We're All Miseducated

We are educated by the wrong people: teachers, professors, journalists, filmmakers, fiction authors.

Teachers score lowest among all professionals on the SAT, and qualitatively, spend time with K-12 teachers and, unless you're a dullard yourself, you'll find most of them, well, dull: usually caring but unlikely to educate beyond a minimum, let alone inspire or elevate their students.

Professors are people who opted out of the real world so they can study arcana for a lifetime--not the best people to abet students' real-world functioning. And because there is a near litmus test for hiring professors in the humanities and social sciences, college and graduate school education is truncated: right-of-center ideas will usually be absent from the curriculum except as whipping boys. Some but not all wisdom resides left-of-center.

Journalists disproportionately self-select into the profession because they want to change the world--in the leftist direction their professors monolithically extolled. And most journalists have little real-world experience to temper their being True Believers in leftist theory: that the privileged white male capitalists are destroying society, especially women and people of color. In previous generations, that was tempered by journalism school professors urging students to strive to be fair and balanced. Now, many journalism professors urge "advocacy journalism," even in supposedly straight-news pieces.

Films nearly always have a leftist bias. For example, filmmakers generally portray corporations as evil --even though, for example, if not for corporations, you'd have no medication, no refrigeration, no TV, no computer, no car, no public transportation, etc. And corporations' efficiency enables even most low-income Americans to afford all of the above. Not to mention that big corporations offer some of the more secure, well-paying, well-benefited jobs, with ongoing free training, all in a safe, pleasant environment. But you'll rarely see that message in a major film. The hero is much more often a have-not.

I've been taking a number of literature courses through The Great Courses, for example, THIS, (taught of course, by leftist professors) and I've learned that the authors of most of our revered literature are misfits, so offbeat (depressed, alcoholic, or simply downright weird,) they nearly always honor the weird person over the straight arrow. And, like journalists, most fiction writers, holed up in their atelier most of their life, have little real-world experience to provide a reality check for their dreamt-up ideas.

I'm not in a bad position to assess the extent to which the above arguments are true. I've trained student teachers and observed many so-called master teachers. I've been on the faculty of the University of California and the California State University and been a consultant to 15 colleges, so I know lots of professors from the inside. I've been a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Kiplinger, U.S., News, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. So I know journalists. I'm always looking for the metamessages in books, movies, and the news media's reporting. And as a career counselor who has worked with 3,900 clients over the past quarter century, and someone who, even at parties, loves to talk with people about their worklife, I have a pretty good sense of what our society's mind molders are like compared with other intelligent people.

As a result of all of this, I have concluded that we would be better educated if we were taught mainly, although not exclusively, by society's doers: businesspeople, those who work in nonprofits, tradespeople, as well as in the government. The older I get, the more I believe in a variant of the old saw: those who can, do; those who can't, teach, write, or make movies.