Obama's Education Address

Yesterday the President gave a speech in Austin, Texas, with the specific theme of the promotion of education.

The support for educational opportunity, always popular in this country, becomes even more attractive politically during economic contractions.  It is true that both the Democratic Obama Administration, and the Green Party of the United States, favor increased investment in education; to that extent we agree.  The context of the speech, the mindless shibboleths repeated by the political leader of the Democratic Party, reveal an almost total wrong-headedness about how to obtain an improvement in the education offered the youth of this country.

Obama in the course of his address took credit for the measure passed into law which replaced private lending institutions as guarantors of student college loans with the federal government.

See, under the old system, we'd pay banks and financial companies billions of dollars in subsidies to act as middlemen. See, these loans were guaranteed by the federal government. But we'd still pass them through banks, and they'd take out billions of dollars in profits. So it was a good deal for them, but it wasn't a very good deal for you. And because these special interests were so powerful, this boondoggle survived year after year, Congress after Congress.

This year, we said, enough is enough. (Applause.) We said we could not afford to continue subsidizing special interests to the tunes of billions of dollars a year at the expense of taxpayers and of students. So we went to battle against the lobbyists and a minority party that was united in their support of this outrageous status quo. And, Texas, I am here to report that we won. (Applause.) We won. (Applause.)

So as a result, instead of handing over $60 billion in subsidies to big banks and financial institutions over the next decade, we're redirecting that money to you, to make college more affordable for nearly 8 million students and families across this country. Eight million students will get more help from financial aid because of these changes. (Applause.)

Secondly, Obama by executive order has linked the amount of Pell grants to the inflation of the currency, so that that relatively small degree of support of college students -- almost all financial aid is provided by loans, not grants -- will not erode to nothing.

And because the value of Pell grants has fallen as the cost of college keeps going up, the cap on how much Pell grants are worth, we have decided to offer more support for the future so the value of Pell grants don't erode with inflation, they keep up with inflation.

Outside of this minor tweaking and reversal of actively regressive policies, which penalized college students, however, the speech displayed the exact kind of nonsense which has so damaged education during the last decades, and not only in this country.

We can begin with the formulation, repeated in several guises, that the U.S. has got to "be the best" economically.  So, for example,

I said we'd build an economy that can compete in the 21st century -- because the economy that we had even before the recession, even before the financial crisis, wasn't working for too many Americans. Too many Americans had seen their wages flat-line, their incomes flat-line. We were falling behind and unable to compete internationally. And I said we need an economy that puts Americans back to work, an economy that's built around three simple words -- Made in America. (Applause.) Because we are not playing for second place. We are the United States of America, and like the Texas Longhorns, you play for first -- we play for first. (Applause.)

Presumably there are several ways in which an economy might be considered to be "competing" with another economy.  The leading economy might exceed the other in the degree to which the value of its exports excels that of its imports.  That sense of competitiveness appears to be what Obama, with his "three simple words," intends.  He goes on to announce

 I've called for doubling our exports within the next five years, so that we're not just buying from other countries, I want us to sell to other countries. (Applause.)

There is, however, a problem with this aim.  The economy of the United States has not gotten a value of exports which exceeds that of its imports since some time in the 1960s.  Well, no, there was a blip in 1976, when we reduced our oil imports because of the Arab Oil Embargo.  

[Initially I had prepared a chart to put here, but -- well, instead I will quote a UC Berkeley economist, in an introductory economics lecture:

Net exports, the balancing item—which in the United States, for my lifetime, have almost always been negative.

It is a casual remark, that for the last couple of generations the value of imports has exceeded the value of exports in the United States.]

The bravado of this fantasy, that just by declaring it we can obtain our aims, is quite reminiscent of the several Presidents who announced that the U.S. was going to be "first in the world" in education: George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

And President Obama?  Well, there's this

And I want us to produce 8 million more college graduates by 2020, because -- (applause) -- because America has to have the highest share of graduates compared to every other nation.

So far we're planning an economy based on "three little words: Made In America," and we're going to produce more college graduates, why?  " -- because America has to have the highest share of graduates compared to every other nation."

This is the same old claptrap we got from the previous three holders of the office -- meaningless, chauvinist whoops and cheers.  The economy built on "three little words" would be a colossal failure, since trading with other nations is the way to economic success, and the production of college graduates just to assert the superiority of 'America' is total baloney.

We could get that object by declaring everyone who could read a "college graduate," and we'd have exceeded the planned 8 millions by many millions.

If that distorts the idea which Obama is selling, it is because there is supposed to be in the 'education' he keeps saying we're going to assure everyone, some sense of excellence.  The excellence, however, has a specific edge.

And that recognition -- that here, in this great country of ours, education and opportunity, they always go hand in hand -- that's what led the first president of the University of Texas to say, as he dedicated the cornerstone of the original Main Building: "Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth."

But that ain't necessarily so.  You may well be educated, even as a population, but you may not thereby be economically successful.  The Japanese high schools and colleges since World War Two have emphasized, even over-emphasized, the value of mathematics.  I showed once the first question of the University of Tokyo entrance exam in mathematics to the entire math faculty of Grant High School here in Portland, and none of us (I myself am a math teacher, and include myself in the statement) knew even how to begin it.  Another symptom would be the fact that, when Fermat's Last Theorem was proved a decade ago, after having been unproven for 350 years, it essentially involved proving the truth of the Tanayama-Shimura Conjecture.

High School students in Japan are given a lot more abstract math than those in the U.S.  Japan's economy has been anemic for the last 20 years.  Are we well-advised, then to follow Japan into having the best students in academic disciplines in the world, and a lousy economy?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Our rhetorically gifted President in the lead, the one who casually threatens to fire teachers en masse, we're too busy chanting "We're Number One!  We're Number One!" to attend to the question of what is excellence in education.