RE: Why Public Education Does not Work (Discussion)
Hi v, checked this first. Nice, lots of good points. First: compulsory education – yes, it is problematic, and it is grossly distorted by current education arrangements, globally. I would suggest that every child has a right to a full education introducing them to the world they live in, and providing basic literacy and maths, and the skills to find answers to anything they are curious about. After that, I suggest that everyone be free, from around puberty (11-14), to leave school and work if they want, with the proviso that they can return to education/training at any later age, and be fully supported by society at large to do so – win-win.
Second: I’m always wary about the ‘private ownership=good, public ownership=bad’ dichotomy when it comes to larger organisations. The problem is that these are both just labels for groups, cooperating for a given end/product. The issue isn’t ‘public/private’; the issue is the task, and the quality of the output. Some tasks require that the public interest comes first, regardless of ‘profitability’, and private ownership distorts this badly (think private prisons in the US – and indeed, big pharma – no interest in keeping people out of prison, or indeed, long term cures – it damages profit). My intuition here is that the problem is not that ‘private/public’ is particularly the issue – the issue is the size of nation states, and the grotesque centralisation of power. Education must be local, responsive to local control and choice, and ‘big govt – or big private industry/corp' are pure poison here – they have absolutely no justification for a say in it. I think this equally applies to pretty much every other public policy too. In short, three words: devolution, devolution, devolution. Do that and everything you write that you want here will inevitably follow. Db
Yes, it is quite as you say, sometimes there are other non-economic incentives that encourage public property and not private, without taking into account the profitability, this would be the case of the police or military forces, or the system of justice, to name a few. However, I believe that, if the State dominates education, regardless of whether it is profitable or not, it is more likely that by simple inertia it will end up becoming indoctrination. I am one of those who believes that the ability to reason is not granted by any university or school in particular, I feel that these institutions should only exist to teach technical work and specialized knowledge that allows them to integrate effectively into the work environment, ie , an education focused on labor integration and the production of wealth. For the rest, I believe that each group of people should have the power to create their own educational institution, and give themselves their own curriculum, however, we must be aware of the danger of this, since as all freedom, represents a responsibility and a risk, because there are very powerful people, with big interests and a lot of money, then, they could take advantage of the vacuum left by the State to indirectly monopolize education, which would be a big problem. While there are small powerful groups against social health, it will be very difficult to make anything that tries to solve a social problem work properly.
Yup, agreed. I just want to pull the rug from under the 'powerful people' first, full stop. Then the State will disappear too - because there is no need for it. When education is the province of the locality, fully responsive, the DOMINATION problems will disappear. It's a process though, and it will be built from the ground up, not dictated by Nation States and their servants/controllers that exist now. Db