I find myself reflected in this article. I am 26 years old, born in Spain, in what we can call a "middle class" family. I've went to school and highschool until 18, and from there to my 23 years I never read a single book.
Fortunately, I recognized at that moment (my 23) that I was becoming, literally, stupid. I was unable to remember what I learned on the school, and I was not satisfied with a life of consume and evasion. At that moment, I decided (ignoring, of course, determinism and flattering my vanity) to start an autodidact study, and I can say that, basically, I started from zero with a huge difficulty in attention and a tremendous lack of understanding. It took for me almost a year to understand how to learn and which was the purpose of learning; and with these I mean: think and reflect, more than simply read information for trying to own knowledge as a mean, but mainly as an end. I think also that without philosophy (Platon and Aristotle, logic and epistemology, humanism and ethics) I've never could do this.
That was the best decision of my life, and every day, I spent hours in lecture, thinking and writting; but always, for my own profit and pleasure. I will never put a foot on colleges or universities.
Knowledge, besides sociologicall aspects that determine it, contributes to a better quality of life. It seems to me that make emphasis on these is the only way for arrive to people like I used to be. Besides all the sociologicall aspects that are in the article, I think that has been a lost of the value of education as an end in the generations that preceded me. In other words, we can say that socially, the knowledge has lost his value as a reinforcer; and without that reinforcer effect, is very hard that people spent effort (because as worst is your state of knowledge in a moment, hardest and more aversive is to turn it around) in adquire it.
PD: Sorry for my english, I've never write since highschool.
I was based in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, at the end of 98. One evening I was sitting in a cafe. A man who I had not met before took a seat opposite me and we conversed in English. After a while, he took out a work book and asked me if I would help him with his English, which I agreed to do. It quickly became apparent that we were communicating at cross purposes. He possessed a far more developed understanding of the building blocks of my native tongue. I found myself in the ridiculous position of being an English speaker from a very young age, with absolutely no formal understanding of the various tenses and clauses, or sentence construction. Nobody made an attempt to teach me anything like this at school. I think this was to my detriment when it came to learning other languages.
When I was percolating through the education system - a decent primary, followed by an extremely violent comprehensive school - the old guard of teachers were ageing out and being replaced by a more liberalised strain. Many of the outgoing teachers were frightening, often damaged individuals, but I learned a lot from them, things that I still remember. With the newer teachers it sometimes seemed like we were being taught bullet points - this fact when presented in the proper context will earn you one mark in an essay written on the subject in your final exam. It was a joyless way to learn; one that pandered to a system of metrics while devaluing education as something of worth that would enrich your life.
A wonderful story, artfully missing out the actual capitalist ruling class that actually instituted the schools (to train workers) and the universities (to train the salaried and the propagandists). The PMC are simply their servants, but t is a brilliant ruse for the capitalist ruling class to make themselves invisible behind the PMC. All culture and no political economy. With automation taking away much of the complications of working class jobs, and many of those jobs shipped abroad, the ownership class decided that it was much more important to dumb down and separate through "identity" etc. the working class than teach them higher skills. Educated minds get to thinking about how societies really work and how to change that, dumbed down ones don't.
Gabriel Rockhill very thoroughly covers the mind-worm which is the non-communist "critical" theory that the ruling class pushed, thoroughly ungrounded from materialism, that has also greatly infested the body educational. Perhaps a bit of blowback there.
One thing that I always found puzzling about "education" is that it serves two purposes at odds with each other: first, it promotes "knowledge," independent of cultural-social context; second, it promotes and indoctrinates various social myths that, in principle, reinforce the cohesion of the society where it is located. (I always thought J H Newman had one of better expositions on the balance between the two goals--but while also pointing to its weakness without meaning to).
