True. It seems that the standard benchmark is where we stand on some arbitrary test in comparison to other countries. The purpose of education is to move the characters "United States" from a low position on a piece of paper to a location higher up.
It is in fact very difficult to come up with a good through definition of the purpose of school, as it varies greatly from person to person and from time to time. My definition changes daily, though I don't think the school system has changed their definition in 100+ years (whatever it may be - basically "mold well-rounded citizens", or better yet, "create consumers who don't cause trouble").
How would you define it?
I believe it encompasses the following:
1. Creating free thinking people. What does this mean?
a. Someone who knows themselves. Who can draw strength from themselves, and isn't afraid of facing their own thoughts when they are alone. This is also someone who naturally would have to be conscious of this particular "self" - something I don't believe a majority are.
b. Someone who is somewhat versed in debate and rhetoric. Someone who can understand arguments, break them down, and can form opinions and rebuttals. This is essential in today's world as we are bombarded with opinions on all sides and often don't know what to think. We naturally conform to the opinions around us when we don't have ones ourselves and don't have what I outlined in a). In addition, this helps us understand the ways in which we are manipulated.
c. Someone who understands the "6 Levels of Moral Development" by Lawrence Kohlberg, or something similar to this. Someone who can see this and contrast it to their own lives.
2. Ensuring a basic level of competency in topics that we come into contact on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis.
3. Teaching what parents don't have time to or aren't capable of doing - with a focus on the above items.
The purpose of low end schools is to pay teachers more than they would earn (for less work) in another job and to provide daycare for kids so their parents can work.
The purpose of high end schools is to prepare kids for Ivy league colleges where they will learn to work on wall street (about half of Harvard grads) where they'll exploit regulatory failures/oversights for profit.
edit: corrected the percentage of harvard grads that go to wall street.
IIRC, it's closer to 10-15% of harvard grads go into finance. If you expand that to include 'business', 'management', and 'consulting' it's something more like 30-40%. Still no where near what you claim.
It wasn't intended as such. Finance is a very important part of the economy and should be.
I actually blame regulators for creating a false sense of security. A more "wild west" environment would have at least led investors/counterparties to question more of the claims that were being made leading up to the crisis.
The root cause was and is the ability for people to gamble with other people’s money and only share in the upside. It promotes ever increasing levels of risk taking. Plenty of mid level people knew they were selling or buying crap but there was zero incentive for them to stop.
I see your point. I view that as a problem with the incentives firms gave their employees.
However, think about the role of government incentives. It took decades of tax breaks and other stimuli to get the public to think that real estate prices "just go up" year after year. It was this massive blind spot about real-estate that was (I think) at the core of the failure of firms to appropriately manage systemic risk.
"Work[ing] on Wall Street" is a metonym for all of finance, and the sentence in question (especially when paired with the previous sentence) implies that such exploits are the predominant endeavor in the industry.
I do think there are many legitimate aspects of finance.
However if you consider the impact that mispriced real-estate had on credit markets, and consider that bad regulation led to over-investment in real-estate, then the massive chunk of the market that went away when the bubble burst was all profiting off of regulatory mistakes.
I consider things like the mortgage interest deduction a massive regulatory mistake, as well as the capital gains tax exemption, etc.
Until you have a clear definition, you can't 'reform' or 'fix' anything because you have no goal.
I, of course, have very strong opinions about this, but these questions are rarely brought up in the debate about the education system.