Tonight I’m running a Students for Liberty webinar on my book in progress, The Case Against Education. Anyone can join at zero price. Q&A follows the seminar. If you’ve got questions about the magic of education, ability bias, the sheepskin effect, the marriage premium versus the college premium, or signaling in general, I’m all ears.
Feb 29 2012
Scott Sumner is the latest intellectual detective on the Bernanke case. The crucial clue is a 2003 piece by Bernanke himself, which states:Ultimately, it appears, one can check to see if an economy has a stable monetary background only by looking at macroeconomic indicators such as nominal GDP growth and infl...
Feb 29 2012
Gerald O'Driscoll talks about an important difference between planned systems and emergent orders. (It takes a while for him to get started, so you might skip through the first 8 minutes or so.) Planning works well for institutions with definite, well-agreed goals and finite lifespans. Emergent orders work well when...
Feb 29 2012
Tonight I'm running a Students for Liberty webinar on my book in progress, The Case Against Education. Anyone can join at zero price. Q&A follows the seminar. If you've got questions about the magic of education, ability bias, the sheepskin effect, the marriage premium versus the college premium, ...
READER COMMENTS
Luke G.
Feb 29 2012 at 10:10am
I know you’ve touched on this before–particularly in the “magic of education” post linked above–but I’d like to hear a really thorough discussion of the “I teach my students how to think, not what to think” general notion. I’ve summarized your arguments to some of my fellow professors and some of my students, and this inevitably is the notion they keep coming back to. What’s the refutation?
Is it really that implausible that we can teach students “how to think”? Is teaching “critical thinking skills” mostly a waste of time?
Ted Craig
Feb 29 2012 at 10:16am
I’m still trying to figure out how none of this makes Caplan a massive hypocrit.
Mark Brophy
Feb 29 2012 at 11:31am
I’d like to second Luke’s call for a “how to think, not what to think” refutation, and a refutation of the idea that learning is transferable between domains. Why doesn’t a child who learns to play chess or a musical instrument become a better learner?
Ezadarque
Feb 29 2012 at 1:16pm
My question is why should this be a “case against (all) education” instead of a case against the current model of education. In your book “The Myth of the Rational Voter” you thoroughly explain how certain biases hurt societies, and how they can, to some extent, be corrected by education.
Shouldn’t we try to create an evidence-based teaching environment that teaches people whatever is needed to correct biases which hurt their personal lives and of people around them?
While we have way too much education about Shakespeare, the causes of World War II or how to measure the volume of a cone, we have way too little teaching of economics, statistics, cognitive biases, the scientific method and other subjects that could actually be helpful.
Leo
Feb 29 2012 at 4:17pm
I’d like to listen but being from the UK the timing makes it unreasonable.
Mark Little
Mar 1 2012 at 9:18pm
Was it recorded? Is there a link?
Comments are closed.