Social myths are built on shared beliefs about the world and the place of the "tribe" in that world (which presupposes that the "tribe" self-evidently exists in the first place, which everyone in that tribe recognizes). These are almost invariably and empirically false: profession of faith stuff--filioque clause or whatever. Understanding is not required: you believe because that is what you do to show your tribal solidarity. But if the educational institutions are to provide an understanding of "untethered" knowledge, whose epistemological basis is "empirical" in nature, you have to adjust the "official" myths (or, indoctrinate people in a different way) so that the two are not really in conflict--at least, not as far as the tribal members are concerned. (One of fascinating and oft replicated result in sociology of science is that US Evangelicals know and "accept" evolution as "science," especially those who are better educated--and Evangelicals in US are, on average, better educated than non-Evangelicals--but they simply do not "personally believe" it, whatever that really means. You can get at this by subtly rephrasing survey questions--Dan Kahan has done good bit of pioneering work on this. But is this all that different? I might "believe" that the Consecrated Host is literal body and blood of Christ, but also that that is independent of the chemistry and chalk it all up to mysterium fidei.) But, the catch, again, is that you need a shared "faith" to sustain that "miracle."
I guess this is what brings us back to the point that Aurelien is raising: the schizophrenic role of the university, of both promoting "empirically true" knowledge and social indoctrination of the "official truths" can be reconciled only if there's a shared faith about the collective "tribal identity." The first context, of promoting "empirical knowledge" is on the wane. The second context, of social indoctrination is still very much in place, but its paradoxical coexistence with "empirical knowledge" rests on a shaky grounds, because we lack a shared collective identity. Rather, the official indoctrination is more about how we don't have one and that we should just glorify ourselves and whatever we make up as our alleged identity, except when they offend the self-appointed masters of the universe.
I don't think the problem with this education system is not so much that we are "overproducing" elites. What we are doing is that we are producing "elites" who are not fit to be elites in terms of practical knowledge independent of professing the faith. Worse, of course, is that this profession of the faith is itself unmoored from any tribal basis: if you are professing faith in a tribal grouping that people at large feel a sense of belonging to, even that falls on deaf ears. Is it any wonder that those who grow tire of the official "profession of faith" are turning to more "extreme" faiths that at least appeal to their sense of where they fit in the universe better?
I’ve thought a lot about the ‘dumbing down’ of the general populace in the West over the last few years or generations, and wondered why it’s happening and whether it’s intentional, but could never come to a conclusion. But I think you nail it here, it’s like an attempt by our elite to create a Neo-feudal society built upon a heap of stupid, distracted serfs. ‘Don’t worry about anything, we know best, just keep consuming, consuming, consuming, watching Netflix, porn and ordering food delivery’.
And while I’m a big fan of Turchin’s books and his elite overproduction theory, I think calling the PMC an elite is a misnomer. I would kill for an elite. These people are pathetic and stupid though. Their priorities are basically about making LGBT+ people feel good and extracting as much wealth as possible out of nations and companies, with the same people cycling between the 2.
The European elite and underclasses that went to war in 1914 were truly great people. Ernst Junger came from a modest middle class background but was the epitome of the warrior-philosopher. Say what you want about an aristocracy like in Britain or the Kaiserreich, but those men answered the call. They were first up and over the trenches and died at higher rates than the men they were leading. How many future geniuses, inventors, Great Men etc were slaughtered on the killing fields of France, Belgium and the Ostfront.
With few exceptions, most of the PMC haven’t done military service. The children of the Golden Generation during the Vietnam War were a bunch of draft dodgers for the most part. The idea of sacrificing for a higher goal is absurd to these people. And like Reagan’s trickle down economics BS, without a real elite as an example to follow, the rest of us are left with the same attitude, ‘why bother?’.
"Hybrid islamo-wokist party" has got to be one of the most goofy things I've read in a while. For all its faults, LFI is the only party that even tries to represent the values of the traditional left on the French political scene. The rest are Atlanticist pawns or dregs of the Vichy right.
What holds up the Earth? Markets. It's markets all the way down.
Western education now consists of consumers and stakeholders rather than the quaint concept of students and teachers.
I never conflated education with intelligence. School does not make you more intelligent. It should make you more knowledgeable. It should confer the ability to assess a problem and make better use of one's innate intelligence to strive for a solution.
