The Case Against Public Intellectuals

A higher-than-you-might-expect number of people I know have the opinion that education probably basically doesn’t do anything that will benefit society. Or maybe that learning basic maths and English is beneficial, but geography classes and history classes and physics classes might not do all that much, and university education probably doesn’t really provide you with any skills. It might signal you have some skills, because you were able to get into a good university and had the willpower and intelligence required to pass all the courses, but it doesn’t really bestow many skills upon you. The reason that lots of people I know believe this, as far as I can tell, is not that they are well-versed in the research on the effects of education, or even that they have personal experience that makes them think that education isn’t that useful. It’s because they’ve read Bryan Caplan’s book The Case Against Education, which I also read and very much enjoyed a few months ago. Caplan’s claim, in …