How utilitarianism in education policy is ultimately self-defeating

The Master said, 'Though a man may be able to recite the three hundred odes, yet if, when entrusted with a governmental charge, he knows not how to act, or if, when sent to any quarter on a mission, he cannot give his replies unassisted, notwithstanding the extent of his learning, of what practical use is it?'

• Confucius, Analects

I’ve always had something of a love-hate relationship with utilitarian moral philosophy. When I first encountered Bentham in community college, nearly two decades before I defended my own dissertation on ethics, I was impressed by the simplistic elegance of it. The good is what maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain across everyone, the bad is what maximizes pain and minimizes pleasure across everyone. Ethics is just a simple mathematical calculus by this theory. Yet this simplistic elegance came at a significant price, as what if some pain is good? When a loved one dies, would we wish away the pain we feel? Maybe in the moment, but afterwards we would probably regret it. What if the suffering of some is justified by the pleasure of many? This last one is, of course, a common refutation. What if some pleasures and some pains are entirely incommensurable with each other? This is something I make a point to emphasize when teaching the theory. There is something fundamentally attractive about the theory for policy makers, however. It makes it easy for them to justify policies by simply trying to figure out which choice maximizes the public good and minimizes public pain. It’s also a theory particularly applicable to a modern capitalist society. Pleasure can simply be determined by what people spend money on, and economic growth combined with basic welfare is an easy proxy for “the good” we ought to pursue. If everyone is richer, we’re all happier.

This line of thinking has dominated how we think about modern education for some time. Our education is primarily focused on providing lucrative job opportunities to our students, and other agendas like civic, moral, and cultural education take a back seat. You won’t get a job based on your knowledge of To Kill a Mockingbird or Hamlet. The current popular acronym for what education ought to emphasize is STEM (though there is at least the occasional nod to humanities when the “A” for art is added to make it STEAM). This is because such fields have a lot of good paying jobs, and because their social utility is obvious. To maximize the number of educated scientists and engineers, education becomes a mission to improve student test scores so more of them get into college and get lucrative jobs. Even the critics of education spending adopt the same framework when they say we need more technical schools because, their argument goes, welding is more lucrative than a lot of what you learn in college.

Despite the obsessive utilitarian approach of policy makers from Bush to Obama, however, test scores continue to drop, reading levels continue to degrade, and students become increasingly alienated from the content they are meant to learn. I won’t bother to rehash the statistics here because they’ve been beaten to death elsewhere. This is not a “liberal” or “conservative” problem, however attractive it might be to some to use this issue as a partisan club. Liberal states like California and conservative states like Texas all share the same problem to varying degrees. Some demonize the San Francisco schoolboard for cancelling texts over racial sensitivities and gleefully mock them when their schools continue their decline, but these same issues are present in the rightwing school districts that cancel anything that has to do with LGBTQ education.

Perhaps the problem has to do with the very utilitarian approach itself. Education, at least for the elite, was once about more than just bare-naked utility. The famous utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill was famously subjected to an education in a variety of fields that had no real “utility” for him like ancient Greek (until, at least, he became a philosopher). This was the liberal model of education … not “liberal” in the sense of modern partisan politics, of course, but liberal in the sense of liberal arts (an artifact of this notion is the concept a “liberal arts college,” though the current habit in many such schools of cancelling philosophy departments suggests they’ve fallen far from this old idea). The idea of a liberal education in this sense was self-improvement and the creation of character, depth of knowledge, and deep familiarity with high culture. The Germans had a similar concept of bildungsroman, a feature of 18th and 19th century German thought.

Of course, this liberal approach and the German bildungsroman were aristocratic and elitist to a degree. One learns ancient Greek to establish that they’re not one of the ignorant illiterate plebians who are consigned to a life in a textile mill or subsistence agriculture, or even the literate but business-oriented bourgeoisie. It’s about learning to be an elite and having the virtues requisite for a member of that class.

