Thomas Sowell on Education

Causes and dynamics of U.S. educational underperformance

August 25, 2023

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African-American economist Thomas Sowell observed in 1993: “We’ve had painful retrogression in terms of education.” In his book Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Dr. Sowell observed:

• “The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

Educational opportunities are key to social mobility and outcomes, especially for minority students and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Sowell stated:

• “The social tragedy of it [underperforming schools] is especially hard on low income people. You see, if you are low income, you’re either going to get a good education or you’re going to stay in poverty, by and large.”[1]

The United States’ failing educational system has degraded democracy and governance, as an informed electorate with a basic understanding of the issues is essential for any free self-governing society. Regarding the election of one U.S. presidential candidate, Dr. Sowell stated:

• “[He] has an absolute talent for saying things that make no sense in a way that not only sounds plausible but inspiring…You have dumbed down education, you have propagandistic education, and what he’s saying connects with all those kinds of things.”[2]

The lack of critical thinking skills by the U.S. public, including by the highly educated, has led to disasters. Sowell reflected on the consequences of failing public education in contrast to his own educational experience:

• “In later years, I would realize that many disastrous policies had been created by thinking no further than stage one. Getting students to think systematically beyond stage one was a lifetime contribution to their understanding. Another lifetime contribution was a reading list that introduced us to the writings of top-notch minds.”[3]

On U.S. educational underperformance, Dr. Sowell wrote:

• “While it is well known that the average American student does poorly on international tests, what is not so well known is that gifted American students lag particularly far behind their foreign counterparts.”

• “Professor Julian Stanley pointed out that the performance level of gifted American students ‘is well below both the level of their own potential and the achievement levels of previous U.S. generations.’ In other words, our brightest kids have been going downhill even faster than our average kids.”[4]

Sowell observed that facts and critical thinking have taken a back seat to indoctrination and activism in schools:

• “We are raising whole generations who’ve come to regard facts as optional. We have kids in elementary school who are urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressman and the president about nuclear energy…They are taught that it’s important to have views and they’re not being taught that it’s important to know what you’re talking about, that it’s important to listen to the opposite viewpoint. And more important how to distinguish how view point A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it.”

• “The very thought that the dogmas they [teachers] were repeating with such fervor might be open to question or subject to evidence seemed never to have occurred to them. This was a far more ominous sign than their merely being wrong on particular beliefs. How can they teach anybody else to think if they themselves have not reached this elementary level of logic? By ‘thinking’ too many educators today mean teaching children to reject traditions in favor of their own emotional responses. Objections to such propaganda programs are called objections to letting children think. Anything less than a blank check for indoctrination is called ‘censorship.’”[5]

• “In light of such non-academic activities in our public schools, it can hardly be surprising that American youngsters do so badly on academic tests administered to youngsters around the world. Nor is it surprising that academic work is so readily abandoned for social experiments, ideological crusades and psychological manipulations by educators whose own academic performances have long been shown to be substandard.”[6]

• “This is yet another way of getting away from academic work and indulging in psychological and ideological indoctrination. This is called advancing beyond ‘rote learning’ and teaching school children to ‘think.’”[7]

On public spending for education, Dr. Sowell wrote:

• “We have fallen very far behind…there’s very little correlation between the money and educational performance.

• “It’s not just money. I would argue that the country has been generous to a fault. If you look around the world, the average American kid has twice as much money spent on him as a kid in New Zealand and the outcomes are not as good” in the United States.[8]

• “Many [immigrants who receive PhDs in the U.S.] come from countries which spend far less per pupil than we do but get far better results for their money.”[9]

The problem, Dr. Sowell states, is not that U.S. schools do not have enough money. To the contrary, spending per pupil in the U.S. is approximately twice the average of other developed countries, notwithstanding U.S. educational outcomes below many international peers. Why does U.S. education underperform notwithstanding its far higher cost? He wrote:

• “The great problem with education today is that people aren’t accountable. They can indulge whatever they like and that goes all the way through.”[10]

He notes that U.S. public schools and universities have succeeded in carrying out the agenda of administration, faculty, and teachers’ unions. Unfortunately, their agenda is not based in positive educational outcomes for students, but in “naked self-interest:”

