Add Two Years to High School for National Defense

Some people want community colleges to be free. I suggest, instead, increasing by two years what is expected, but not required, of the average American, moving us from K-12 to K-14 public education as our norm. It’s a matter of national defense.

Economic development, as well as productive political engagement, required a more literate population in the 19th century, so primary school (grades 1-8) was offered free of charge to an increasing percentage of children. Industrial development made an 8th grade education inadequate for many jobs, so the expectation became a high school diploma in the 20th century.

After World War II, the government funded state universities to get more young people through college. This helped our economy, but not everyone needs or wants a college education, so if we are to meet the needs of the present, we must do what we have done in the past, increase the number of years of education expected of most Americans from K-12 to K-14.

We can’t squeeze extra knowledge into K-12 education any more than we could fit the extra knowledge needed in the 20th century into grades 1-8. Our traditions of summer vacations and other breaks make adding more days in a school year unrealistic. Instead, we can add more years to the baseline of expected, publicly-funded schooling.

More knowledge by the average citizen is now required in part because electronic advances enable people to promote disinformation on the Internet in many ways, such as through electronically produced or altered images that are so realistic most of us can’t detect the fraud. Unscrupulous people at home and abroad exploit this and other methods of fraud to further divide us. Our persistence as a unified people requires internalized fraud detection.

History is fundamental. When the US Capitol was illegally entered to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2021, General Milley said that he recognized it immediately as a Reichstag moment (when the Nazi’s ended the Weimar Republic in Germany in 1933). Most Americans should also have been educated enough to have recognized this.

More generally, Americans should learn from history what’s needed to maintain a republic and the methods commonly used by (would-be) authoritarians to undermine it. At one point, 35 or 40 percent of Americans believed that the Capitol insurrection was justified by a stolen election. If the number had been 60 or 65 percent, our republic would likely have been lost.

People need to realize that almost everything that they know of relevance to politics and science has been conveyed to them by others, not learned by personal experience, whether in physics, biology, or economics. Few of us can prove that the earth goes around the sun. People shouldn’t expect to know from personal experience that an election was fair. They should consider the source of claims, require evidence, and factor in possible bias.

We all have biases, such as “confirmation bias,” the tendency to believe what confirms our current views. Recognizing this bias can protect people from beliefs that are unfounded but pleasing, thereby reducing the popularity of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

Critical thinking that combats confirmation bias would have made evident the obvious fact (unwelcome to some) that the claim of fraud in 2020 made no sense in an election that favored a surprising number of Republican winners for House and Senate seats. It makes no sense to alter a ballot to favor the Democrat for president, but not Democrats running for the House and Senate.

Education in economics would help people realize the importance of government-supplied, tax-payer supported infrastructure. We’ve done a good job of warning people against the government making all major economic decisions, as in the old Soviet Union, but not as good a job of explaining that our economic success results from cooperation between governments and private enterprise, not only in infrastructure, but also in basic research, such as those resulting in computers, the Internet, and most basic medical advances.

The evidence is now clear that trickle-down economics (tax breaks to the wealthiest) doesn’t stimulate the economy, and that high tax rates on the wealthy don’t impair economic growth, as shown by our experience in the 1950s and 60s. More important, increasing inequality between the rich and poor endangers the state, as the French and Russian Revolutions illustrate, which is another reason for raising tax rates on rich people.

In sum, additional education about how the world actually works, to the extent that we really know this, would help people resist the fraudulent claims of would-be demagogues and promote public policies likely to produce positive results. This is education for national defense, the first obligation of any government, as well as for prosperity. We need to spread this knowledge in age-appropriate ways all through K-14 education.