General education emerged as a way to educate the plebians in basic knowledge, with some minimal attention to high culture but mainly as a way to reduce the costs of child labor. Child labor in the 1800s was destroying the minds and bodies of the majority of the youth, which was accelerating cultural decadence, driving crime (as when unskilled youth lost their factory jobs crime was the only way to make a living), and even diminishing the martial ability of Western countries (as broken and malnourished minds and bodies made for poor soldiers).

Thus, it came to pass that there was a two-tier system of education, where the elites accessed higher knowledge of all sorts while the working class was consigned to mere literacy and mathematics. The elites sought self-betterment and enrichment for their children, while the masses simply needed a basic education. Though many of these systems emerged out of the Prussian state and the English workers’ struggle to improve the lot of their kids, such a model is first seen in the Aztecs. The Aztecs notably had universal education of a sort, with the nobility going to the Calmecac and the commoners going to the Tēlpochcalli. The Calmecac taught religion, philosophy, art, military strategy, writing, and engineering, while the Tēlpochcalli taught basic skills and warfare. This model worked for their advanced obsidian-age society, building a prosperous collection of city states with a remarkably educated society for their time (so much so that Cortes and his compatriots marveled at their achievements while also destroying them).

In our society though, the lines between these eventually became blurred, at least in some places. Many workers did want more, and eventually were exposed to things like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the ancient Greek classics. Eventually, we ended up with a comparatively literate working class. Meanwhile, the elite slowly began losing interest in these higher cultural achievements. Why study King Lear if your goal in life is to build a profitable business, unless it’s a publishing business that is? Studies like the classics lost favor, as a modern bourgeois individual didn’t care whether their fellow bourgeois knew ancient Greek or Latin.

Today, we have an education system entirely geared to producing success. Workers, caught in a competitive labor market, are pushed to study only those things that look good on a resume. The degree becomes a means to the end of getting a good job. Policy makers want those students to get those jobs to fill the labor market and fuel the economy, and workers want someday to afford a boat by the time they retire. In this respect the utilitarians won, and we ended up with an educational model in their image. Education became treated as a kind of swiss army knife used to fix any sort of social problem, and “rigorous” metrics were applied to schools so they could fulfill these functions. West Virginian coal miner lost his job? He can learn to code! That will surely solve his problems (this Obama-era discourse didn’t age well when the tech companies built LLMs that could automate coding). Inner city schools are failing? Let’s implement a no-child-left-behind policy that uses market competition to incentivize high-return school policies (this, too, was a failure since those schools were doing poorly for a variety of problems).

Here’s the deeper problem, however. What if this utilitarian model fails by its own standards? Yes, we have a lot of economic growth and a highly credentialed population, but we also have a population more insecure, less knowledgeable, and in many ways less happy than ever. Our system is falling apart at the seams, with all the bad metrics people are talking about. How is it that when our schools actively pursue various utilitarian metrics like high test scores and high graduation rates that we produce less utility? This is something of a paradox.

This brings me to two classic arguments from the annals of philosophy.

First, there is the hedonic paradox of Aristotle. As Aristotle argued in his Nicomachean Ethics, when we treat pleasure as the primary end of our action we are actually less likely to achieve pleasure. This is a problem I noticed in myself when I was moderately addicted to computer games in high school. I loved playing computer games, which would lead me to play them more. Yet the more I played them, the hollower the experience became. The video games were only fun when they operated as a form of relaxation and leisure after a long day of learning, but if I spent a weekend binging on them it basically ruined the experience. The greatest pleasure, Aristotle argues, comes as a side effect of achieving higher ends. The richest and most human kind of pleasure, he postulates, is the one that comes with doing a noble deed like helping the poor or educating the youth. A student telling me that they loved my lecture brings me a richer and more intense pleasure than the computer game ever could have, but I do not teach these students for the compliments. Rather, it’s the side effect of genuinely wanting them to appreciate and enjoy the content I am communicating to them.

