Individualism is the thrust of my theory. We are all individual people is exactly why education needs to be privatized. We are unique individuals with our own strengths and weaknesses and need to be able to select the education that best fits our mold. Education is not a one size fits all as the government is trying to make it. We have people that learn a different speeds. Brighter kids are constantly being held back and duller kids are constantly get lost in a teaching style that i wrong for them or at a pace that is too fast for them. By being in classrooms that are not a good fit for them kids are being robbed of their time and denied the opportunity of a good education. Also this comes to an issue of who has control of our children the parents or the government. The government one size fits all type of education locks our children in an educational box where they are taught things the government feels is right instead of the parent. However the parents are the best qualified people for judging their kids and can send them to schools that fit them or even home school them. They decide what is best for their kid not the government. With private education people are also aloud to explore things that best fit our strengths. I am very weak in the more advanced math but thrive in history and music business However it was mandated in high school that I should learn geometry trigonometry and calculus. Those three classes has proved useless to me I have never been asked to find the volume of a cylinder or a derivative or anything to that extent. What this did is robbed me of time where i could have been in more history writing or business classes. having to take these useless math courses hindered my leaning experience and that of others in the class. I was one of the laggers in the class that couldn't keep pace with the kids that had strong math skills and the truth Is people like me held them back if we were not in the class the brighter kids could have moved at a faster pace. Just as those people that had strong math skills but could not compete with in the history department and held me back. Think of individualism and evolution. in the days of the savages the was very little individualism if any but as society evolved people started to specialize in what they did best. so when you think about it the collectivism and jamming kids into one school depressing their individualism we are taking a step back in evolution. end government control of your child's education and privatize education.
I think there is a fundamental flaw in your argument where you assume that private education is automatically more flexible and catered to individual needs and state run education is automatically proscriptive one-size fits all. Even within the scope of the private education that exists today, while some can provide exactly that kind of flexibility and freedom, some is exactly the opposite, much more proscriptive and restrictive than the state alternatives (often very much by design). I also think there is a flaw in assuming parents are best qualified to know what is best for their children's education. Parents are just people and lots of people are idiots. Of course, that doesn't mean government is automatically better at determining what is best for children either but, as with so many things, the best answer is going to be somewhere in the middle.
Once upon a time all education was individualistic. Those that could afford tutors would get them for their children, those who couldn't would do their best to try and pass on their knowledge to their own children. Then we got the Industrial Revolution and the world changed. Industry demanded people ready for labour and that required basic skills. Government acting in the interests of the owners of the means of production set about ensuring that people received a basic generic education so they could be ready for work. It's not easy to throw that off. There have been some attempts to overcome the tendency to generic education by "streaming" school students. There have also been attempts at de-schooling (Ilich) and of non-conventional schooling (e.g. A.S Neil's Summerhill) but they remain few and far between and I'm not sure if they were effective. But as long as there is capitalism there will be industrialised education.
The reason It would give more freedom is because more privet schools would emerge and become more specialized (right now privet schools still have restrictions on them) and parents have the choice of where to send their child. There would be more traditional schools and there would be schools that are specialized and the parents would be able to pick the one they want their kid to go to. your starting the story in yes people are idiots however its the government that is subsidizing idiocy through public education. As I talked about evolution those that can adapt will and those that cant will die out and we move forward as a society and become stronger. In the sort of individualized university setting if a student is not up to par he is expelled or drops out. While in public education settings in high school and grade school that kid has to be tolerated and weighs down the brighter kids of the class. In a basketball game you would not recruit the poor players then start your worst player as he hinders you best players ability to score points. These poor players then go to other leagues and then flourish there. people always say oh my gosh he dropped out of college thats terrible. However Thats not the case my college roommate and best friend since grade school dropped out the second semester of his freshmen year. His other friends thought this was horrible but I knew him well and knew and the university setting was just not for him. After he dropped out he went to trade school in art and animation and flourished and now has a career in graphic designing animation. I haven't seen him since but I know he is much better off where he is and much happier than he would be trying to struggle through school in the university setting. Now everyone knew he was destine for graphic and animation since his year in high school (even people that did not know him that well) wouldn't it have been better for him to spend his high school years in a privet trade school the struggle through the traditional high school education.
There is no reason those things can't be achieved within a state-funded system and no reason why they'd automatically be achieved by a privately-funded one. The idea that privatisation is a magical solution to this kind of issue is simply wrong. You can only improve education by change what actually happens in the classroom (and beyond it for that matter). How it is funded is a means to those ends, not the solution in itself. Anyway, "private schools" doesn't really mean anything on it's own. There are all sorts of different systems and structures for funding schools and an education system in general involving what could be called private schools, all with advanatages and disadvantages. Your ideas don't tie down what kind of system you're really proposing. Midless rhetoric does your argument no favours. Again, what does that have to do with private funding? State schools can have setting based on students abilities and private schools can have multiple-ability classes (especially if you have your requirement for parents to be free to choose where to send their children). A state system can even has separate schools based (apparent) student ability - look in to the grammar school system in the UK as an example (though do please look in to the negatives as well as the positives).
