Not who you responded to, but as someone who spent many years in education I find Caplan's case deeply unconvincing. Yes, education has a component of signaling, but he assigns far too much value to it.
I find the core of his argument rests on the assertion that we all went through school and don't think we learned much of value/it didn't help us. What he's actually describing here is a form of the curse of expertise. Humans are incredibly bad at remembering what it was like to not know things, it's why people make such atrocious teachers without training. But educators are actually helping to build valuable skills and complex mental models that would not arise naturally.
If you interact with homeschooled children of deeply incompetent parents or certain alternative schooling systems (Scientology schools mess their kids up) you can see what the alternative provides, and it's not pretty.
I find the core of his argument rests on the assertion that we all went through school and don't think we learned much of value/it didn't help us. What he's actually describing here is a form of the curse of expertise. Humans are incredibly bad at remembering what it was like to not know things, it's why people make such atrocious teachers without training. But educators are actually helping to build valuable skills and complex mental models that would not arise naturally.
If you interact with homeschooled children of deeply incompetent parents or certain alternative schooling systems (Scientology schools mess their kids up) you can see what the alternative provides, and it's not pretty.