The second argument is Henry Sidgwick’s esoteric understanding of utilitarianism. As Sidgwick thought, utilitarianism might be true in that the good comes from maximizing utility, but making everyone utilitarian would reduce overall utility. In other words, it might reduce pleasure and increase pain to teach utilitarianism to all. Perhaps the people would be much happier if they were motivated by religious morality or some other “higher” notion of the good instead of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is simply a theory for the political elite who must be burdened with knowledge of the truth so they can enact policies that maximize utility, while the public remains blissfully unaware of utilitarianism.

My thought is that Sidgwick might not go far enough. What if utility is maximized by nobody being utilitarian, and us instead adopting a rather more noble notion of the good? What if, instead, we ought to adopt a modernized concept of Aristotle’s virtue (modernized, in the sense that we do away with naturalized slavery, patriarchy, and aristocratic privilege). As I’ve argued elsewhere, Karl Marx implicitly endorses such a moral view where the purpose of life isn’t maximal pleasure and minimal pain but universal enrichment of our character and capabilities.

Perhaps, what will really maximize utility is abandoning utilitarianism altogether as an ethical theory. Instead, we should inculcate a love of knowledge for its own sake among students. We should treat the enrichment of personal character and the development of virtue as the real purpose of education. This does not mean abandoning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the famous STEM). On the contrary, Aristotle was a pioneer in these fields himself. In fact, it might increase people’s interest in learning such topics if we make it clear to them how it makes life more interesting to know them. Plato, perhaps inspired by the Pythagoreans, argued forcefully that the study of geometry was a prerequisite to virtue. If we make such knowledge a mere means to the ends of a good paycheck and a cozy job, then our interest in them is merely instrumental instead of as an end in itself. This would improve self-motivation, as opposed to relying merely on the extrinsic motivation of economic incentive.

This was an issue taken up by the Neo-Confucian philosopher Xhu Zi, who saw his own medieval Chinese society decaying as learning became a mere instrumental means to getting a bureaucratic job. Paradoxically, this created worse bureaucrats more interested in rank and public acclaim than self-cultivation. Instead, he argued that the Confucian academies had to return to their earlier principle of learning for its own sake. This would go on to inspire all future Confucian theories. Sadly, the “Confucianism” imported to the West by upwardly mobile immigrants ended up closer to our utilitarians, as the Confucian values of knowledge for its own sake and filial piety were perverted into mere careerism.

Consider the “AI” problem emerging in higher education. Let’s take a student whose only purpose in college is to get a credential they need for a job. They want to get this credential with the lowest amount of personal investment possible, which maximizes utility. After all, why spend extra time studying this topic if study is not fun? Consequently, if they have an essay assignment on Homer’s Odessey, there is a significant incentive to simply ask an “AI” to write the essay for them since it equally achieves their end of getting the credential. Yes, it’s less honest, and honesty is good, but the utility of honesty is far less tangible than that of the credential and money. Writing it oneself is substantially riskier, since one could fail the assignment and need to retake the class. However, if knowledge is good for its own sake, they would rather take that risk by reading Homer themselves and writing their own essay.

Thus, the utilitarian approach to education is self-defeating, and the policy maker’s pursuit of metrics in education is akin to trying to pull one’s finger out of a Chinese finger trap. The more they chase those metrics of a “good education”, the worse education will get and the less educated people will become. This will then lead them to chase the metrics even harder, doubling down on the same policies that caused failure in the first place. If we make education good for its own sake, we will have a more educated and virtuous population that still studies science and engineering and still enjoys the technical achievements of the modern world albeit with fewer of the downsides.

Rather than viewing education as a mere means to achieve specific economic ends, we should universalize the ideals of the Aztec Calmecac, the Confucian Academy, and the Western Liberal Arts School. These institutions sought knowledge for its own sake, generating a sophisticated learned elite familiar with the esoteric subtleties of their respective traditions. They did achieve instrumental ends for their society, but they did so best when they were motivated by knowledge and virtue for their own sake.