US but be prepared to not be shocked, offended or enlightened. That being said, I’m not writing a book review but am responding to his section on education in the chapter titled, “Opportunity.”
Senator Obama has a very sympathetic view towards education. He wants to lower tuition costs, to increase grants to students and research programs, and to increase teacher’s salaries (based on performance). I agree that these things should be done and that education should be more of a priority in our government’s spending. What struck me was why he thought spending should be increased and what he expected from this increase in spending. It boils down to a direct relationship between education and the economy. Increased government spending in learning is not so much an investment in the people as it is an investment in our economy. Nicely funded research programs stocked with well educated students will help keep the US competitive in the global economy. The more people we have entering engineering/physics/computer science programs the better chance innovative companies will be created – companies that will keep our economy afloat. Tax payers and politicians are meant to be soothed by the idea that money spent on education will have a high return.
Education = money. More education = more money. While reading this I was having flashbacks of reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto. I had a bearded man in the back of my head telling me that in a capitalistic society every institution finds its value in its monetary productiveness, that every relation is a monetary relation and that education is valuable if and only if it has a high return. Areas of study that don’t have a direct translation to the marketplace are devalued. Obama isn’t concerned if we stay competitive in literature, philosophy or the study of history (etc.) because these areas of study have no monetary worth. He even suggests that high school teachers of math and science should be paid more because what they teach has (yet again, monetary) worth.
Not that this is particularly anything new. Anyone studying in the Humanities at a University in the US knows the feeling of having to pay an ever increasing tuition, seeing their department experience cuts and walking past brand new buildings dedicated to the sciences. It is also happening in Germany.
To give Senator Obama some slack I highly doubt that any of the other candidates view education as something that deserves government spending because it is in itself valuable. I voted for the guy in my state’s primary and, if given the chance, will vote for him again. I am just incredibly turned off by this view of education and despair the future of our humanities.
24. February, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Many of the best things we have are better and cheaper than they were. In fact, produtivity gains and innovation make this an ongoing process.
However, I can think of anything that is either government controlled or heavily influences that doesn’t seem to get worse and more expensive. Education and health care two good examples.
When you look at local, state and federal spending on education it grows rapidly all the time. It’s well over $500 billion now.
Cost cutting when done right doesn’t just mean less money. Done right it means looking for new ways to do things that are more effective and efficient that lead to lower costs.
There are billions of dollars of waste in the education system that if removed could fund dramatic improvements.
24. February, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Hi Steve,
I can’t say I understand your second paragraph (or some of your other sentence fragments) but I will say that I don’t see how it is possible for education to get worse if the government helps lower tuition costs and gives out more research grants. What am I missing?
At the level of primary and secondary schools there seems to be a bigger problem than just a faulty allocation of funds.
- but that wasn’t really the point of the post anyways.
24. February, 2008 at 8:05 pm
What government does to lower tuition costs is to subsidize students. They actually don’t look at deliverying something as good or better for less money.
Here’s what government wants to do. I went to the Unversity of Minnesota in the 70s. At that point they had more students and were highly ranked in more programs than today. They also had 1/2 the number of buildings.
They’ve now spent billions to create a mega campus without improving the quality of education. They are now tied into this system and supporting this infrastructure.
24. February, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Making university education available to students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it (i.e.; increasing the amount of money a school receives per student) does not change the level of education. That is unless we assume that the university, having received the money from the government and not from a student, will overspend and “mismanage” the funds. As if having the money come from the government gives the university a license for abandon.
What is it that the government wants to do?
The point isn’t to create “mega campuses” but to make it so students and professors can spend more time learning/researching and less time raising money.
I don’t see why one example would be taken as the rule. There are undoubtedly many reasons for the University of Minnesota’s alleged ill fate but I would be hesitant to count an “abundance of money” as one of them. How about: “an abundance of administrators who didn’t properly know how to spend the money they had”?