The reason why public education does not work
Well, the case is the following, many people (especially the left) believe that public education is not only necessary, but it is also a right, and therefore in many left-wing countries they even try to guarantee education by law, forcing the State to create public educational institutions.
I don't doubt that in the heads of many (not all) of these people are the best intentions, many of them sin of believing that public education is a solution, but the reality is that neither in practice nor in theory has public education really been education.
To prove my point, here are the main problems of public education:
Since the goal of public education is to make education more accessible, many people who do not really want to study are "forced" (by social pressure, by parents, and in some cases by law) to study, which results in many of these people either not finishing school and dropping out in the middle of the year, or having a degree for a career that they will never practice. When a person abandons his studies after a couple of years, or when a person does not exercise his degree, it represents an expense for society, because the State is paying for a career that is not going to be exercised, and that large amount of money (because there are many people who do it) finished it without generating the slightest benefit.
Since public education is easily accessible, the number of students tends to increase, thus losing the quality of education. If you have a larger number of students, education must therefore be more basic so that everyone can learn, so a person with a real desire to learn must study more basic things because he or she shares classes with someone less interested or qualified.
The last big problem with public education is in its name, it is public. All State-run institutions tend to be coarse, corrupt and hopelessly bureaucratic.
I don't think that public education is necessary or useful if we consider that its objective is to educate the youth. I believe that every person is free to educate himself and institutions should not possess the monopoly of education. Although I believe that, as a social development, the increase and access to education through private sector methods should be sought.
But as long as public education continues to have the same foundation as today, I very seriously doubt that it can succeed.
Of course this is my opinion and I want to know what you think.
Image Source: 1
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
I am new vote me and also follow me Thanks
@originalworks
The @OriginalWorks bot has determined this post by @vieira to be original material and upvoted it!
To call @OriginalWorks, simply reply to any post with @originalworks or !originalworks in your message!
To enter this post into the daily RESTEEM contest, upvote this comment! The user with the most upvotes on their @OriginalWorks comment will win!
For more information, Click Here!
Special thanks to @reggaemuffin for being a supporter! Vote him as a witness to help make Steemit a better place!
Hey! Great topic, thanks for opening up discussion.
I am going to number your bullet points for ease of reference 1,2,3
Great point about the use of force in education. It seems the least effective way to get people to engage in learning skills that benefit society. However, if we examine societies goals we may see why this is the way we have set it up. In society, we need certain functions to run smoothly (water treatment, energy distribution, etc) and more and more these functions require specialized skills. So it is necessary to at least provide access to that knowledge, I think that is where public education comes in. If, for instance, we left the education of the citizenry to private industry we the people could no longer control our societies future, that power would be left in the relatively few hands of private schools and their board of directors.
Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, an evil private school. What if they decide not to teach certain skills or to teach them in ways that limit societal progress/growth but expand profit? Well, you could argue that the market would solve this by giving incentive to entrepreneurs to open their own school to fill that demand. But now you must assume that the risk of doing so is outweighed by the possible profit, well if I were in the position of the incumbent school I would lower my prices to starve the startup school out of business.
My goal here is to illustrate the possible fragility of our capitalist system. To depend on a few people for the common good of education seems to run contrary to our societal need for security.
I haven't thought about the quality of education as a function of the number of students, but I think your argument depends on the current state of public education which is outdated in many ways. Perhaps private schools are better than public education as it stands (however, this is hard to argue if you look at our current secretary of education Betsy Devos's private schools in Michigan (links at the bottom)). I have to believe it's possible to improve our education curriculum and structure in order to give us the education we need to continue our society into the future. Perhaps taking a page from popular education alternatives like Khan Academy, MIT and Harvard who have put all their educational resources online for free.
3.This one was not one of your great points. In US history we have had many failed public programs. But we also have many more failed private ventures. The truth is our government is not OURS and therein lies the inefficiency. I don't think it is reasonable to say that any public operation is, by default, less efficient than a private one. Bad is Bad, amiright
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/12/08/a-sobering-look-at-what-betsy-devos-did-to-education-in-michigan-and-what-she-might-do-as-secretary-of-education/
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-school-experiment-232399
If these links seem cherry picked, they certainly are. So gimme some of your own and we can compare notes!
Thanks!
Greetings, here I present my answer, which I will also organize by points.
I. I fully understand what you say, but on the contrary, I do not think that the education system would be reduced to a small business elite, that is, that private is not reducing the number of institutions, but rather the multiple. Each person who has knowledge about a specific subject (such as a teacher) can impart education locally without the need for large infrastructures. That is what I meant by removing the monopoly of education from institutions, since the latter would not be a small group of people. Now, the questions you ask me are equally feasible in the present system or in any other system, all systems that depend on non-centralized functioning and empower people are very fragile, since they depend on many people. The only way of not being it is with a total regulation, and even in the latter, one would have to resort to force.
II. Here we are in similar positions. The best way to improve education is to resort to technology and modernization, I think that inevitably that will be the way and that is where little by little society begins to move forward. As for the number of students, I set an example to Latin America, from 2000 to 2010 the number of students became multiple, public institutions grew and education became much more accessible (due to the pink tide), but which occurred was that proportionately, people who finished their studies had fallen from 73% to 50%, and the quality of public education had been greatly reduced due to the low academic readiness of the "new" students.
III. He admitted that it was one of my poorest points, but I did not think I needed to explain much more. The state is very large so it tends to be either very bureaucratic or very corrupt, or in the worst case; both. If the state makes many regulations, it creates a centralized system, the bureaucracy multiplies and the whole procedure is obstructed, the quality of education is low, the students grow up, the education is politicized and all sorts of planning mistakes are made since the state is one vending machine of money, reason why it finally decays in corruption.
Finally I must clarify, I am not American so I do not know in depth the plan of Betsy DeVos, but from what I have read is very different from what I pose, since what she seeks is to increase the number of students in institutions private by means of a kind of loan, so that it is neither a capitalist system nor liberal, but rather mercantilist. I also do not pass links since as I said earlier, I am not American, and my information is usually in Spanish.
Thanks for passing, I say goodbye!
Desculpeme!
It was silly of me to assume so much of you, thanks for pulling me out of my tiny world.
Also, my Spanish is horrible but I do have access to translations and wouldn't mind seeing your sources.
Thanks friend and keep up the great thinking!
Well, here are some of the points I've said, so I'll leave you these two articles:
http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-39970406
http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-41422087