Mark Steyn - After America

The Credentialed Age symbolizes an important transition in society.

We’ve gone through those before, of course—from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and thence to the so-called “knowledge economy.” But, when you think about it, is the “knowledge economy” really that knowledge-able? It would seem improbable that any society could undergo the massive expansion of college education that America has seen since the Second World War, and either effectively impart that much extra “knowledge” or create the jobs that require it. So, instead, we have witnessed an explosion in the ersatz-knowledge economy, where it is possible to pass one’s entire life in an entirely bogus occupation—such as “community organizer” or “diversity consultant,” to name only the First Couple’s contributions to the scene. Addressing a group of financially strapped women in economically debilitated central Ohio, Michelle Obama told them: “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America.” 48

But isn’t “corporate America” what pays for, among other things, the Gulf emir-sized retinue of courtiers the average U.S. senator now travels with? And in what sense did the Obamas “leave” corporate America? Before ascending to her throne, the First Lady worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals. She wasn’t a nurse or doctor, or even a janitor. She was taken on by the hospitals in 2002 to run “programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity, and minority contracting.” 49She was a diversicrat—a booming industry in Eloi America.

In 2005, by happy coincidence, just as her husband was coming to national prominence, she received an impressive $200,000 pay raise and was appointed Vice President for Community and External Affairs and put in charge of managing the hospitals’ “business diversity program.” Mrs. Obama famously complained that America is “just downright mean,” 50and you can see what she’s getting at: she had to make do with a lousy $316,962 plus benefits for a job so necessary to the hospitals that when she quit to become First Lady they didn’t bother replacing her. 51

Leave “corporate America” and get a non-job as a diversity enforcement officer: that’s where the big bucks are.

Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a “community organizer.” I’m not sure that’s progress—and it’s certainly not “sustainable.”

If he hadn’t become president, his resumé wouldn’t be anybody’s idea of a return on investment. His life would read like one of those experimental novels that runs backwards. But who cares? At every stage along the way, he got the measure of his guilty white liberal patrons and played them for saps.

President Obama now wants the rest of America to follow in his and Michelle’s footsteps. Under his student-loan “reforms,” if you choose to go into “public service” any college-loan debts will be forgiven after ten years. 52

Because “public service” is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector. That’s another one of those things that “everybody” knows.

So we need to encourage more people to go into “public service.”

Why?

In the six decades from 1950, the size of America’s state and local workforce increased three times faster than the general population. 53Yet the president says it’s still not enough: we have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine.

Like many career politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s offering, you’ll be working till you drop dead to fund an ever swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks’ vacation a year and retires at fifty-three on a pension you could never dream of.

Centralization, unionization, and credentialization have delivered American education into the grip of a ruthless and destructive conformity.

America spends more per pupil on education than any other major industrial democracy, and the more it spends, the dumber it gets. 54Ignorance has never been such bliss—at least for the teachers’ union. As for the students, nearly 60 percent of U.S. high school graduates entering community college require remedial education. 55In New York, it’s 75 percent. 56Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster. But, in his lavish, leisurely, over-lettered education, he embodies the failings of his class: credentialism isn’t going to be enough in the post-abundance economy, and 90 percent of expensively acquired college “educations” won’t see any return on investment.

Way back in 1993, in The American Educator , Lillian Katz, professor of early childhood education at the University of Illinois, got the lie of the land:

A project by a First Grade class in an affluent Middle Western suburb that I recently observed showed how self-esteem and narcissism can be confused. Working from copied pages prepared by the teacher, each student produced a booklet called “All About Me.” The first page asked for basic information about the child’s home and family. The second page was titled “What I like to eat,” the third was “What I like to watch on TV,” the next was “What I want for a present.”…

Each page was directed toward the child’s basest inner gratifications. Each topic put the child in the role of consumer—of food, entertainment, gifts, and recreation. Not once was the child asked to play the role of producer, investigator, initiator, explorer, experimenter, or problem-solver. 57

Professor Katz recalled walking through a school vestibule and seeing a poster that neatly summed up this approach to education—a circle of clapping hands surrounding the slogan:

And not for the Latin scores. Our students are certainly expert at applauding themselves, with levels of “self-esteem” growing ever more detached from more earthbound measures of achievement. A 2003 OECD study asked pupils of many lands whether they got “good marks in mathematics.” 58Seventy-two percent of U.S. students said yes. Only 56 percent of Finns did, and a mere 25 percent of Hong Kong pupils. Yet, according to another OECD study of the world’s Ninth Graders, Hong Kong has the third best math scores in the world, Finland the second, and the top spot goes to Taiwan (which didn’t participate in the earlier feelgood study, presumably because their self-esteem levels are so low they’re undetectable). 59Where do all those Americans so confident of their “good marks” in math actually rank in the global Hit Parade? Number 35, between Azerbaijan and Croatia. We barely scrape the Top 40 in actual math, but we’re Number One in self-esteem about our math.

Lillian Katz made her observations in the early Nineties. Fifteen years later, a generation expertly trained in tinny self-congratulation went out and voted for a candidate who told them:

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.