Mixed bag

Tyler Cowen offers a bundle of unrelated opinions including this nice suggestion:

High-quality American high school students study too much and have too many extracurricular activities.  Yes, I am thinking zero-sum game.  It would be better for most of them to go out and get jobs bagging groceries.  They would learn more about the real world.

and this rather, ahem, counter-intuitive assessment of George Lucas' opus:

The first two Star Wars installments (yes, that includes the one with Jar Jar Binks) were excellent, and will someday be recognized as such....

I can think of at least one person who might beg to violently disagree.

Comments

[Yog-Sothoth]

It's really wierd - if he had any sense, he'd just re-release the old ones so that everyone who loved it first time around would introduce it to their children. Why spend hundreds of millions of dollars on making garbage like The Phantom Menace.

[Jon Ihle]

Cowen is talking out of his ass. I was a high-achieving American high school student and I bagged groceries. It was a waste of time. All it taught me about the real world was that supermarkets are staffed by wasters and high-achieving high school students. Oh, that and to keep my mouth shut around bigots and misogynists when outnumbered.

High-achieving high school students aren't preparing for the so-called real world anyway. They're preparing to succeed at elite colleges and universities, from which they will go on to high-level professions. And if we're talking zero-sum, time spent at a crap service sector job is time not spent studying. This puts working high-achievers at a competitive disadvantage with respect to their non-working peers. Look at who makes phi beta kappa in the US: not too many work-study students on those lists.

American students are ignorant enough as it is without having their ignorance reinforced by the retarded 'university of life'.

[Frank McGahon]

All it taught me about the real world was that supermarkets are staffed by wasters and high-achieving high school students..

How do you know that was all it taught you? You have a fairly good grasp of economics, incentives, human nature and indeed "irrational" preferences. Is it completely unthinkable that some of that might have been acquired working in such an ordinary job?

In any case, I think what TC refers to here is students of "high quality" schools, and not "high achieving" students per se.

[Jon Ihle]

Perhaps working in a supermarket had some absolute utility for me - I'm rather adept at counting change and I have excellent bag-packing technique - but its relative utility was definitely negative in that the 20 hours a week I worked was 20 hours I wasn't improving my abilities in something I showed some aptitude for. So that year of part-time work equals a language or instrument I didn't learn or about 100 books I didn't read.

[John]

So that year of part-time work equals a language or instrument I didn't learn or about 100 books I didn't read.

You were not like me. That would have meant a little more homework and higher grades, maybe, and more time in front of the t.v. watching sports. I worked 40 hours a week in my senior year, lots of Sat/Sun 7-3 shifts as well as some weeknights (2-10).

As well as learning things, I saved nearly $10K over the last two years of HS, which helped pay my way in college.

[Abiola Lapite]

I have to agree with Jon Ihle: Tyler Cowen is talking complete and utter crap, both on the student front and where Star Wars is concerned. The fact is that very many international comparisons indicate that American students study too little by comparison with their peers elsewhere in the world, not too much, and this is true at all levels of "quality."

It's rubbish like this - along with the repeated references to nauseating "Old Africa hand" idiots like Kim du Toit and Steve Sailer - that's made me stop thinking Marginal Revolution worth my time.

[Abiola Lapite]

Oh, and by the way, as someone who had to work 20 hours a week while attending a "high quality" college, and full time during my holidays, let me say that all that work did absolutely nothing to teach me anything about the "real world" that I didn't already know. All it did was handicap me in the competition with affluent students who could afford to devote their full energies to studying.

[John]

Abiola's completely correct, of course. If the US had a more serious approach to education we might have a lot more people remaining in full-time, government-funded education until they're 45 studying Hegel or Eliot or whatever rather than earning a crust.

The biggest problems with American education have nothing to do with the number of days in school, but with political correctness, state control and teacher unions.

[John]

Oh, and by the way, as someone who had to work 20 hours a week while attending a "high quality" college, and full time during my holidays, let me say that all that work did absolutely nothing to teach me anything about the "real world" that I didn't already know. All it did was handicap me in the competition with affluent students who could afford to devote their full energies to studying.

What? How can that be a handicap? When I was finished college and being interviewed I never had one interview that didn't ask many questions about my jobs (high school and college). And, when I was on the other end working for a big bank in the late 80s I was much more interested in someone's answers about their jobs than their education. Most jobs (nearly all, I would say) are more about commitment and some basic skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing - emphasized depending on the role), very little of which was taught in college (or even high school). I never recommended anyone who dismissed their part-time jobs as a "waste of time" or whatever.

