Education's Siren Song
Great Men have become an endangered species thanks to homogenized teaching and overschooling.
Education is emphasized and compulsory in most first-world countries. It is so deeply embedded in Western culture that many don’t stop at traditional schooling but continue into a Master’s program. From early childhood, we are taught that education is a prerequisite to success and crucial to living a meaningful life. That being said, the overall benefit of education has been massive. Prosperity paves the road to education, and education, in turn, paves the road to more prosperity. Just like any government-run road, the long-traveled Education-Prosperity Highway has some huge cracks; consider this Waze.
First, allow me to quote Aristotle: “everything in moderation.” Even the greatest goods require some temperance. Education, which has been a prodigious net positive to the world, can be over-indulged. Education can become overeducation.
But how?
Let us start from 0. In the grand scheme of things, the objective of education is to increase societal and individual prosperity. Education is crucial not because it feeds into intellectual passion but because a smarter and wealthier civilization results in a more prosperous society. The stakes are far higher than just learning for fun.
When considering the true, utilitarian purpose of education, it becomes clear that learning alone, though it may be net-beneficial to humanity, is not maximizing its value-add. How is it that the smartest man in the world could choose a life of indolence and inconsequence, while a slightly-above average intellect, like Steve Jobs, could have a greater societal impact than millions of men combined? Surprise, surprise, it’s because knowledge isn't everything.
In order for a man to have maximum societal value-add, a man requires a mixture of knowledge, conviction, originality, favorable timing, and, at the very least, a decent heart. The first three ingredients make a man capable, the fourth gives him the opportunity to use his capability, and the final ingredient decides if he will use his capability to do bad or good (societal prosperity).
For several reasons, which we'll save for another rabbit hole, the preponderance of education seeks to provide only the first ingredient to prosperity: knowledge.
While knowledge alone may allow a man to make a decent living, the combined “Net Prosperity Added” (NPA) of every average Joe is dwarfed by the NPA of a handful of Great Men.1 Great Men are those rare few who have it all: knowledge, conviction, originality, decent intentions, and timing. The most influential men in history were all either Great Men or would-be Great Men, had they not lacked a heart. Consider Einstein and Stalin. Their greatest traits were knowledge, conviction, and originality. Both were given incredible opportunities through favorable timing, but were divergent in the virtue of their intentions. Thus, one brought prosperity while one spearheaded hardship.
One thing that can be universally agreed upon is that societies' “Great Men” are action-oriented and individualistic. They deviate from the norm and do not shy away from acting on their often unpopular views. If the goal of education is prosperity, and prosperity requires Great Men, then education becomes self-destructive when it cultivates the expansion of knowledge at the expense of originality and conviction.
This is overeducation.
The main drivers of overeducation are Education Uniformity and Opportunity Cost. Sit tight and see why.
Education Uniformity:
The ‘greatest’ professors and the ‘greatest’ schools teach the same curricula and generally offer the same opinions. You cannot expect the output to be different if the inputs are all the same. This has made it far more challenging for even the smartest individuals to form independent and original opinions. We now have a world of carbon-copied geniuses. More of the same. Good individuals, but not Great Men, unfortunately.
Opportunity Cost:
Time is a zero-sum game. That being said, the more time one spends learning, the less time one has for ‘doing.’ Knowledge is fodder and ‘doing,’ taking action, is shooting a cannon. One needs fodder to feed the cannon and win the battle, but it is easy to get distracted in the prep work and miss out on the action. Knowledge is nothing without action and you cannot be a Great Man without action.
This trap is amplified by the fact that risk aversion normally grows with age and that the greatest achievements of Great Men sprouted from great risks. The average American has their first child at 27, giving a college graduate just five years after undergrad to make a high-risk (high-reward) move. Though it’s possible to start while in college, over 1/3 of American college grads begin graduate studies before the age of 30. Throw in onerous student debt, as a result of years of education, and even the most cavalier can become risk-averse. Like it or not, higher education occupies the most promising years of a man’s life and makes it very hard for a Great Man to do anything other than learn, when what he should be doing is doing.
But is it a big deal?
One would imagine that the smartest, most determined minds would wise up to these dangers and avoid such pitfalls. While some do, it is harder than one would think. We have been bred to believe that education is an endless good; that moderation and education do not belong in the sentence. Learning has become something of a guilt-free vice, even for those who fear overeducation (myself included). Just as a smoker knows the dangers of cigarettes, emotions supersede logic, and the addiction kicks in anyway. The same happens with learning. Learning feels good, is guilt-free, and will never be criticized. This makes it a dangerous drug.
Just how bad is the curse of overeducation, you ask? Make no mistake: this is not a problem exclusively assigned to the rich or the educational elite. This is a problem that will continue to secretly eat away at society, especially the everyday man.
We have already proven that humanity has been shaped by the lives of a few Great Men. If you don’t believe me, read Thomas Carlyle, who goes so far as to suggest that less than a handful of men per century have made humanity what it is today. This seems exaggerated, but one cannot deny that less than 2% of civilization influences more people than the other 98%. Napoleon alone touched hundreds of millions of souls in perpetuity. As mentioned previously, what do inventors, conquerors, and business magnates all have in common? Originality and conviction, AKA the enemies of modern-day education.
Great Men escaped the pitfalls of overeducation or never faced the trap to begin with.
Unfortunately, the lives of our Great Men are disproportionately affected by education’s siren song. Generally, the smarter one is, the better they perform in school. The better one does in school, the more they are motivated or rewarded to continue their education. Thus, education seeks out would-be Great Men and has ruined many.
As civilizations have become more civilized, education has become more common and expansive. Public education is widespread among the first world, and average days spent in school have grown exponentially in the US. Higher education has become so commonplace that it is extremely stigmatized to not attend college. This bodes very poorly for society’s Great Men and the billions of normal folk who will suffer the consequences of their absence.
But it can’t all be that bad. The last few years have seen AI change the world (I suppose for the better) and Master’s degrees have lost popularity. Conversely, America’s teachers are more homogeneous than ever before. Nearly every single professor at the United States' most competitive universities shares the same political and social views. Luckily, widespread internet access has given millions of students a lifeline from the singularity of Common Core and higher ed. In a perfect world, schools would have denser curricula and return to an uninflated grading system. Banking and consulting jobs would not be made the dream of every business student and STEM students wouldn’t require three years of prerequisites to take a class worth paying for. However you cut it, overeducation is slowly eating away at our scarce supply of Great Men. But maybe I’m just sweating the small stuff. A mere 1% drop in birth rates will erase more Great Men than all of overeducation anyway.
The Great Man Theory predates this essay, so I will use only male pronouns in this context. Of course, women can be equally influential and Great as men, as they regularly are.