Don't Need No Education?

Tyler Cowen speculates, others take note: could education be a placebo effect? Yes, it could, and the Moon might really consist of green cheese. Ben Casnocha:

On your first day of school at a fancy institution you listen to grand speeches about the wisdom that will soon be imprinted in your brain. You have entered as feeble minds, you will leave as the ruling class. You are also reminded about the ultra-selectivity of the august institution. You are some of the smartest young men and women in the world. It is impossible to leave a convocation ceremony without being convinced that you are among the chosen ones.

Then, you spend four years cracking open the great books, interacting with professors who shock and awe you with their intelligence, and listening intently to outside speakers who tell you it's up your generation to right yesterday's wrongs.

All the while you are keenly aware of the time and money investment you are making. By the end you have spent 48 months full-time engaged in the crucial business of educating yourself. At private colleges, your parents have mortgaged the house to make one of the largest investments of their life.

Surely, you've learned something profound. Surely, you've learned "how to think." Surely, without such a formative intellectual experience you would be at a significant disadvantage in the workforce.

At graduation, you walk off the campus toting the armor of self-confidence that comes from being told you are now "an educated adult." Self-confidence is extremely important.

Perhaps at some point it doesn't matter what actually happens during those four years; if the song-and-dance is elaborate enough, you will be convinced that education happened, and you will carry intellectual self-confidence with you into the world.

Casnocha admits that these speculations clearly don't work for subjects like science and engineering (or presumably for any others where technique is taught - music, accounting, theatre...). What about liberal arts?

If you are lucky, your liberal arts education will force you to read some good books, and maybe even to discuss them. I asked one liberal arts student what he had learned. His answer: How to write a five page essay. That's not a small thing.

The "placebo effect" is a silly identification in any case, since everybody knows that the primary result of an education is the awarding of the tribal badge...