Rob Montz

The Case Against School with Prof. Bryan Caplan

Episode Summary

The politics of the pandemic have been defined by brutal tribal division, but there’s at least one point of consensus among the professional punditry: the COVID school closures were a catastrophe. The thinking goes: shutting down K-12 led to vast, unrecoverable learning losses, hobbling the next generation of workers, and we’ll be suffering the economic repercussions for decades to come. School does indeed serve valuable purposes, most importantly providing shelter and food for low-income kids. But education? We’re not so sure. That’s why we sat down with Professor Bryan Caplan, the George Mason economist and author of “The Case Against Education,” the book that convinced us school is largely a waste of time. What does he think about this consensus on the COVID school closures?