Should You Have to Be 21 to Smoke?

Dan Klein raises this question at Econlib.org:   Does the recent federal law increasing the smoking age to 21 make sense?  He turns to the great observer of 1830s America, Alexis De Tocqueville,  for clues. 

A couple of times, back in early Millennium days, I asked my classes of 65  NYU MBA students, who were graduates of elite colleges around the country, whether they were familiar with de Tocqueville, and no more than two or three percent had heard of him (one or two per class of 65). The state of the higher education system, which on average spent $27,000 per student in 2018, is that students who graduate are unfamiliar with the rudiments of history, culture, and literature.  They are likely worse educated than the elementary-school-educated Americans of de Tocqueville's day, who read the classics as well as the Bible. 

Klein recounts that the America de Tocqueville saw was one where boys and girls became men and women at the beginning of adolescence;  Americans could think for themselves at the onset of adulthood; girls were the most self-reliant and self-confident in the world; boys became land speculators and entrepreneurs before they were what we would call men. Moreover, business people never dreamt of relying on government because they were self-reliant. People voluntarily helped each other. Crimes were rapidly punished.

Klein notes this quote from de Tocqueville: “Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard of their welfare.”  

How sharply the observations of de Tocqueville differ from those of John Dewey, the early twentieth century philosopher of education.  Dewey believed that schools need to provide a plastic, manipulated environment that provides learning through experience.  Experiential learning is not to involve the real world of profit and loss, and it is to be guided by omniscient teachers.  

The Antifa students of today have so internalized the rules of America's left-wing schoolmarms that they often have trouble making a living and instead spend their lives attacking those who do not conform to the left-wing rituals of the academic Temples of Political Correctness.   

I wonder about the degree to which American education has not only debilitated most Americans intellectually but also made them more immature by encouraging a culture of dependency cloaked in experiential learning.

The Liberal Arts Can't Fix Higher Education

My essay "The Liberal Arts Can't Fix Higher Education" appeared at Minding the Campus on December 28, 2015. What can fix higher education? Better attention to basic skills, including memorization of the multiplication tables, reading-and-writing practice, writing correction, math correction, and grammatical skills are a start.  These need to occur at the K-12 level, but they also need to occur at the college level when they are needed. Liberal arts is problematic because it's not done well.  The liberal arts tradition was rooted in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but today's college students often cannot write English.

Indeed, the claim of today's colleges that they encourage diversity is belied by many students' (also here) getting no exposure to a language.  Indeed, I very much doubt that most faculties can teach from diverse perspectives because they are trained in narrow specialties and mostly do not have broad education. As well, few are interested in improving the skills needed to study liberal arts, including writing.

Conservative Chloe on the US and China

Conservative Chloe (aka Jamie) has written me an e-mail. Jamie blogs at http://conservativechloemichigan.blogspot.com/.

Jamie used to work for the Michigan State Legislature (incidentally I briefly worked for the New York State Assembly Ways and Means Committee). Jamie has posted a good blog concerning progressive education in Michigan that for some strange reason the Chinese government has funded. The program's curriculum sounds familiar--it is the same drivel that "social justice educators" at the Natonal Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education and the half-literate graduate schools of education have been advocating for a century. A good book on this topic is Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. Progressive education was a failure 50 years ago, but the education schools advocate it.

Jamie notes:

"The new mindset and curriculum these programs want to teach our children are quite frightening. Some of the objectives for preschool and kindergarten are as follows:

* The challenge is to help children appreciate the power they have to cause change and channel that energy towards positive endeavors. By providing opportunities to take action and observe consequences, children learn to appreciate their roles as change agents and become responsible for making wise choices. (In my opinion they are teaching our children to be activists.)

* Energy is the underlying currency that fuels the universe.

* As children extend their understandings to appreciate how human action affects the natural world, they can learn about species preservation. As children observe how plants thrive or die according to heat, rain, and soil conditions (i.e. global warming), they solidify their understandings of the ever important role of environment for all creatures of the earth.

"Throughout this curriculum are quotes from various intellectuals, including Confucius. Of course they can quote Confucius but not Jesus. But the bigger question is, what on earth are we doing in America teaching our children Chinese teachings and a global education curriculum? Is there any Legislator in Michigan willing to address this issue?"

The sad truth is that our own home-grown Bill Ayers and the lunatic fringe known as the education establishment are largely responsible for the ideas that Jamie is describing. I think that the American public needs to think in terms of home schooling and privatization of education. The voucher idea is good but it has run up against too much resistance from the entrenched teachers' unions. I think the best approach would be to fight to de-fund education so that parents are pressured to send their children to private schools or home school. The public education system in America is but one more Progressive disaster.

Government Is the Problem: Phil Orenstein on Immigration Reform

Over at Democracy Project Phil Orenstein chronicles the inability of a highly skilled mechanical engineer in his high-tech manufacturing firm to obtain a visa to stay in the US. Instead, Gianluca Mattaroccia, the Italian techie, is returning to Italy with a six figure salary offer. Phil notes that while legitimate immigrants with unique skills that are in demand globally cannot obtain a visa, those willing to come to the USA illegally but who lack skills and wish to mooch off welfare are welcomed with open arms. Phil's article points out that combined with America's bad educational system, dominated by progressive educationists who fail to provide the basics, our immigration laws do not work because they are ineptly administered:

"While American schools have succumbed to progressive pedagogies that focus more on social justice education and feel good outcomes than on competency, there is certifiable proof that Chinese schools have left us far behind, according to Andrew Wolf in the New York Sun. As we keep dumbing down proficiency tests year after year to make the results appear better and Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein look like heroes, our children and businesses suffer. Thus our own students graduate with less proficiency compared to foreign students who possess more competence with 21st century skills. The answer isn’t to kick out the smarter, more proficient foreign workers and students, so we can go on fooling ourselves that our schools aren’t failing.."

Phil suggests an argument against immigration restrictions, not because of the pros or cons of limiting low-wage immigration in order to protect low-wage American workers, but because the US government lacks the competence to administer an immigration program intelligently. I think that there is much merit in this idea. What scares me is that these bozos want to control what goes on on the operating table, your refrigerator, and your living room.

Isn't it time to roll back government bureaucracy?