The Price of Bad Ideas

Education is one of the major institutions of our society that is failing, more so than most of the others, and failing in two ways. It's failing to teach students how to think, and to give them a background of knowledge and history. And it's failing to allow them to express views different from what is being propagandized. These have become propaganda agencies more than educational institutions. And there's nothing in the way education is set up to cause them to correct themselves. In private business, if you're making widgets the public won't put up with, you lose money and you're forced out of business. Milton Friedman used to say people call this a capitalist society, a profits society, he called it the profit and loss society, and the losses are just as important as the profits, because the losses force people to stop doing things that are not working. That's not true with education. Public schools have an almost inexhaustible amount of money from the taxpayers. Private schools are becoming private more in name than in reality, they're getting billions of dollars of taxpayers' money, so they can keep doing things that are wrong for generation after generation. My book Inside American Education, I want people to look at it, not because it's new, but precisely because it's old. By reading it you see that things we've "newly discovered" wrong with the schools, sometimes as a result of the COVID pandemic and the homeschooling that came out of it, have been like that for 30 years or more. Someone discovered that in Minnesota the schools were teaching boys about tampons, and people seized on it, but they've been doing that for more than 30 years, and you'd never have known except for the pandemic. Any idea that the public can keep up with what's going on in the schools in any serious way is false. You have to have some mechanism by which the schools can be changed, or the people can be allowed out of those schools.

Eddie came from a much better-educated family than mine, but my family appreciated education, so even before I arrived they'd picked out Eddie as someone I must get to know. The first thing he did was take me to a public library. I came into this big building with enormous numbers of books and wondered, "Why am I here? I don't have enough money to buy one book." I was already thinking like a Chicago economist. He convinced me to reluctantly take out a library card and borrow a couple of books. Since I'd arrived in summer, there was no school and no kids nearby, so I started becoming a reader, and after a while it became a habit. Without that, the rest of the story would not have been the same.

I try not to think of that.

In terms of morale. But there's another aspect of my education that may have relevance. When kids came out of the South to New York, the Black kids, probably the whites too, were automatically put back a year, because the difference in educational quality was that great. When I enrolled, I asked to see the principal and convinced him to let me try without being put back. It was a bad decision on my part, but it tells you something about ability and its limits. They had ability grouping, the best students in 4A1, the second-best in 4A2, and they put me in 4A3, and I found I couldn't do the work. Having been one of the best students in North Carolina, I was now the worst student in the class in Harlem, and whoever was next-to-worst was probably a lot better than I was. I can remember actually crying over my homework, I was so stunned. And when I turned to the adults for help, they said, "We don't have the education to help you." At the end of that semester I got a commendation as the most improved student, but I still hadn't improved enough, so when they promoted me they put me in 4B4, the lowest class. It took a year and a half to work my way back up to 5B1. Despite the success I had in later years, the fact is that mere raw ability by itself only goes so far, and a lot of what is said doesn't take that into account.

That's true. And the difference between Charlotte and New York was huge. In later years, doing research on IQs, I came across the IQs for the kids in that Harlem school at the time, their average IQ was 84. At the end of sixth grade I was assigned to a predominantly white junior high, and entered at 7A1. There was also a 7AR, the rapid advancement class, for students with IQs of 120 and above. Someone in the school decided to find out if there were kids with IQs over 120 not already in that class, and there were four, and I was one of them. So despite having had to struggle for a year and a half to catch up with kids whose IQs were 84, I now go into the 7AR. On the first math exam, the teacher said, "I didn't think this was tough for a class like this, but only one person made 100 on it, and his name was...", and being something of a wise guy, I said, "Thomas Sowell." He said, "Yes, that's the name." The point is, I had trouble keeping up with kids whose IQs were 84 until I finally got into the top class, and yet at that point I could go anywhere and do anything.

Yes.

That was an error, from reading what someone else had said. In later years I did my own research. There were four academic high schools, and Dunbar came in ahead of two of the three white schools.

That's a question I have not been able to solve, but which I hope someone in the younger generation will. There was one Black school in New York City that impressed me enormously. I went to the principal's office to ask for data on his students' test scores, and he said, "Yes, and I'll show you later, but you won't believe the data unless you see the students." This was a regular ghetto school, I'd phoned a friend who said I was brave to park a rented car in that neighborhood, and he said brave, but he meant foolhardy. Instead of giving me the usual Potemkin Village tour, the principal said, "We'll walk down each hallway, and you pick whichever room you want to go into." And we did, on every floor. All those kids spoke the King's English. All of them had very good answers to the questions asked. It was as if it were some middle-class or higher place. Only after that did he turn over the test results, far superior to any other school in his district, and the neighborhood was certainly no better off. It could be done. That was half a century ago. Nobody that I know of has ever taken the slightest interest in that school. Out of Dunbar High School came the first Black man to graduate from Annapolis, the first Black general in the army, the first Black cabinet member, the first Black full professor at a nationally known university, and a doctor who became internationally known for his work on blood plasma, which came in handy during World War II. And no one has followed up. Dunbar was located within walking distance of the Supreme Court that declared its existence impossible. Chief Justice Warren painted the picture that because Blacks were kept out of white schools, this would so affect their picture of themselves that it would be a big educational handicap. Now, I went to a segregated school in the South, there were no white people in our neighborhoods, our churches, our playgrounds. If we'd found white people in the school, we'd have wondered what the hell was going on. Just one false assumption like that can, for decades, keep the truth from coming out, because people get a vested interest in it. The few who paid attention to my work on Dunbar spent their time trying to discredit its relevance, saying "those were middle-class people", without citing a speck of evidence about the income or occupations of the parents. I did have some, and there were multiple times as many kids whose mothers were maids as whose fathers were doctors. That was true back in 1895, when they bested two of the three white high schools.