When knowledge now defies the reality that exists what exactly is the purpose of education?
The HBD crowd is right about education - it does not matter much. Gregory Cochran, Razib Khan, Joseph Bronski, Steve Sailer, Charles Murray, to name a few, provide tons of evidence. Smart people are like productive employees - they can do much more for a short period of time, and people who are interested in a subject have no issues finding information about it nowadays. Todd's right, the West is doomed. The fools at the top do not like meritocracy.
I have often commented here about how I see a political economic motive behind the PMC, that I see its rise to power as a downstream consequence of international economic power. This time I put my response in an article on my own Substack. We agree on much, I think, Aurelien, including, I believe, contempt for PMC aesthetics, opportunism, vacuousness, and hypocrisy. I hope you'll read it.
I have read two Emmanuel Todd books. "The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social Systems" -as far as I can tell his bonkers theory that family structure predicts political structure doesn't work. "After the Empire" seemed designed to appeal to the "not in our name" types; it didn't work out the way he said at all, and is rather comical in hindsight. Calling out the Soviet system in the 70s was a good trick though.
The educational system is absurdly dumbed down; my boomer parents learned Latin, Anglo-Saxon and pre-calc in a very working class high school. How many PhDs in English Lit were required to read Beowulf? Probably none.
I attribute the madness of the PMC to the slow down of technological progress. If chip making lithography hadn't improved as it did, the world would look a lot like it did when I was a kid in the 70s. Since we no longer have technological progress we have to have "social progress" like euthenasia and letting kids who can't choose their bedtimes choose what kind of genitals they'd prefer. Most of fooling around in computers isn't actually very economically productive; it barely shows up in productivity stats (Solow's paradox). It does keep a lot of people busy though, and things would be a lot worse without it.
I think you have to consider technological development alongside everything else. The trend line starts to dip as mass TV becomes available in the west. Distraction for the adults (it's easier to be happy with your station once you're sedated by TV and now internet all day) and simply less reading, thinking and intellectual challenge for the children.
And then there's another aspect of the TV and now social media, the dumbing down of discourse - the vox pop, one liner culture that goes against deep thinking and any effort at rational analysis. Mass media must denigrate real education and hold up a shrunken substitute in its place to maintain its legitimacy.
Coupled with permissive culture, the lack of interest with putting children through the grinder of a rigorous education (which is what has saved the east asians and also upper classes here), and the marketised move from education to credentialisation and you have a breakdown of standards.
It's an unintentional return to feudal times playing out. While state school teachers are subject to strict surveillance and frequently changing educational theories and methods, many of the elite private schools in the UK now either use the International Baccalaureate (quite literally a global elite education standard) or are creating their own examinations and curriculums which is a return to the 19th century.
A minor point or two, and not in disagreement: in late 19th and early twentieth century France, the purpose of education was, as you point out, explicitly ideological social engineering aimed at the destruction of the still majority (geographically-speaking) non-French communities (Breton, Occitan, German, Basque etc.) and anyone else who was in the way: aimed at the creation of a streamlined, standard population socialized into urban-oriented and Republican values and thus more efficiently administered and used for the purposes of the state. Intent and practice do bear comparison to later Bolshevik and Chinese Communist practice. People of course did become literate good citizens, but they were generally literate only in materials sanctioned by state Republican culture, which could include (like today) apparently daring material of certain types.
In the United States, late 19th century and early 20th century public education in urban areas was usually intended primarily to socialize children into efficient factory workers. One can argue that was necessary in order to process disparate immigrant populations into Americans, and of course literacy is useful and necessary for many purposes, but since American culture was at the same time being remade by the elites, and changing from democratic, morally-based one to something very different, education very often for most people functioned not as a liberating but as a restraining force, generally speaking.
Minor correction: re: the WWI era lacking any analogue mathematical calculators?
