Why the Government Isn’t Educating Productivity: Part II

When John Stewart Mill remarked that many children of intelligent men do not develop great intelligence, but rather have their mental faculties overlaid with facts and rote repetition, he pointed to a duality in the understanding of education that has the power to make or break a nation’s long-term productivity. Many bureaucrats and professional educators believe that the purpose of education is to support the economic strength of a nation. The fact that the highest goal of education should not fundamentally be national productivity is a truth that will not be explored in this article. Governing bodies cannot be expected to understand the intricacies of human and character development that are the true purpose of education, yet even their utilitarian understanding of schooling is improper. Productive people are those who are creative and have the character and ability to thrive in situations of change. These underlying skills allow for the development of other more specific skills, yet the acquisition of specific knowledge can help little with character formation or the ability to learn. The current focus in education of developing applied skills has greatly damaged both quality of education and human capability. If the world was in a state of stasis, constant informational loading, and specific upskilling could have huge benefits for children, yet the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the world actually rewards adaptable people who can evaluate themselves clearly: well-developed human beings. The specific skills tied to commerce must always be developed as secondary to the fundamental skills of being a good human.

The first lie of the educational establishment is that productivity can be modeled as a system with human inputs rather than a miracle of human ingenuity in positive institutional environments. They are taking a symptom of growth and framing it as the cause of progress. All countries with impressive industries will have many people who have developed skills relevant to those industries. However, if the associated industries themselves do not grow, there will be a point of diminishing societal returns for the high-skilled individuals. A country with loose property rights will produce far less output than a country with stable property rights even if they have the same amount of skilled professionals. Constant changes in preferences and technology can greatly increase certain skills and value while also making some skills obsolete. The nation with a more adaptable populace will always be better suited to handle these situations of transition. The loss of need for specific skills becomes much less than the survivalistic threat it is today when people are able to learn quickly and have an education greater than their specific commercial capabilities.

The mechanistic understanding of productivity has rearranged the proper order of human activity. While the ability to learn and create is far more fundamental to human activity, those skills are often sidelined in favor of specialization into specific disciplines. Children can only embrace all of life and reach their full creative potential when they have some time to develop and explore without the pressures of the commercial world on them. While specific career training like college or the trades can be extremely helpful, they are used best by people who already know how to be an effective human. These abilities will let them shift between their most profitable and interesting opportunities as they are not siloed into one career path with no ability to escape. In utilitarian terms, a fully educated human has a certain level of insurance against the changing of the world. They are able to switch between activities with much more ease than someone who never developed the capability for self assessment and learning, rather than just memorizing information.

Until a more robust anthropology is developed in conjunction with a more dynamic understanding of productivity, even those who view education simply for its utilitarian purpose will not be able to “create productivity.” It is a direct harm to students to promise them a life of success through the learning of specific skills with a neglect of their underlying humanity. Even the administrators and politicians who implement this dehumanizing education would appreciate the many benefits of a people with a truly robust and humanity-forming education. It is no secret that in the early 1900s the modern education system was created to enable better factory workers, and this mentality has never died. There are many strains of thought fighting this theory, yet the predominant narrative is still one of mechanistic productivity. Only through a full understanding of the human person can education be brought back to its true purpose and effectiveness.

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