Sorely Off the Mark

Generally I find Paul Krugman's economic op-eds enlightening, but I found his most recent piece sorely off the mark. Deviating from his usual evaluations of why the deficit is an issue of secondary importance to unemployment, Krugman then provides us with his vision for a future society in which even more government safeguards are needed to maintain economic equality. This will happen, Friedman says, because education is not the great equalizer after all, and technology is going to keep force more and more workers to the sidelines, "Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt)." Without here voicing my objections to Krugman's vision of our future, I do want to point out how full of holes his view on education is.

Let us begin by looking at public education, an area Krugman looks at at only through the narrow lens of job preparedness, and therefore, in his view, of limited utility due to the inevitable replacement of man by machine. If you accept his conclusion, we should abandon public education, as well as higher education because all that can be done about inequality in America is creating a stronger social safety net.

But this is a shallow understanding of the goal of education. Let us remember that Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize is in economics, not educational philosophy. Job preparedness is a positive byproduct of the primary goal of public education, which is to prepare young adults for citizenship. Ideally, students leave school prepared to be active citizens and imbued with the knowledge and critical thinking skills to be good employees or employers.

This point of view broadens the scope of education and shows that that the moral and economic reasons for education are intrinsically linked. Those who leave school informed and empowered to be self-advocates will be able to access resources for the betterment of themselves and their community. They should therefore rely less on traditional safety net programs. Education, then, is an investment that should necessitate less, rather than more, spending on entitlement programs. While this is an ideal vision of what we should be striving for as a society, we still have a long way to go. However, even the woeful state of public education in America we can see how even taking minor steps will help us save money. What if, for example, in the short term, we increased high school graduation rates and decreased prison populations, would this not achieve positive financial and moral outcomes?

Furthermore, Krugman, in his apocalyptic economic forecast, neglects to take into account that while technology does indeed destroy jobs, it also opens up new fields thereby potentially creating new jobs as well. And most of these jobs will indeed require higher levels of knowledge than can be obtained in high school. So not only is primary public education important for the survival of our democracy, but secondary education is important to acquire the knowledge and critical thinking skills that will allow citizens to thrive in a world that is increasingly interconnected and changing at a faster pace each day. I cannot make projections as to how many jobs will be gained or lost because of technology, but I know someone will need to supervise the machines putting together the next generation of tablets.

Rather than being doomed to become a society in which more and more of us depend on the state for our basic necessities, America can and should be a vibrant nation of civically-engaged and intelligent entrepreneurs. Education is the path towards maintaining this society and bringing more of our countrymen into its fold. Those who rely most on the safety net are those whom we invested in least educationally. There is a strong correlation there, and the route to making our country stronger leads through schools. Krugman entitled his piece, "Sympathy for the Luddites," and indeed we should feel sympathetic towards them, those who are not fortunate enough to embrace technology and education will find themselves left behind in the world. We should endeavor to make sure that few of our fellow Americans are among them.