There have been many mechanical calculators used, some QUITE widely, from the time of the Antikythera mechanism right on through the pinwheel calculators still widely used in USSR through the 1970s called "iron feliks" after Feliks Dzerzehnsky who championed their distribution to the proletariat... There were several such devices in common use, particularly in factory settings- Labor saving devices. Google on these mathematicians & engineers for more: Leibniz, Pascal, Müller, Napier and of course, Charles Babbage.
Great article otherwise... And I'm an example of the late stage decay and senility/disruption of USA educational system in several ways myself. Two parents with PhDs, largely self taught when the officially authorized path didn't go well...
"Meanwhile, of course, and unlike the US, cultures such as Russia, China and India retain widespread support for education at all levels."
Does Todd or someone else offer information to that effect? I don't know about China and India, but all of your criticisms concerning modern Western education are identical to the complaints I often hear about modern Russian education. Perhaps our situation is less bad, but I think it is broadly similar. After all, our education system has almost always tried to copy that of the West for the last three hundred years, and I would argue our modern society and culture are strongly Westernised as well, rhetorical attempts to distance ourselves from the West notwithstanding.
How strange are the patterns of resemblance between The West, the Anglosphere in particular, in this point in History and the Qing Dynasty in her days of spiral downward in the midst of the 19th century.
Just as in the final decades of the Dynasty the Western countries also have serious drug problems. Problems that are even more severe than the ones that plague Qing China since in their case, not only both large chunks of the populations of the U.S. and Europe are now hook up on drugs of some kind, but the drug money itself has turned vital for the well-being of the financial system too. Now is the PMC that is echoing the late literati class of imperial China. Of course, the similarities are only superficial.
Nevertheless, in China's history the sentiment of discontentment within society and specially the feeling that the old traditional path of enrichment through merit in Education, by passing the imperial examinations and acquiring office, had become meaningless partly fed the fury of one of the greatest mass revolts of the period, the Taiping Rebellion. Later on, as the power slipped out of their hands the Qing ruling class and the literati that served them turned into an even more tight and smaller group, a group of highly educated people, totally corrupted, severely weaken and completely detached from reality until their very end.
I find myself reflected in this article. I am 26 years old, born in Spain, in what we can call a "middle class" family. I've went to school and highschool until 18, and from there to my 23 years I never read a single book.
Fortunately, I recognized at that moment (my 23) that I was becoming, literally, stupid. I was unable to remember what I learned on the school, and I was not satisfied with a life of consume and evasion. At that moment, I decided (ignoring, of course, determinism and flattering my vanity) to start an autodidact study, and I can say that, basically, I started from zero with a huge difficulty in attention and a tremendous lack of understanding. It took for me almost a year to understand how to learn and which was the purpose of learning; and with these I mean: think and reflect, more than simply read information for trying to own knowledge as a mean, but mainly as an end. I think also that without philosophy (Platon and Aristotle, logic and epistemology, humanism and ethics) I've never could do this.
That was the best decision of my life, and every day, I spent hours in lecture, thinking and writting; but always, for my own profit and pleasure. I will never put a foot on colleges or universities.
Knowledge, besides sociologicall aspects that determine it, contributes to a better quality of life. It seems to me that make emphasis on these is the only way for arrive to people like I used to be. Besides all the sociologicall aspects that are in the article, I think that has been a lost of the value of education as an end in the generations that preceded me. In other words, we can say that socially, the knowledge has lost his value as a reinforcer; and without that reinforcer effect, is very hard that people spent effort (because as worst is your state of knowledge in a moment, hardest and more aversive is to turn it around) in adquire it.
PD: Sorry for my english, I've never write since highschool.
I was based in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, at the end of 98. One evening I was sitting in a cafe. A man who I had not met before took a seat opposite me and we conversed in English. After a while, he took out a work book and asked me if I would help him with his English, which I agreed to do. It quickly became apparent that we were communicating at cross purposes. He possessed a far more developed understanding of the building blocks of my native tongue. I found myself in the ridiculous position of being an English speaker from a very young age, with absolutely no formal understanding of the various tenses and clauses, or sentence construction. Nobody made an attempt to teach me anything like this at school. I think this was to my detriment when it came to learning other languages.
