The common-sense value of a university degree is correspondingly declining. A diploma guarantees less and less, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:
This is because attendance at a postsecondary institution no longer guarantees a “college education.” Instead, colleges and universities now provide a full-service experience of “going to college.” These are not remotely the same thing, and students now graduate believing they know a lot more than they actually do. Today, when an expert says, “Well, I went to college,” it’s hard to blame the public for answering, “Who hasn’t?” Americans with college degrees now broadly think of themselves as “educated” when in reality the best that many of them can say is that they’ve continued on in some kind of classroom setting after high school, with wildly varying results.
While post-secondary institutions are abandoning solid content and instead providing a social experience, primary and secondary schools have rejected rigorous curriculum for a different reason. Educational achievement has been exchanged for exercising one’s social identity.
In the face of a real and serious achievement gap, some educational theorists are providing, not the tools which help students take advantage of opportunities, but rather meditations on race and gender.
To seriously address poverty and the demographic trends which maintain it, primary and secondary schools can help students to build skills in mathematics and basic literacy, moving eventually into the nature sciences, history, and geography.
Whether well-intentioned or cynical, trends which dilute the content of academic disciplines and divert energy toward social sentiments do not help, and in fact hurt, those demographic segments which such trends claim to assist. As Robert Bork writes:
Feminism, Afrocentrism, and the self-esteem movement, three other products of the egalitarian passion, divert resources from real education and miseducate. The United States spends more on education than do other Western industrialized nations, and gets less in return. This is not only harmful to individuals and to our competitiveness internationally, it is a likely source of considerable social unrest and antagonism. The failures of public education have had a devastating impact on poor black children. They are often not given even the most rudimentary education that might enable them to compete in the American economy. A growing uneducated black underclass, without prospects for a decent life, is creating social chaos and will create more.
To advance against the achievement gap, and generally to help various socioeconomic and demographic groups, schools need to offer functional skills to students: reading and writing, proficiency at arithmetic and basic algebra, and familiarity with natural sciences and history.
A solid curricular foundation enables students either to succeed at the university, or to enter apprenticeship programs, or the workforce directly.