• “Our public schools have not failed. They have succeeded incredibly in carrying out their own agenda, wholly at cross-purposes with the goals of those who pay the bills and those who send their children to them to be educated. Every demand for better results is turned into a demand for more money. Every failure is blamed on parents, television, ‘society.’ The greatest success of the educators has been in keeping their own performance off the agenda, the rewards wholly unrelated to classroom performance, and sanctions virtually nil in a tenure system where firing one teacher can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. At no point does the education establishment have to put up or shut up. In even the worst of the worst schools, typically in low-income and minority neighborhoods, the teachers unions bitterly oppose letting even a fraction of the students go to private schools with vouchers. This is not caprice or racism. It is naked self-interest…The survival of the existing system depends on results not mattering.”[11]

• “The kinds of people who come out of departments and schools of education need a curriculum focussed on non-academic activities and goals that make them feel good and feel important. Social engineering, indoctrinating students with trendy attitudes and enrolling them in various crusades for environmentalism and ‘public service’ projects fill that bill...
  “Teaching kids about the square on the hypotenuse is not where it’s at, as far as these kinds of teachers are concerned. If that role needs to be played—and it definitely does—then we need to get different people teaching in our public schools. Without that, everything else is cosmetics and pouring more money down a bottomless pit.[12]

For the academic establishment, Sowell writes that most teaching awards are granted not for successful educational outcomes of their students, but for other agendas: “A ‘good’ teacher is not defined as a teacher whose students learn more. A ‘good’ teacher is someone who exemplifies the prevailing dogmas of the educational establishment.”[13]

At many universities, efforts to acquire and retain research grants have supplanted a primary focus on education. Sowell observed that tenure decisions he observed were often based on publications (whether genuinely valuable or wasted) and research grants rather than teaching quality. He wrote:

• “About two-thirds of all professors spend no more than 12 hours per week in the classroom.This includes 35 percent who spend no more than 9 hours per week in the classroom. A roughly comparable amount of time is spent preparing for classes, but these two activities put together add up to what most people would consider to be a part-time job.”[14]

• “Unfortunately, colleges and universities have become bloated with research money, spawning all sorts of expensive boondoggles and layers of bureaucracy to oversee the boondoggles. To keep all this going, academic institutions have to have the kind of professors who can keep the research money flowing in. Thus means have become ends in themselves—and have sacrificed the original ends of education…Can academia kick its research addiction cold turkey? Only if those who supply the money learn to ‘just say no.’”[15]

• “The Chronicle of Higher Education’s survey did not get into the quality or relevance of what is published, but editors of leading scholarly journals in various fields have said that much of the research that is done is a waste of time. However, the money received to finance time-wasting research is just as valuable to a college or university as money received to find a cure for fatal diseases.”[16]

Dr. Sowell proceeded to debunk common excuses for underperforming U.S. schools:

• “Among the many clever and misleading defenses of our failing educational system is the assertion that our universities are among the highest rated in the world and Americans consistently win a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. Both these claims are accurate—and irrelevant. While Americans won the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes in 1999, not one of these winners was actually born in the United States. If people born and raised elsewhere choose to come here and use their talents, fine. But do not claim their achievements as some vindication of the American educational system.

• “The top-rated American universities owe much to the generosity of American donors and the largess of the American government, which enable them to attract top scholars from around the world. It is research, rather than teaching, which determines world rankings, and our well-financed Ph.D.-granting universities are unquestionably among the best at research.

• “In a mushy and undemanding field like education, more than four out of five of the doctorates go to Americans. It is when you start getting into the physical sciences that the proportion drops to barely half and when you get into engineering and math that Americans become a minority among American university Ph.D.s.

