For decades, the United States has been spending more on education and getting less value in return. Why?

In today’s Martin Center article, F. Andrew Wolf Jr. offers his view on that question.

He writes:

Suffice it to say, in the West today (and especially in the U.S.), a type of schizophrenic malaise has crept into colleges, due primarily to an ineffective K-12 system, an overreliance on developmental college curricula, and “general course requirements” that essentially reiterate high-school learning.

He’s right. For a great many students, K-12 is a huge waste of time, and teachers are more concerned with students’ happiness than with their learning of basic material. Those students then arrive in college, where they drop out or coast along with courses that don’t demand much.

Wolf is right on target here:

Yet it is not only in regurgitating high-school learning that colleges fail. There is a persistent tendency among modern liberals to identify education with an ever-increasing flow of information (data). I suspect it makes them feel better, as though something important is happening in the classroom. Lots of people are hired, enormous sums are spent, and experts crank out yearly reports on how things are getting better, or at least aren’t as bad as they appear.

As Thomas Sowell says, American education is far more a jobs program for adults than a system for educating young people.