When I was percolating through the education system - a decent primary, followed by an extremely violent comprehensive school - the old guard of teachers were ageing out and being replaced by a more liberalised strain. Many of the outgoing teachers were frightening, often damaged individuals, but I learned a lot from them, things that I still remember. With the newer teachers it sometimes seemed like we were being taught bullet points - this fact when presented in the proper context will earn you one mark in an essay written on the subject in your final exam. It was a joyless way to learn; one that pandered to a system of metrics while devaluing education as something of worth that would enrich your life.
A wonderful story, artfully missing out the actual capitalist ruling class that actually instituted the schools (to train workers) and the universities (to train the salaried and the propagandists). The PMC are simply their servants, but t is a brilliant ruse for the capitalist ruling class to make themselves invisible behind the PMC. All culture and no political economy. With automation taking away much of the complications of working class jobs, and many of those jobs shipped abroad, the ownership class decided that it was much more important to dumb down and separate through "identity" etc. the working class than teach them higher skills. Educated minds get to thinking about how societies really work and how to change that, dumbed down ones don't.
Gabriel Rockhill very thoroughly covers the mind-worm which is the non-communist "critical" theory that the ruling class pushed, thoroughly ungrounded from materialism, that has also greatly infested the body educational. Perhaps a bit of blowback there.
One thing that I always found puzzling about "education" is that it serves two purposes at odds with each other: first, it promotes "knowledge," independent of cultural-social context; second, it promotes and indoctrinates various social myths that, in principle, reinforce the cohesion of the society where it is located. (I always thought J H Newman had one of better expositions on the balance between the two goals--but while also pointing to its weakness without meaning to).
Social myths are built on shared beliefs about the world and the place of the "tribe" in that world (which presupposes that the "tribe" self-evidently exists in the first place, which everyone in that tribe recognizes). These are almost invariably and empirically false: profession of faith stuff--filioque clause or whatever. Understanding is not required: you believe because that is what you do to show your tribal solidarity. But if the educational institutions are to provide an understanding of "untethered" knowledge, whose epistemological basis is "empirical" in nature, you have to adjust the "official" myths (or, indoctrinate people in a different way) so that the two are not really in conflict--at least, not as far as the tribal members are concerned. (One of fascinating and oft replicated result in sociology of science is that US Evangelicals know and "accept" evolution as "science," especially those who are better educated--and Evangelicals in US are, on average, better educated than non-Evangelicals--but they simply do not "personally believe" it, whatever that really means. You can get at this by subtly rephrasing survey questions--Dan Kahan has done good bit of pioneering work on this. But is this all that different? I might "believe" that the Consecrated Host is literal body and blood of Christ, but also that that is independent of the chemistry and chalk it all up to mysterium fidei.) But, the catch, again, is that you need a shared "faith" to sustain that "miracle."
I guess this is what brings us back to the point that Aurelien is raising: the schizophrenic role of the university, of both promoting "empirically true" knowledge and social indoctrination of the "official truths" can be reconciled only if there's a shared faith about the collective "tribal identity." The first context, of promoting "empirical knowledge" is on the wane. The second context, of social indoctrination is still very much in place, but its paradoxical coexistence with "empirical knowledge" rests on a shaky grounds, because we lack a shared collective identity. Rather, the official indoctrination is more about how we don't have one and that we should just glorify ourselves and whatever we make up as our alleged identity, except when they offend the self-appointed masters of the universe.
I don't think the problem with this education system is not so much that we are "overproducing" elites. What we are doing is that we are producing "elites" who are not fit to be elites in terms of practical knowledge independent of professing the faith. Worse, of course, is that this profession of the faith is itself unmoored from any tribal basis: if you are professing faith in a tribal grouping that people at large feel a sense of belonging to, even that falls on deaf ears. Is it any wonder that those who grow tire of the official "profession of faith" are turning to more "extreme" faiths that at least appeal to their sense of where they fit in the universe better?
