Facebook logo

Yet, everywhere around the world, the rise in college-educated workers hasn't produced the increase in productivity expected. We are more and more educated, but the marginal improvement is less and less. Something went wrong along the road. The "higher education bubble" is a fact: getting a very expensive post-graduate degree doesn't mean a six figure paycheck anymore. People are starting to doubt that investing in your child education is a sound choice. 

Such a complex problem can hardly offer itself to easy, clean-cut solutions but most of the actors in the debate on education ignore that the linkage between education and productivity works both ways. And it's causing some countries to implode.

Some of the solutions that are proposed to reform the US education system are not new, they are fashioned upon similar efforts that happened 25 years ago in Europe. At the heart of Common Core, or whatever the "safe" name is this week, are the recipes that brought untold misery to entire countries.  

The situation in my homeland, Italy, is a perfect example of what happens when bureaucrats are allowed to test unproven theories on millions of children. In the 70s, experts studied primary education in Italy, one of the most advanced on the planet. Today the situation is appalling: test results are abysmal, discipline is non existent, teachers seem more interested in pushing a political agenda than actually educating children. 

The economy followed. Yesterday's guinea pigs have become the "no-income generation." 50% of them are unemployed, most of the rest are in dead-end, temporary, low-paying jobs. The brightest are forced to leave a country in a self-destructing downward spiral. 

The advocates of reform always think that the next billion will solve the problem. It won't. They will push for more teachers, more of everything. We tried, it doesn't work. The United Kingdom and Germany are slowly trying to reverse 25 years of mistakes. Others are going full steam ahead into the abyss.  

Recently a new reform was announced in Italy: a lot of hot air, 100000 new teachers. In a system that spends 90% of the budget on salaries. Thomas Jefferson said "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be." Italy has already lost its future. If you value your own, tread carefully.