Category Archives: American History

A longtime reader writes, largely in response to our essay “Obama’s War on the Young“:

You’ve been doing yeoman work charting the pitfalls of government education policy and college policies that seduce ill-prepared kids into a lifetime of debt before they even get to start a family and buy a house. Your articles have been pretty revealing, I think in large part because you have a way of dragging analytical nuggets our of largely human interest stories like Andrew Martin‘s.

My problem with such articles is that they rarely look at the issues in a systematic and historical way. The same was true of many books and articles that tried to explain how the financial meltdown happened, what policies conspired to create the problem, who benefited, etc. In both subjects, most analysts don’t go back far enough. The authors want to find their favorite whipping boy and start there. For example, Democrats like to go back to Reagan and refuse to consider the glaring flaws in the underlying post-war housing policy or banking policy; they refuse to consider the role the Community Reinvestment Act had in creating mechanisms that promoted and reinforced irresponsible lending practices. Similarly, Republicans like to focus on the Community Reinvestment Act and ignore the role of post war housing policy which pushed homeownership and denigrated renting.

In the case of both the financial meltdown and the education bubble, journalists want to tell the story thru the lens of suffering individuals, usually leaving readers with the impression that it’s the readers’ responsibility to fix the problem by making sure the suffering individuals are ultimately held harmless for irresponsible decisions the latter have made over a long period of time. Journalists rarely want to trace threads all the way back to the source in a program or set of policies in order to spot latent problems when they largely approve of the programs as a whole. Nobody talks about the post war baby boom’s impact on education policy, or that of the GI Bill, which I believe was the source of the policy that schools should educate as if every child were college-bound. I was in High School in the early ’60s. Even then the school was geared to college prep, and tried to discourage kids from taking trades courses, like shop.

In short, someone needs to do for ed policy what writers have begun to do for Social Security, i.e., go back to the beginnings and chart the ideas that gave rise to the policies in place today.

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