I’ve thought a lot about the ‘dumbing down’ of the general populace in the West over the last few years or generations, and wondered why it’s happening and whether it’s intentional, but could never come to a conclusion. But I think you nail it here, it’s like an attempt by our elite to create a Neo-feudal society built upon a heap of stupid, distracted serfs. ‘Don’t worry about anything, we know best, just keep consuming, consuming, consuming, watching Netflix, porn and ordering food delivery’.
And while I’m a big fan of Turchin’s books and his elite overproduction theory, I think calling the PMC an elite is a misnomer. I would kill for an elite. These people are pathetic and stupid though. Their priorities are basically about making LGBT+ people feel good and extracting as much wealth as possible out of nations and companies, with the same people cycling between the 2.
The European elite and underclasses that went to war in 1914 were truly great people. Ernst Junger came from a modest middle class background but was the epitome of the warrior-philosopher. Say what you want about an aristocracy like in Britain or the Kaiserreich, but those men answered the call. They were first up and over the trenches and died at higher rates than the men they were leading. How many future geniuses, inventors, Great Men etc were slaughtered on the killing fields of France, Belgium and the Ostfront.
With few exceptions, most of the PMC haven’t done military service. The children of the Golden Generation during the Vietnam War were a bunch of draft dodgers for the most part. The idea of sacrificing for a higher goal is absurd to these people. And like Reagan’s trickle down economics BS, without a real elite as an example to follow, the rest of us are left with the same attitude, ‘why bother?’.
"Hybrid islamo-wokist party" has got to be one of the most goofy things I've read in a while. For all its faults, LFI is the only party that even tries to represent the values of the traditional left on the French political scene. The rest are Atlanticist pawns or dregs of the Vichy right.
What holds up the Earth? Markets. It's markets all the way down.
Western education now consists of consumers and stakeholders rather than the quaint concept of students and teachers.
I never conflated education with intelligence. School does not make you more intelligent. It should make you more knowledgeable. It should confer the ability to assess a problem and make better use of one's innate intelligence to strive for a solution.
When knowledge now defies the reality that exists what exactly is the purpose of education?
The HBD crowd is right about education - it does not matter much. Gregory Cochran, Razib Khan, Joseph Bronski, Steve Sailer, Charles Murray, to name a few, provide tons of evidence. Smart people are like productive employees - they can do much more for a short period of time, and people who are interested in a subject have no issues finding information about it nowadays. Todd's right, the West is doomed. The fools at the top do not like meritocracy.
I have often commented here about how I see a political economic motive behind the PMC, that I see its rise to power as a downstream consequence of international economic power. This time I put my response in an article on my own Substack. We agree on much, I think, Aurelien, including, I believe, contempt for PMC aesthetics, opportunism, vacuousness, and hypocrisy. I hope you'll read it.
https://thefsb.substack.com/p/response-to-aureliens-the-revolt
I have read two Emmanuel Todd books. "The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social Systems" -as far as I can tell his bonkers theory that family structure predicts political structure doesn't work. "After the Empire" seemed designed to appeal to the "not in our name" types; it didn't work out the way he said at all, and is rather comical in hindsight. Calling out the Soviet system in the 70s was a good trick though.
The educational system is absurdly dumbed down; my boomer parents learned Latin, Anglo-Saxon and pre-calc in a very working class high school. How many PhDs in English Lit were required to read Beowulf? Probably none.
I attribute the madness of the PMC to the slow down of technological progress. If chip making lithography hadn't improved as it did, the world would look a lot like it did when I was a kid in the 70s. Since we no longer have technological progress we have to have "social progress" like euthenasia and letting kids who can't choose their bedtimes choose what kind of genitals they'd prefer. Most of fooling around in computers isn't actually very economically productive; it barely shows up in productivity stats (Solow's paradox). It does keep a lot of people busy though, and things would be a lot worse without it.
I think you have to consider technological development alongside everything else. The trend line starts to dip as mass TV becomes available in the west. Distraction for the adults (it's easier to be happy with your station once you're sedated by TV and now internet all day) and simply less reading, thinking and intellectual challenge for the children.
