When Public Education Backfires: Seeds To Egypt’s Revolt

Education equals prosperity is an immensely misguided concept.

It is a belief founded on an observation where prosperous societies are populated by educated people. The oversimplistic causation or applied syllogism which led to this conclusion says that education “caused” prosperity. Hence, many social policies adapted by nation states focus on getting people “educated”.

We have pointed out in this space that this isn’t (necessarily) true. Throngs of unemployed in many places as the Philippines have been “educated” people.

Here is an eye-opening insight from Troy Camplin who argues that Egypt’s free “public” education has backfired and has virtually sowed the seeds of the today’s upheaval.

We quote Mr. Camplin, (all bold highlights mine)

There are plenty of reasons to want to overthrow the sitting Egyptian government. But the irony is that the government’s largesse is part of the problem. The government provided free educations for its people, even though there was not a sufficiently complex economic system in place to create jobs for all of those people. In 2001, Alison Wolf argued in Does Education Matter? that “Egypt is a country whose government made a commitment to give (university) graduates first call on jobs in the public sector. It very quickly found itself with a vast and underemployed army of civil servants, and a huge queue of students aiming at comparable sinecures for themselves” (p.40).

There can only be so many government jobs. What happens when government can no longer absorb the excess college graduates? In the end, the Egyptian government created the current situation by creating a population too educated for its economic system.

Critics will immediately accuse me of arguing that we ought to keep the masses poor and uneducated, to ensure they don’t rise up. What I am in fact arguing is that we cannot create wealth by skipping steps, by leaping a country into a population whose education does not match its economic realities.

One of the side effects of an overly-educated population (overly-educated meaning there are more people with educations than jobs for them at that level of education) is that one has a population composed of people who are both dissatisfied with their lot in life and who know exactly what is causing their dissatisfaction. Their world is bigger, and the limits of their situation cannot contain them. It eventually spills into the streets.

Keeping people ignorant is one way to control people.

Also indoctrination in the form of public education is another form of control, as John Stuart Mill once wrote

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body

Nevertheless, governments, as F. A. Hayek and Mises pointed out, can’t know everything and can’t calculate the nitty-gritty requirements of society. Thus, governments frequently institute policies that are noble sounding that comes with short term benefits, but has been laden self destructive traps, e.g. policies may eventually be used against themselves.

I am reminded of the nice apropos quote from A. Whitney Griswold (1909-1963: Essays on Education, 1954) who wrote,

"Certain things we cannot accomplish… by any process of government. We cannot legislate intelligence. We cannot legislate morality. No, and we cannot legislate loyalty, for loyalty is a kind of morality."

Education isn’t intelligence nor is it a source of political loyalty. The Egyptian Revolt seems to demonstrate this.