The End of School: Reclaiming Education from the Classroom (2016)

By Zachary Slayback - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

Every year of the first eighteen years of a Boomer’s life, things got better, and it had nothing to do with them. Peter Thiel’s line, quoted in Zachary Slayback’s 2016 The End of School: Reclaiming Education from the Classroom, is the pivot on which the entire cultural mythos of American higher education turns. The postwar boom that made college attendance look like the cause of middle-class prosperity was in fact driven by wartime technological growth, the semiconductor, information theory, and the Marshall Plan. Universities rode the wave. They did not create it. The million-dollar-in-lifetime-earnings figure that guidance counselors quote to seventeen-year-olds reflects selection bias, not causation. Smarter, more ambitious people were more likely to attend college. They would have been successful without it. What has been sold to two generations as investment is, in Benjamin Graham’s sense, speculation.

Slayback wrote from inside the system he was leaving. He held an Ivy League scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania, designed a majors-only seminar with a professor, and took a graduate seminar as a sophomore. He was the ideal college student by every conventional metric. Two years in, he dropped out. He now works at Praxis, an apprenticeship program that places young people directly into fast-growing companies rather than into classrooms. The book is not academic philosophy of education. It is the record of a highly credentialed young person watching his equally credentialed peers get funneled into consulting and banking jobs they never wanted, and asking why the system that produced him had done so at the cost of the things he actually cared about.

The book appeared at the peak of the No Child Left Behind era, when standardized testing had colonized K-12 to the point where teachers openly admitted the state standards were arbitrary. Average student loan debt had reached $29,400. Fifty-three percent of graduates were underemployed. According to Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data, the share of American households under thirty owning private business stock had collapsed from 10.6% in 1989 to 3.6% in 2015. Within elite institutions themselves, a convergent critique was emerging: Peter Thiel’s Zero to One in 2014, William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Andrew Yang’s Smart People Should Build Things. Slayback’s contribution to this moment was to trace the problem back further than his contemporaries, past the credentialing crisis and into the Prussian origins of the compulsory schooling model itself.

The book sits within the deschooling lineage that runs from Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971) through John Taylor Gatto’s work on the history of American schooling to Peter Gray’s psychological research on play-based learning. The full summary traces the payoff-versus-downside framework that replaces probability-based thinking about college, illustrated with the concrete comparison of a $12,000 ten-month coding bootcamp against a $65,000 four-year computer science degree that fails to teach the languages the marketplace actually uses. It documents Alexander James Inglis’s Principles of Secondary Education and its explicit naming of the integrating and adjustive functions of schooling: create conformity, create fixed reactions to authority. It follows the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which restricted employer IQ testing and forced companies to fall back on universities as their proxy filter, cementing the degree as the credentialing gate for a generation. There are more American janitors today with chemistry degrees than there are working chemists.

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