Part of Newt Gingrich’s updated Contract with America is reforming education, including eliminating state and federal standards for educational curricula. State and federal curricula, which Gingrich said are “profoundly wrong,” bureaucratize education and should be replaced by curricula for individual students.

Higher education is about more than just getting a job and making money. Colleges and universities exist to make their students into well-rounded, diverse individuals who can examine a variety of problems in a variety of ways.

College educations are valuable in the job market because employees who have attended college are assumed to be innovative individuals who will apply realistic solutions, not dogma, to the problems they see.

In our post-industrial economy, liberal educations are more important than ever. More leisure time means devoting more time to the news, forming judgments about the world around us. We should consider that news from an angle not just our own before we act on those judgments.

Individual curricula do nothing to secure that liberal education. Curricula adapted to individual students do nothing to necessarily challenge students’ abilities. And students need to be challenged. They need to be forced out of their comfort zones. The “no pain, no gain” motto of athletic training also applies to the mind.

State and federal standards are not necessarily a bureaucratic nightmare. That problem can be fixed with changing the statutes that govern the operation of education departments or by issuing administrative directives. To deny that minimum standards of education are necessary is to deny that there is any importance to education beyond personal gratification. And while your own monkish musings and reflections on your own time or your hermit’s hut might do you good, education serves a larger goal.

Learning about a complicated world makes you better prepared to do more than just get a job and collect a paycheck. Learning about subjects outside your interests at the time you enter college will help you appreciate and work cooperatively with other people who disagree with you.

A broad-based education shapes us into better people. And if Gingrich truly wants more even citizen involvement in politics, they should to go beyond what they’re comfortable with and examine other ideas. Pluralism is necessary for a representative government that respects citizens’ private lives, and tailoring education to individual students is no way to arrive at it.