• “Ironically, people who go ballistic when minorities are ‘under-represented,’ relative to their percentage of the population, whether among college degree recipients or in various professions, remain strangely silent when the whole American population is under-represented among those receiving postgraduate degrees in science, math and engineering in their own country. Such under-representation might be understandable if the United States were some Third World country just entering the world of modern science and technology. It is staggering in a country whose people led the world in such things in the recent past. Clearly something has gone very wrong in our educational system.”[17]

On ideological bias in higher education, Dr. Sowell wrote:

• “The least surprising finding from this survey [in the Chronicle of Higher Education] is that liberalism reigns supreme in academe. Three-quarters of the professors are for a ‘national health care plan’ to ‘cover everybody’s medical costs.’ However, a statement that the undergraduate curriculum should be based on Western civilization gets only a 53 percent agreement. Only 28 percent thought it essential or very important to teach students the classic works of Western civilization, while 80 percent thought that colleges should encourage students to get involved in ‘community service’ activities and nearly a third thought that this should be a requirement for graduation.”[18]

On intolerance and the assault on free speech on campuses:

• “The totalitarian mindset behind the liberal vision shows through in innumerable ways. There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals…
  “Students who openly disagree with the left-wing vision that they are being taught in class can find themselves facing lower grades and insults from the professor in front of their classmates and friends. Offend the hyper-sensitivities of any of the sacred cow groups on campus—even inadvertently—and stronger punishments, ranging up to suspension or expulsion, can follow. On the other hand, if minorities, homosexuals or radical feminists want to shout down speakers they don’t like or engage in vandalism or other mob actions to promote their agendas, that’s OK.”

• “If the liberals are teaching any civics lesson with all this, it is that power is what matters—including the power to force people to keep their thoughts to themselves, if those thoughts do not conform to the liberal vision.”[19]

On discipline in universities:

• “Administrators know which way to bend academic policy and whose misconduct or outright crimes are to be overlooked. This game works only because many outside of academia are not even aware that the game is being played. But, before deciding whether to contribute to dear old Alma Mater, it might be well worthwhile to subscribe to The Chronicle of Higher Education. You could end up deciding to donate to medical research instead, or to invest the money in the marketplace, where it will help create jobs.”[20]

Regarding how to improve American education, Sowell shared his insights:

• “First of all, the education establishment is not about to give up any part of its turf, much less require its teachers to try to do things that many of them are simply not capable of doing.”[21]

• “Virtually everything is better than the present system…

• “Number one, school choice so the parents can yank their kids out” of low-performing schools. “Because as long as the school has a captive audience, they’re going to do what they want to do.”

• “Number two. the elimination of tenure…As long as people are rewarded for…just being alive a certain number of years regardless of performance, you can’t expect” quality outcomes.[22]

Where would one find better teachers? Sowell write:

1. “Where are we to find these new people? They are everywhere. Private schools find them in such abundance that people with solid educations—but often without education courses—can be hired at lower salaries than the public schools pay. Elaborate restrictions on entry to the public schools are necessary to protect existing teachers from their competition.”[23]

2. “The National Education Association may make a lot of noise about not wanting ‘unqualified’ people in the classrooms. But this is Newspeak. What they mean by ‘unqualified’ are people who have not jumped through the hoops of the education schools and education departments. Nobel prizewinners are unqualified by this definition.”[24]

References

[1]“Thomas Sowell on the Failures of American Education.” The Diane Rehm Show, January 18, 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujga_GcWkD8 

[2] “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World.”  Free To Choose Network, Youtube, posted January 25, 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4M9iJrgto

[3] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 369.

[4] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. p. 356.

[5] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. pp. 335-36.

[6] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 336.

[7] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 335.

[8] Thomas Sowell on the Failures of American Education.” The Diane Rehm Show, January 18, 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujga_GcWkD8

[9] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. pp. 344.

[10] Thomas Sowell on the Failures of American Education.” The Diane Rehm Show, January 18, 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujga_GcWkD8

[11] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. p. 339.

[12] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. p. 338

[13] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 368.

[14] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 372.

[15] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 371.

[16] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 372.

[17] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. pp. 343-44.

[18] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 374

[19] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011, p. 349.

[20] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. p. 342.

[21] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. p. 338.

[22] Thomas Sowell on the Failures of American Education.” The Diane Rehm Show, January 18, 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujga_GcWkD8

[23] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. pp. 338-39.

[24] Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2011. pp. 339.