Education is the scaffolding that supports everything about society.
The things we teach our kids are the things that build their futures and our world. Without education, there is no science. There is no technology. There aren’t the logistics that keep trucks on the road and paper towels on store shelves and gas in pumps at the local convenience store. While we frequently think of the workforce as what drives the American machine, that workforce starts as kids learning their alphabet and grows from there.
Joshua Angrist would likely agree with that. On Monday, Angrist was announced as one of the three winners of the Nobel prize in economics. The work that drove the win was on the importance of minimum wage, immigration and education and a methodology to analyze it.
Angrist obviously appreciates education. He is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of the MIT School of Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative. He got his bachelor degree at Oberlin and did his graduate work at Princeton. It’s a long list of good schools.
But his journey started in Pittsburgh. He cut his teeth on learning at the Wightman School and Linden Elementary. Allderdice got him ready for Oberlin.
It isn’t just Angrist’s accolades that show how important that foundation of education is. It is a career built on where education and economy collide — research and writing on things like charter schools, teacher testing, school lotteries, the G.I. Bill and voucher systems.
And none of that would have been out there, help shaping decisions, without Angrist sitting at a desk in Pittsburgh as a kid.
Every kid at every desk gets a start on where they fit into the world and the community and the economy in their school years. The better that education, the higher they can reach, no matter what field they enter. Angrist even wrote a paper on that in 1991, quantifying the way requiring kids to go to school affects their lifelong schooling and earnings.
Education should be government’s highest priority because of its amazing potential. Not because every one of today’s students could become tomorrow’s Nobel winner, but because given the right foundation, some of them could be.
But beyond that, a quality grounding in math and reading, science and social studies, language and art and music creates people who can reach their best potential, regardless of what that might be.