[Brian]

That's odd. The conventional wisdom among the 'education sky is falling' crowd is that American kids have too LITTLE homework... particularly the elite students.

I tend to agree with you. Too much of one kind of learning (book) and not enough of another (practical). A good education would have a sensible mixture of both.

[Brian]

Come to think of it, I should clarify some of what I said above. Abiola and the other noters do make some good points. I do think kids should work, but not during the school year (or as little as possible).

I DO think kids do too many extracurricular activities. They end up doing a little bit of everything and truly mastering none of it. And stressing themselves (and their parents) to boot.

I coach soccer. I have kids do music lessons, student government, theater and karate (all at the same time)... and that's in addition to school, homework, soccer and once in a while even sleep. Kids are getting stressed out before they're old enough to drive. It's insane.

[Frank McGahon]

Abiola, agreed on the Sailer and Du Toit references (to which I'd add their curious attachment to "Futurepundit") but I don't see what is so objectionable about this. He's talking about high school, not university and making the point that middle class kids are somewhat cossetted from the real world if their time is completely made up with study and leisure - and I would have thought the complaint is more that they spend too much time with the latter - and little with paid work. If he is making some sort of crass "arbeit macht frei" point then I disagree. But, I do think that you can learn a little about economics and human nature by working - I know that I never gave too much thought to tax and incentives until I started earning money myself during the summers while at university.

[Abiola Lapite]

"What? How can that be a handicap? When I was finished college and being interviewed I never had one interview that didn't ask many questions about my jobs (high school and college)."

Has it occurred to you that others might have post-graduation aspirations which go beyond merely finding highly paid work - like, oh, I dunno, graduate school in mathematics? In any case, when I did the consulting/investment banking recruiting thing, what mattered was my internships and activities, not the fact that I'd spent large portions of my time washing dishes and stacking books.

"He's talking about high school, not university and making the point that middle class kids are somewhat cossetted from the real world if their time is completely made up with study and leisure - and I would have thought the complaint is more that they spend too much time with the latter - and little with paid work."

My point is that there just might be some things more important than avoiding the cosseting of teenagers, like a stellar academic record, for instance. I know that if I have children and I'm ever faced with the choice between encouraging them to read intellectually stimulating material and giving them some "real world" exposure through work, I'll choose the intellectual stimulation without a thought: they'll have the rest of their entire lives to work, but they'll only get that one shot at the full time intellectual cultivation (unless they're going to be academics, in which case full-time study is even *more* important).

[Delmore Macnamara]

I think your reaction to this depends on what is your "idea of a University".

You might take the reactionary view that a University is supposed to be a venue for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the cultivation of future scholars. If you do, then clearly paid work is a pointless distraction from study. Please note that so would be beer, student societies & sex. I think it would be a lot harder to get 50% of the population into University on that model (altho' it would be a lot easier for the state to pick up the tuition and maintenance bills for poorer students than it is now).

If you want to get that magic 50% through Uni, however, you probably don't subscribe to the above idea of "a University" in any case. More likely you hold the view that University is half rite of passage half training course. If so, paid pointless work is going to be a positive part of the "University Experience", as preparation for post-University paid pointless work.

[Abiola Lapite]

"If you do, then clearly paid work is a pointless distraction from study. Please note that so would be beer, student societies & sex."

Does it make me a hidebound fossil if I say that I do believe those things have no place being encouraged in the university setting? I realize that young people are driven by their hormones, but that's no reason to validate the notion that a legitimate purpose of higher education is to get laid and high.

[Jim]

The core problem in US high schools is not the ampount of outsdie service job work versus study time, the core problem is the bloated importance of sports. That comes out of the decsision, mainly after WWII, to ram everyone through high school where in the past most had stopped at Grade 8 and gone into a mill. High school retained a track for the "college-bound" but mostly it became a holding pen. Sports were the one area where non-academic students could achieve something.

Something similar happened in the universites. Western universities started out as schools to crank out clergy and what-not, lawyers, alchemists and philosphers. People studied mathematics, but they had to risk being burnt as sorcerers. Forward a few centuries, in America people started studying agriculture and business in an academic way. Future farmers and business leaders had no interest and no need for an academic approach to anything, including their studies. There's the dichotomy that Abiola and Delmore are bumping up against.