Charles Murray on Education Myths

[Music] the bachelors degree has long been considered a benchmark for success in life and an effective preparation for the workforce charles Murray says the bachelor's degree for most students doesn't represent real education he explores what's wrong with the VA and what could replace it at a Cato Policy Forum for the book real education this is a segment of a longer event available at Cato dot org the educational system in the United States is living a lie it is living a lie in the sense that it tries to pretend that all kids can pretty much be anything they want to be if only the schools do their job now nobody really truly believes that I mean if you push kid that if you push people to the wall and particular if you get them to talk about their own children I say I think they will readily acknowledge that well to be a theoretical physicist requires intellectual capabilities that are not necessarily within everyone's grasp and if you push them harder than that I think they will acknowledge the ways in which children really do differ in their profiles of abilities but we operate the schools as if it were true that all children can do just about anything if the schools do their job and if you doubt that try to think of the last time that you saw a newspaper article or a television feature about No Child Left Behind which used the low intellectual ability of some children as a reason why kids don't pass the proficiency standard that they set I doubt if you can think of a single example because that sort of thing is just not said the problem is that this does a disservice to everybody because the abilities that children bring first are of a varied set so you have not just the kind of ability that lets you pass a proficiency examination in mathematics for No Child Left Behind you have verbal abilities you have but you have all of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences they really are different kinds of abilities that should be tapped when you're doing a proper educational system and they will be different for different kinds of kids the four simple truths of which are part of the subtitle of the book go as follows the first is that ability varies I said they were simple the second one is half of the children are below average that one also is really really simple and and I have gotten lots of interesting observations about that statement by the way where people have first gotten mad at me and in for saying it until finally sinks in that the third simple truth is too many people are going to college and the fourth is that the future of the nation depends on how we educate the academically gifted because we have mr. Nelson here I'm going to spend most of my time on the last two because I'm delighted that he's going to be commenting on the book there are lots of things that we can discuss I think both in agreement and disagreement and I want to focus on those the basic message of the first to involve elementary and secondary education and they are a plea in large part to stop first trying to push everybody onto an academic track which i think is a very big mistake second stop ignoring the fact that that kids are do have limits and instead don't give up on kids but simply shape the education they get with that in mind but let me turn to too many people are going to college and the future of the nation depends on how we educate the academically gifted I am NOT against post-secondary education on the contrary I think just about everybody needs post-secondary education the idea that it needs to consist of four years of residence at a brick-and-mortar institution seems to me to be foolish on a number of levels my drape is not with a college education my gripe is with the piece of paper called a BA and the role that this has taken on in a mirror in life let us count the ways first for years very few vocational specialties require four years of coursework and that includes brain surgery that includes being an attorney to become competence in any profession requires more than four years or often requires more than four years but it's not coursework that's doing it and an awful lot of kids want out of college to learn how to make a living at something they have an interest in we will come back to the issue of liberal education in a moment but I want simply to put that out front you have a whole lot of 18 year olds who are very reasonably concerned about making a living that is a good living and reasonably want to find out how to do something that they enjoy and that the idea that they must acquire the BA in the process of doing this of is wrong it's fine for the upper-middle class people who have enough money and time to do this lots of kids don't let me that let me also add into this indictment another problem because we have made the BA the emblem of educational success in this country we automatically are saying that most young people cannot achieve this desired goal and this gets to the issue of the intellectual demands of genuine college level material we've got two separate issues we got going on here we've got we've got young people who can't handle the demands of college-level material but shouldn't be required to spend four years at a residential college to do it we also have the large number who can't handle traditional college-level material and let me be more explicit about that the College Board did a study recently in which it tried to estimate what SAT score is associated with college readiness and they defined college readiness as a 2.7 grade average during the freshman year they had a sample of 41 colleges in their study which range from solid state universities but not spectacular ones up through the most elite colleges so we are talking about colleges that that are the real thing in terms of today's universities and the requirement of an ended the benchmark SAT score that's associated with the 65% probability of having a 2.7 grade average this is not a very severe requirement the SAT score required for that was one that only about 10% of 18 year olds would get if all 18 year olds took the SAT 10% now since you've got 28 percent of all adults who have bas obviously you can get through to a BA without being in that top 10 percent but that is the threshold for dealing with that material in the book I try to make that point uh for readers who I think may have forgotten what a real college is like and I do that by putting down paragraphs from page 400 I just chose that page arbitrarily of a number of standard textbooks and just putting them there on the book sort of lets you know you know what you have to have really good verbal skills to be able to comprehend the texts that you have to read to do a real college education so you have a whole lot of P you have a whole lot of people who are told from birth that you aren't a success in life unless you get a BA and there is no way on God's green earth that a whole lot of those kids can get a genuine BA in a genuine subject at a genuine University and so you have all kinds of changes in the way we define an undergraduate education to try to get around that to expand the pool of people who get it and we we go through all of these hoops that are not necessary in order for these kids to learn what they want to learn to get an education another problem I have with the BA and with regard to its current use is it no longer means anything if it's not in a subject like or biochemistry you can be fairly confident if somebody has a BA or BSC in engineering they know a fair amount of engineering tell me what it means if you're an employer and you want to have people come in at entry-level positions as white-collar workers and the applicant tells you that she has a BA in sociology you don't know anything except that she has a certain degree of perseverance and a certain degree of intelligence you know nothing about anything that she brings to the job that makes her a good employee and yet what are you doing you are requiring the BA as a minimum requirement for getting your foot in the door in the job interview when the when the piece of paper itself tells you nothing charles murray is author of the book real education you can watch the full event at cato org

Channel: The Cato Institute

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Keywords: cato, institute, charles, murray, book, forum, real, education, bachelors, degree, certification

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Length: 9min 54sec (594 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 17 2009