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| Thread: Should public education be illegal? |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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artu
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posted November 13, 2013 06:20 AM |
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Quote:
You are born poor -> you live poor.
Yes, but in developed countries (in which freedom relatively exists) the poor isn't really that poor, they still have a lot to lose and they can hope for a good life full of nice memories. So, it's really beside the point.
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JollyJoker
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posted November 13, 2013 08:03 AM |
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I could write a long sermon here, but consider this.
SUPPOSE, public schooling is banned and private schooling comes into play. You are living in a lower-than-average neighborhood and have three children.
The first private school to open in your vicinity is funded by the Scientologists. Fairly low cost. A week later a Catholic school opens up. Comparable cost. Couple of days later the Muslims of America open one. Girls getting a healthy discount in that one, being allowed in for nigh on nothing...
Couple of days later White people for a White America opens up. Only white pupils admitted. The school cost moderate fee and somewhat more than the others, but also offers more classes.
A day later Black Power opens a school, admitting only Blacks. Stress is on Sports classes.
Couple of days later you read that the American colleges are auctioned off to the highest bidders. Harvard is finally won by the Catholic Church which doesn't take long to announce that they will try everything to keep the high standard of education, and in order to do that they sadly have to announce that they can only admit students from Catholic schools...
So here's the 64$ question: if the PUBLIC has to make sure that a) everyone will be able to get an education at all (i.e. schooling for orphans and the poorest has to be paid by the public OR will be left to private social organisations) and b) the public has to make sure that every single school meets the standards and doesn't teach "harmful" things - don't you think that it's a lot simpler and more efficient for the public to RUN the system instead of trying to CONTROL it?
That's by the way the same logic that can be used for public health
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mvassilev
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posted November 13, 2013 09:28 AM |
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You do know that Harvard is private, right? And there are plenty of perfectly good private religious universities as well.
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DagothGares
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posted November 13, 2013 09:33 AM |
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Religious/ Jesuit schools are considered superior to most other schools, here. They have government funding, though.
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xerox
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posted November 13, 2013 10:40 AM |
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Edited by xerox at 10:47, 13 Nov 2013.
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artu said:
No public schools will mean that lower classes wont be able to afford proper education, that will reduce social mobility; poor will get poorer, rich will get richer on a massive scale. terrible things happens
Untill very recently, I feared this aswell. Which meant I put my otherwise libertarian views aside and supported government providing education. But now I've looked at this research which shows that even in the poorest slums, people have access to private education. Poor people even make a choice NOT to go to tuition free public schools. Now poverty can also be relative and it is true that not all of the VERY poorest in these countries can afford private alternatives. But that's not an argument for having public schools either as you can easily circumvent that problem through charity, scholarships and government vouchers. Even just having the government providing vouchers would give people access to (for taxpayers) cheaper and better education than what they would otherwise get from public schools.
With the access-to-education problem solved, I just can't see any reason for having public schools.
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JollyJoker
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posted November 13, 2013 11:03 AM |
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All that is possible only because there IS a public system underneath everything. The public system defines the standard, and based on that private institutions can offer BETTER schooling for money you wouldn't have to pay otherwise (so that the schooling has a higher quality is more or less a given - otherwise why pay for it?).
Generally it's possible in such a system that there are a few private schools that are selling a certain ideology AT THAT - of course that's all the more unproblematic, the older the kids are that gain access.
However, if that foundation of public standard schooling is taken away, there is no standard anymore.
So what would happen?
Answer: You'd have to pay the price for being unable to buy your child the high-quality education, but would HAVE to put your child into the school that you could pay for; naturally this would be either low-quality schools, offering only some kind of "basic education" or having the worst/cheapest teachers and very few weekly classes - or it would be INTEREST GROUP SCHOOLS, that could obviously teach the children everything THEY deemed worthy to teach, which would be the price of schooling in that case.
You know how TV works, right? If you don't want or can't pay - suffer the commercials or don't watch!
Now, TV is voluntary, school isn't, because not many (poor) kids have a future without.
The equivalent of "commercials" would be, what the kids would have to suffer - and I don't want to imagine the amount of lawsuits that would busy the courts about what schools could teach what and why not.
So the alternative for many people would be: either get your kids CRAPPY TO NONE schooling - or pick the poison that will be injected into them in an interest group owned and subsidized school.
In the end there would be a lot of home-schooling, obviously.
Great outlook, really.
Of COURSE something is wrong with public schooling: it's UNDERFUNDED, that's what's wrong! The times are changing ever faster, and school just can't compete. Kids are used to BEING ENTERTAINED nowadays, PASSIVELY, or, if they do something, by being rewarded/having a good time.
School, however, is WORK, compared to that - kids will have to do a lot of boring stuff without even being rewarded for it, since most of what they learn, isn't immediately usable and don't bring in any benefits soon after.
Now, while it's certainly possible to make PART of the school experience somewhat more entertaining, what you learn in school for life is, that there ARE some necessities in life you will have to invest some sweat into, even if they are not entertaining at all, which is getting ever more difficult to teach.
Then INFORMATION is a lot more accessible today than it used to be. Which means, that education for the sake of being educated isn't necessary anymore: for example, you don't need to read all kinds of classics in school; it's more like reading one, teaching more HOW to read stuff like that and show kids where they can find what and in what form (watch a classic as a movie or theatre adaption, for example).
Bottom line is, that our basic schooling system will have to adapt: a shorter basic schooling with more specializing options, so kids can go more into what they really dig, and consequently may want to do later.
