Government is Destroying Education

As a person that has spent his entire life in the education system (through graduate school), I have seen first hand the effects of government involvement.  Like in many other situations, good intentions on the part of government haven't resulted in favorable consequences.  Increased governmental interference is destroying education in America.

To illustrate, I will focus on higher education.  The first step of the destructive process is the ever increasing levels of public money used in "making education more available to the masses" - the original good intention.  Accordingly, the result has been for the populations of colleges and universities to explode.  At first sight, this seems good.  After all, the purpose of the bloated expenditures was to increase the number of people holding degrees.

As school populations burgeon, there is a direct effect on the quality of the education.  Professors find themselves attempting to teach very large and ever growing classes.  Beyond a certain point, the assignment of homework (for those who would like to do so) becomes meaningless due to the fact that it becomes impractical to grade, and without grading, students don't take it seriously.  In addition, tests move increasingly towards a pure multiple choice format which is exceedingly difficult to design in such a way to provoke critical thinking; students begin relying on rote memorization to pass them.  Naturally, the entire curriculum is quickly memory dumped.  As classes grow, students learn less.  To correct this element of the problem, institutions must hire more professors to decrease the student to teacher ratio, but this inevitably strains budgets and leads to increased tuition costs.

Another problem associated with the influx of all the new students is the effect it has on the quality of the curriculum itself.  Here in the United States, educators are often judged by pass/fail rates.  When an "unacceptable" number of students begin failing, the quality of the professor's teaching ability is called into question.  Realistically, it stands to reason that a larger portion of the students leaving high school with good marks would already be college bound (with or without the existence of federal aid) compared to those students with lower grades.  Therefore, the new incoming students - the excess created by state aid - are necessarily lower performers.  As a result, passing rates fall as school populations increase.  In a move to remedy this situation, professors that don't want to be looked upon poorly begin lowering the standards of the material to be covered.  To further compound the problem, the size of university budgets depends on the number of graduating students; if more students fail, affected schools will have less money to spend.  Curriculum suffers as aid is increased, and the people who pay most are those students who would have attended college regardless.

Finally, the tendency for students to look at a college education as free don't take it seriously.  As state sponsored aid increases, young people that are inexperienced with finance look at it as free (even those who are taking out subsidized loans).  This reality makes college life seem like one big unsupervised high school party.  Before the advent of heavy governmental involvement, many students had to work their way through college which stemmed a feeling of value for success in their studies.  Nowadays, many young people view college simply as a vacation before they must join the real world.  This has a negative impact on students that would have otherwise done well.  The adage, "One bad apple spoils the bunch," comes to mind.  In addition, this problem makes the problems mentioned previously that much worse.  Federal aid causes a moral hazard for students that otherwise would be mitigated in its absence.

As one can see, there are very real problems associated with state involvement in education, and this has only been a brief analysis.  The deterioration in the quality of education in public grade schools caused by the enactment of No Child Left Behind in conjunction with the issues spelled out here in higher learning, paint a grim picture for the future of the American education system.  The government is destroying education.

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