Gidget is not a Widget

In today's NYT, Nick Kristof defends the right of companies to outsource jobs to other countries, but argues that we should get our educational act together so that our own workers are more internationally competitive—making outsourcing less attractive. So far so good. Where Kristof and many others go awry is in their proposed solution to our educational woes. After noting how badly American high-school seniors perform in mathematics and science compared to their peers in Asia, he calls for a national campaign to improve instruction in those subjects, just like the one sparked by the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite during the height of the cold war.

The trouble is, that earlier campaign resulted in a federal expenditure of about $1 billion (which was over 1% of the entire U.S. budget in 1958) without leading to any significant lasting improvement in science, mathematics, or foreign language instruction (the three areas on which it concentrated). Instead, much of the money was squandered on dubious and untested pedagogical methods (see Diane Ravitch’s The Troubled Crusade) and science equipment that was not always fully utilized. Before Kristof gets too misty eyed about the post-Sputnik era, he should recall that the sixties gave us “open classrooms,” and the “new math,” among the most infamous bits of educational quackery of the 20th century.

The spark for Kristof’s OP/ED appears to have been a recent report by the American Diploma Project pointing out how abysmally unprepared U.S. high-school graduates are for both college and the modern labor market. The ADP advises states to impose its own curriculum and testing package so that a high-school diploma means something again. Their basic goal is certainly laudable, but further centralizing the state’s control over what and how children are taught is an astoundingly bad idea. To advocate it honestly, one must be ignorant of the long history of government involvement in education.

The first rule of thumb for proponents of government curricula and testing should be: Imagine what your most objectionable political opponents will do with the powers you wish to bestow upon the state. The ADP and like-minded folks seem to imagine that whatever content and testing program they put in place will either remain immutable or will improve (in their view) over time. This is impossibly utopian. In reality, successive legislatures of differing ideological stripes will manipulate the content to suit their whims, creating a hash that will please few. The second rule of thumb should be: Gidget is not a widget. It is unrealistic and counterproductive to try to standardize children’s knowledge and skills. Children are different, and if we wish the best for them we will try to maximize their individual potentials rather than feeding them through a homogenizing educational assembly line.

Yes, high-school diplomas need to mean something again, and yes, both students and schools should know precisely what competencies a given diploma implies. But there is no need for every high-school diploma in a state or a nation to mean precisely the same thing. This is not a totalitarian regime that must coerce its subjects into conformity to ensure its survival. On the contrary, this is a liberal society that relies on diversity and innovation as driving forces of progress.