Their whole vision is one in which the government has to step in and rescue Blacks, and the liberals preempt the decision-making of Blacks and other groups. It will never occur to them that those people know their own situation far better than any liberal. One man who writes against charter schools, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, which charitable people may consider a mitigating factor, says openly that he really has not looked at the data, but he's been writing articles and books showing why you shouldn't support charter schools, because "obviously the parents don't know enough to pick the right schools." Facts are really a danger to the egos of a lot of people with high IQs and low information.

Whatever instruments they're using, they should use more of them. The big problem with universities is that you very seldom, almost never, find a university going out of business. No matter how bad they are, the money keeps coming in. As for research, there's no reason it can't take place in places other than universities, I strongly suspect most research, whether to find cures for cancer or anything else, already goes on to a great extent outside universities. There's nothing indispensable about what universities are doing. If one or two Ivy League universities went bankrupt, it would be a very good thing for the others to understand that they don't get the taxpayers' money just because they're used to getting it.

There's a lot of talk about how whites and Asians lose from affirmative action, and that's true, but the Blacks and Hispanics lose far bigger. This came to me at Cornell in the 1960s, when they decided to bring in Black students without meeting the same standards. Very soon, half the Black students were on academic probation. I looked up the SATs and found the average Black student admitted to Cornell scored at the 75th percentile nationwide, which is good, but the average Cornell liberal arts student scored at the 99th percentile. So instead of being at another good college where the other students scored at the 75th percentile, where they'd have been fine, they were brought to Cornell to fail. And their failure created bitterness, and there were always people telling them it was because the professors are racist. I strongly suspect most of them never graduated. In the University of California system, where great numbers were let into UCLA and Berkeley, it was the norm for the majority not to graduate. You spend years of your life in vain, then drop out.

No, and I say that without having read all the opinions. I asked one of my assistants to go through the majority opinion and see if there's a place where they leave an opening, and sure enough, there it was. The Bakke decision was wonderful reading until you got to the point where they essentially said you cannot have racial quotas if you call them racial quotas, but you can if you don't call them that. Now they're saying you can take into account whether someone's essay refers to growing up in a ghetto or a barrio. That's in the Chief Justice's opinion. I thought it strange that Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, could not hire their own lawyers to think of how to get around this, and had to have the Chief Justice of the United States offer a helpful hint.

Because so many people have so much invested in their vision of the world. In their vision, they are the saviors of low-income minority people, and minority progress has been due to them. To have it said that it's not so, and that the remaining problems are all due to racism, the one that gets me is when they say that due to slavery, a Black family structure was never established.

There is a definitive study, The Black Family by Herbert Gutman, who spent more than a decade on it, I remember telling him I hoped I'd live to see him finish. He showed that was utter nonsense. Certainly by the 1920s, most Blacks were raised by two-parent families. As of 1940, 17% of Black children were raised by one parent, over 80% in two-parent families. This is before all the wonderful things people take credit for in the 1960s. After the 1960s, 68% of Black children were raised in one-parent families, four times as many. When you compare the rhetoric with the hard data, you find they're opposite. Same outside the racial area: when sex education was brought into the schools on a grand scale in the 1960s, the idea was it would prevent teenage pregnancy and venereal disease, and the word "crisis" was used a lot. But syphilis and gonorrhea in 1960 were far lower than in 1950, and falling, until they brought in sex education, and then it turned around. As the schools took on tasks like teaching kids different sexual ideas, liberating the children from their parents, the suicide rate among children 15 to 19 was 3.5 in 1950 and 17.9 in 2020. All the things that were going right until they came in with their solutions started going wrong. And the homicide rate of Black males declined 18% in the 1940s and 22% in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court found all sorts of new rights for criminals in the Constitution that no one had found before, the homicide rate doubled after going down for three consecutive decades. One of the great tragedies is that people devoted to a set of ideas don't want any other ideas in, and they're not about to want a debate.

Frederick Douglass all the way. Douglass was born a slave, escaped, educated himself, and made his living writing. One of his books was recently reprinted, and the irony is that all sorts of footnotes were added, because the language this man, who probably never spent a day in school in his life, mastered has to be explained to our expensively undereducated students today so they'll know what he's referring to. It is such a painful irony.

