Paid for time, not skill

School is funded and measured by hours in a seat, so hours are what it is built to produce.

In plain words

Around 1906 a foundation defined a standard unit of education. Not a unit of skill. A unit of time. More than a century later a credit hour is still a receipt for time. Once time is the unit, the money follows the time. The mechanic paid by the hour has a quiet reason to take longer. A school paid by the hour is built to keep you there. Nobody planned it. Money tends to get what it rewards.

Evidence and sources

• The Carnegie Unit, set around 1906, measures hours of instruction and is still the basis of the credit hour. Elena Silva, Taylor White, and Thomas Toch, The Carnegie Unit (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2015).
• The bells, rows, and age grades came from the Prussian model, brought to Massachusetts by Horace Mann. Horace Mann, Seventh Annual Report (1843).
• Rockefeller's General Education Board put well over a hundred million dollars into American schooling. General Education Board, An Account of Its Activities, 1902-1914 (1915).
• A student loan pays the school in full whether or not the student learns or is ever hired. William Bennett, "Our Greedy Colleges," New York Times, February 18, 1987.

Questions this answers

• Why does school measure hours instead of skills?
• What is the Carnegie Unit?
• Where did the modern school system come from?
• Why hasn't school changed in a hundred years?

Where this falls short

This is a story about incentives, not villains. Most people inside the system are good people paid to do the wrong thing.

In the book

In Four Weeks, Not Four Years: Chapters 4, 5.

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