And then there's another aspect of the TV and now social media, the dumbing down of discourse - the vox pop, one liner culture that goes against deep thinking and any effort at rational analysis. Mass media must denigrate real education and hold up a shrunken substitute in its place to maintain its legitimacy.
Coupled with permissive culture, the lack of interest with putting children through the grinder of a rigorous education (which is what has saved the east asians and also upper classes here), and the marketised move from education to credentialisation and you have a breakdown of standards.
It's an unintentional return to feudal times playing out. While state school teachers are subject to strict surveillance and frequently changing educational theories and methods, many of the elite private schools in the UK now either use the International Baccalaureate (quite literally a global elite education standard) or are creating their own examinations and curriculums which is a return to the 19th century.
Well said,
A minor point or two, and not in disagreement: in late 19th and early twentieth century France, the purpose of education was, as you point out, explicitly ideological social engineering aimed at the destruction of the still majority (geographically-speaking) non-French communities (Breton, Occitan, German, Basque etc.) and anyone else who was in the way: aimed at the creation of a streamlined, standard population socialized into urban-oriented and Republican values and thus more efficiently administered and used for the purposes of the state. Intent and practice do bear comparison to later Bolshevik and Chinese Communist practice. People of course did become literate good citizens, but they were generally literate only in materials sanctioned by state Republican culture, which could include (like today) apparently daring material of certain types.
In the United States, late 19th century and early 20th century public education in urban areas was usually intended primarily to socialize children into efficient factory workers. One can argue that was necessary in order to process disparate immigrant populations into Americans, and of course literacy is useful and necessary for many purposes, but since American culture was at the same time being remade by the elites, and changing from democratic, morally-based one to something very different, education very often for most people functioned not as a liberating but as a restraining force, generally speaking.
Minor correction: re: the WWI era lacking any analogue mathematical calculators?
There have been many mechanical calculators used, some QUITE widely, from the time of the Antikythera mechanism right on through the pinwheel calculators still widely used in USSR through the 1970s called "iron feliks" after Feliks Dzerzehnsky who championed their distribution to the proletariat... There were several such devices in common use, particularly in factory settings- Labor saving devices. Google on these mathematicians & engineers for more: Leibniz, Pascal, Müller, Napier and of course, Charles Babbage.
Great article otherwise... And I'm an example of the late stage decay and senility/disruption of USA educational system in several ways myself. Two parents with PhDs, largely self taught when the officially authorized path didn't go well...
"Meanwhile, of course, and unlike the US, cultures such as Russia, China and India retain widespread support for education at all levels."
Does Todd or someone else offer information to that effect? I don't know about China and India, but all of your criticisms concerning modern Western education are identical to the complaints I often hear about modern Russian education. Perhaps our situation is less bad, but I think it is broadly similar. After all, our education system has almost always tried to copy that of the West for the last three hundred years, and I would argue our modern society and culture are strongly Westernised as well, rhetorical attempts to distance ourselves from the West notwithstanding.
How strange are the patterns of resemblance between The West, the Anglosphere in particular, in this point in History and the Qing Dynasty in her days of spiral downward in the midst of the 19th century.
Just as in the final decades of the Dynasty the Western countries also have serious drug problems. Problems that are even more severe than the ones that plague Qing China since in their case, not only both large chunks of the populations of the U.S. and Europe are now hook up on drugs of some kind, but the drug money itself has turned vital for the well-being of the financial system too. Now is the PMC that is echoing the late literati class of imperial China. Of course, the similarities are only superficial.
Nevertheless, in China's history the sentiment of discontentment within society and specially the feeling that the old traditional path of enrichment through merit in Education, by passing the imperial examinations and acquiring office, had become meaningless partly fed the fury of one of the greatest mass revolts of the period, the Taiping Rebellion. Later on, as the power slipped out of their hands the Qing ruling class and the literati that served them turned into an even more tight and smaller group, a group of highly educated people, totally corrupted, severely weaken and completely detached from reality until their very end.
Apropos today's public education... https://bit.ly/3xnexz5