It was on April 23, 1635 that the town of Boston founded the Boston Latin School, the first tax supported public school established to provide a free education, open to all the children of the community. To say the idea caught on is a massive understatement, today the tax supported, free to the public, education model is the dominant form of education in every part of the world. Under that broad heading are all sorts of schools, some very innovative, some highly successful, Boston Latin School is still in operation, and sends a large percentage of it's graduates to Ivy League schools, it's very possibly the best high school education in the country, public or private. There are good schools and bad schools, on balance, public education has proven to be an enormous success. There are areas that need work and that takes money and the will to succeed. But doing away with public education would be a tremendous mistake.
The old Comprehensive system is worth a look at as well, I spent my first four years of secondary school in London's largest comprehensive school, it was an interesting experience with the streaming approach.
I always point to what the market has done in the past. Not to long ago (couple decades) only relatively rich people could afford cell phones. Now just about everyone has a cell phone. It may not be a smart phone. but a good phone. Another would be it use to be only the rich had slow dial up internet service now just about everyone can afford fast DSL. The government involvement in education is why education has not made these same advancements
What is wrong with public education by and large the strong majority of our population is literate enough in English and know enough mathematics to do the bulk of jobs, with some added training on-the-job or more formal education say a two year college degree or less. The military seems to find a High School Diploma enough for enlistment and then they will find out what to do with you. Seems to privatizing it is not necessary and if parents want that there are private schools and other options depending on the state your in.
There are awesome public schools and horrible private schools as well. The issue is more complicated than "privatize schools". We need to learn from what works, regardless if the schools are private or public.
The current system already ensures literally everyone has access to the education system, albeit of varying quality. You're proposing a change that you hope would, after a couple of decades, lead to just about everyone having access to the education system, albeit of varying quality. You're not selling this very well in my opinion.
We're talking about health care, not cell phones. But thanks for trying. Anyone else want to address the issue? What kind of choice will people who don't have a lot of money will have?
I think the benefits of private education come from the more student centered approach -- the school only stays open if it can teach the majority of students. Why would a parent keep a kid in a school that doesn't educate their child unless forced to (by public school district boundaries, for example)? What that means in all practicality is that every decision made is about making sure that the student in that classroom understand the material. In a public school, that's not the case. Funding for projects and budgets are decided by politicians, and in some cases even the choice of textbooks is political (for example how evolution is covered in science texts, or how history is covered in history texts) -- which means that there are plenty of cases where the main objective of the decision is not education, but politics. Even in a private religious school, the politics would be somewhat muted by the fact that no one would attend a religious school that didn't teach kids. At the same time, since the schools are being hired to teach kids to a high level, there would be a lot less pushback against the school having fairly high standards. In a public school, that's not the case -- people send their kids to public school because that's the default option, so they tend to think of it less as life preparation and more as "where we send the kids to", which means that when the teacher gives a low grade or suggests that homework needs to be a higher priority or assigns a lot of homework, the parents push back and demand that junior get an A for doing no homework and reading comics in class. I think the issue of the poorer students could be handled in lots of ways -- perhaps requiring that every private school have a certain percentage of "charity slots" for poor kids or the very obvious vouchers. I don't think it's a difficult problem, and I don't think it negates the very positive effects that a privatized education system will have on the vast majority of students. What we have no is actually worse for all students because if you look at the numbers, we're behind most of the industrialized world in math and science education. There are entire school districts where the students graduate unable to read a newspaper, which in the 21st century essentially makes them unemployable and thus they "graduate" from school to welfare with no hope for a better life. I think that's tragic, but it also points out the specious nature of the "what about the poor kids" argument -- we're failing the poor kids so hard now that it's hard to imagine doing worse.
I have history and economic pricipals on my side. also the trasition period would not be decades or as bad as you act like it would be.
Perhaps, but making it a commodity like any other commodity, which is really what has happened, is a choice. When something is made a commodity it has to be purchased and purchasing a commodity takes money. iriemon's point, I think, is that if you have money you can buy the commodity. But why would any society make education a commodity?
I'm not claiming a fully private education system couldn't work, only that you've not demonstrated any reason why it would automatically be better than a state funded system (or the hybrid system we use today).
in the first post of the thread I talked about the individualism case. Also history is on my sided historically the market has always been better. And as hayek once said i trust the mases to build a better system then a group of central planners.
Again, I'm not disagreeing with the individualism concept, I'm only saying that you've not explained how an entirely private education would necessarily provide that where a state funded (in part or in full) is incapable of doing so. I question that history shows anything as simple as "the market has always been better", especially in the area of vital public services. I wouldn't accept someone saying it's always been worse either. The fact is that I don't think the fundamental source of funding is actually the key factor in determining the quality of a service. Privatisation doesn't, in practice, hand anything to the masses, it usually just hands it to a different group of central planners with a different set of flaws, petty politics and ulterior motives. Communism would be handing it to the masses but that'd be a whole new topic.