My own experience with artificial intelligence has been somewhat negative. There are people on YouTube who have simulated my voice and had that simulated voice saying things I never said, things that are the opposite of what I've ever said. One of them originates as far away as England. Fortunately, I have an attorney in New York who has taken up the matter, and we've had about half a dozen removed from YouTube. Anybody can be imitated, and the imitation sounds plausible.

I hate to be this definitive, and I take some consolation that all of us are fallible, so I offer my opinion with that caveat. I do think there is a very serious chance that we are doomed, because we have institutions that, for people pursuing their interests, are destroying the larger interests of the whole society. These people who go around shooting people and calling them fascists are so ignorant they don't even know what the fascists were doing. Charlie Kirk went around talking to people, trying to convince them. Fascists don't do that. Fascists shoot people.

So it's the person who kills him, thinking he's a fascist, who is himself the fascist, the opposite of the man he's murdering. And I don't think it's coincidence. Intolerant universities are the norm, people who go around trying to give talks are kept from doing so by mobs. Professors who spent a lifetime studying a subject, like Stephen Thernstrom at Harvard, had to stop teaching because people made it impossible. Some of that history is in my book from 30 years ago, Inside American Education. It's horrifying.

Let's not ask for miracles. In New York, fortunately, we had Mayor Bloomberg, who was favorable to charter schools and let them move into vacant buildings, but he was followed immediately by Bill de Blasio, who did everything he could against them. And in California there's a law that charter schools cannot suspend or expel a student for creating problems. That law can't even offer a pretense of being educationally worthwhile. It's doing something worthwhile only to keep the charter schools from attracting more people out of the teachers' unions, which pay millions of dollars to politicians' campaigns. The teachers' unions collect billions of dollars in dues and invest millions to politicians who will protect the unions from competition.

Yes, it is. We think of schools as noble places, their goals are noble, but it's amazing how many people will sell that down the river.

That's a very tough one. I'm not sure how confident I am that Western European nations, democratic and free for some time, are going to remain so in the next generation or two. So I really cannot honestly offer him an answer. I can only hope there will be people who will fight. One reason I recommend that old book of mine, Inside American Education, is that it shows how hard it is for people even to know what is going on inside educational institutions, not only the public schools, but the universities. It's wonderful to hear people talk about how diversity is so wonderful in the schools, but diversity to them means white leftists, Black leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists. When people say we need more diversity, I ask them, "How many Republicans are there in your sociology department?" I don't think I've ever heard an answer as large as 10.

Although my office is on a university campus, I am not part of the university, I'm at the Hoover Institution, voted some years ago the top think tank in the world, a place where you have the right to think how you think and not be harassed over it. And I think that if the Ivy League and other universities lost some of their members, a lot of the research would go on outside the university. The university is trying to hide behind the fact that yes, they're doing some serious medical research, but that research can go on without the university. It would be wonderful if that fact were brought home by one or two Ivy League institutions shutting down when they lose their automatic access to the taxpayers' money. When I was at Cornell, I got a call from an administrator in late spring: "You haven't touched the remainder of that grant since last October. When are you going to spend it?" I said I planned to spend it in the next couple of weeks. He said, "Good," and hung up. He didn't care what I spent it on. Because if you don't spend it'll look like you didn't need it, and that'll make it harder to get more money next time.

No. And there's a reason: it required no courage whatsoever. I wanted to be an academic, to teach, I hadn't thought about writing books. But I was unable to get the spot I wanted, so I became an economist in the federal government, and then took an academic post even though it meant a 20% reduction in income I could ill afford. Then I was offered a job at&T, at that time the world's largest corporation, at double what I was paid in academia, and I took it. When I later decided to go back and finish my PhD, I was told, "Anytime you want to come back, you're welcome." At Cornell I was an assistant professor on a three-year contract, and I was told my contract wouldn't be renewed because I'd rubbed some people the wrong way. One of the key people with power told me, "These are the people who are going to be voting on whether your contract gets renewed." And I said, "Well, since I make my decisions as I see fit, I assume they'll make their decisions as they see fit," and I got up and walked out. I told my wife, and she said, "What if you get fired?" I said, "I'll go back to the phone company. We can use the money." And she said, "In that case, give them hell." It took no courage, because I knew I could always make more money outside the academic world. The threat of a higher income is not a very effective threat.

A new book, and a revision of my Basic Economics textbook.

[reading, offering to change anything he's changed his mind on] "What, if anything, will endure from what I have written is, of course, something that I will never know. Nor is what I have said and done enhanced or reduced by my personal life, however fashionable amateur psychology has become. What has been done stands or falls on its own merits or applicability. The whole point of looking back on my life, aside from the pleasure of sharing reminiscences, is to hope that others will find something useful in their own lives. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best: 'If I could think that I had sent a spark to those who come after, I should be ready to say goodbye.'"

I hope not, because he's a lot more valuable.

Thank you.