Bruce Charlton

This is the first in a three-part symposium on The Higher Education Bubble -- why the West’s highly leveraged, heavily subsidized university system shall collapse and why that is a good thing.

Modern education is about selection more than enhancement, with educational qualifications mainly serving to “signal” or quantify a person’s hereditary psychological attributes. On average, a modern college or university education enhances neither skills nor behaviors, nor does it inculcate useful knowledge.

In practice, higher education mostly functions as an extremely slow, inefficient, and imprecise form of psychometric testing that measures intelligence and evaluates personality. It would therefore be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one.

Since the modern educational system in general, and higher education in particular, are vastly over-expanded, it is likely that sooner or later this situation will prove unsustainable. Not least because the education system has been, for about a century, based-on the expectation of continual expansion in personnel, resources, years of education, and inflation of qualifications.

Therefore, when the crash comes it will be catastrophic. I would guess the system will shrink to about a tenth of its present size -- back to what it was a century ago.

Together with virtues of stability, continuity, immunity from political ague, there are, needless to say, great dangers and defects in authoritarian systems of government: the danger of dishonest authorities, upheld by violence, the danger of arbitrary decisions and the difficulty of correcting them, the danger of sliding into tyranny.

But authoritarian regimes as such are not frightening - only those which are answerable to no one and nothing.

The autocrats of earlier, religious ages, though their power was ostensibly unlimited, felt themselves responsible before God and their own consciences.

The autocrats of our own time are dangerous precisely because it is difficult to find higher values which would bind them.

It would be more correct to say that in relation to the true ends of human beings here on earth (and these cannot be equated with the aims of the animal world, which amount to no more than unhindered existence) the state structure is of secondary significance. That this is so, Christ himself teaches us. 'Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's - not because every Caesar deserves it, but because Caesar's concern is not with the most important thing in our lives.

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The state system which exists in our country [i.e. USSR, 1973] is terrible not because it is undemocratic, authoritarian, based on physical constraint - a man can live under such conditions without harm to his spiritual essence.

Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious *lie*. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent.

When Caesar, having extracted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God's - that is a sacrifice we dare not make!"

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "As Breathing and Consciousness Returns" (1973)