But to do all that, MONEY is NEEDED to fund the changes and adaptions, and that is no one willing to spend.
Which is somewhat paradoxical. If you consider how much money is spend for kids without having any income for
TVs and DvDs
Gaming consoles
Smartphones
which are basically IN COMPETITION with education (the way things are now), you can only come to the conclusion that parents are way more willing to spend money on what could be called "occupational drugs" in order to not being bothered by their kids, instead of spending more money on fixing the educational system, then no one should wonder about how "kids are so lazy and unwilling to learn nowadays" or complain about the inefficiency of the educational system.
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Zenofex
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posted November 13, 2013 02:31 PM |
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Oh dear, the regular red herring "it's public = it's bad". There are zero reasons to believe that public education is bad because it's public. Zero. Public and private sector are both run by people and are both susceptible to problems, it takes a really high degree of naivete and ideological short-sightedness to believe that one is better than the other just because it's under public or private government. These issues are not "global" and are usually individual to each country and sometimes even each school. And like I wrote in another topic - during the "communist" years here in Bulgaria we had a very good public education but then the state had different priorities.
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Stevie
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posted November 13, 2013 04:47 PM |
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Edited by Stevie at 16:49, 13 Nov 2013.
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Quote:
Oh dear, the regular red herring "it's public = it's bad".
Oh dear, the regular straw man... Please point out this "it's public = it's bad" argument in Xerox's post. It seems people willingly neglect the fact that this was demonstrated in a study in India, it's not a red herring at all. Yet you must think of yourself as being intelligent when throwing said "fallacies" when you're actually using one yourself.
As for the rest of this conversation... Public schooling COULD work, but it's exactly the same as the communist utopia. You could dream all day you're gonna have a population where the wealthy and the poor would have the same level of education, but that's just that, dreaming. We need practical solutions that really help, not utopias.
My 2 cents: we would be better off with no public schooling, and I'm deffinetly opposed to forced schooling. If you don't have money to spend on private schools, then do homeschooling, simple as that.
Anyway, as in any issue the main problem is man. Even a broken system could work if you got the right people. Conversly, even an utopic system would fail with the wrong people.
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Zenofex
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posted November 13, 2013 05:09 PM |
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The India example doesn't prove anything besides that it works in India. Somewhere in India. And somewhere else. What other information do you have? How are these private schools funded? The article says almost nothing about this. Why are the public schools performing worse than them and do they indeed? Also no info, in fact it's only noted that most of the children in some area attend private schools and... that's it. How was the evaluation done? English, Maths and "one other subject" + an IQ test. That proves... what?
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mvassilev
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posted November 13, 2013 06:53 PM |
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It's hard for private schools to compare to JJ's public schools, but there are problems that are inherent to public schools' functioning that can't be solved by throwing more money at the problem.
First, they're run by government, which uses the opportunity to churn out propaganda. In safe subjects (math, science, etc) they generally teach what's true (at least, there's nothing grossly false and intentionally misleading), but when it comes to subjects like history and other social studies, pro-status-quo propaganda abounds. The current system of government and social organization is treated like the best of all possible worlds, and that anyone who opposes it is a racist, an anarchist, or wants to bring back the Soviet Union. Certain historical figures are treated as secular saints when in fact they deserve the opposite treatment. Why would giving schools more money make this any better?
Second, schools are fundamentally not just about education. They're also day care, so parents can work for most of the day without leaving their children unsupervised. Day care is relatively cheap and schools more or less already succeed at that. For government, schools are about indoctrination. For teachers, schools are a way to make money, with students' performance unrelated to how much they're paid. This misalignment of incentives would also not be solved by throwing more money at the problem. So you see schools today being part prison, part day care, part indoctrination center, and education, though praised to the heavens, is a low priority.
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Zenofex
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posted November 13, 2013 07:05 PM |
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There is no way to take out the propaganda from the social sciences and that has nothing to do with whether the schools are public or not. These disciplines are just very susceptible to bias and unscientific interferences. You think that moving to private schools will resolve that? Hehe. How? The textbook writers can be biased, the teachers can be biased, the education method can be biased. And in 99% of the cases they are all biased. It makes zero difference if the people involved in the education receive their salary from the state or from some private organization.
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mvassilev
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posted November 13, 2013 07:46 PM |
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It's hardly optimal for all propaganda to say the same thing. If people were at least told different things, they could compare notes. If everyone is being taught the same wrong thing, there's less of an opportunity to question it.
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JoonasTo
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posted November 13, 2013 08:52 PM |
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mvassilev said:
It's hardly optimal for all propaganda to say the same thing. If people were at least told different things, they could compare notes. If everyone is being taught the same wrong thing, there's less of an opportunity to question it.
This has also a lot to do with the culture. You make it sound like US schools are propaganda machines.
Finnish schools, those that I know at least, have always had a strong focus on critical thinking and source criticism since middle-school.
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Zenofex
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posted November 13, 2013 10:31 PM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 22:32, 13 Nov 2013.
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mvassilev said:
It's hardly optimal for all propaganda to say the same thing. If people were at least told different things, they could compare notes. If everyone is being taught the same wrong thing, there's less of an opportunity to question it.
You keep dodging the question - how moving exclusively to private schools will help? What guarantees that the information taught in them will be "right"? What is "right" and who determines it? What does the private sector do better than the public one when it comes to taking the "ideological noise" out of the social sciences?
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xerox
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posted November 13, 2013 10:32 PM |
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JJ: I don't get why the public schools need to set a standard. This all comes down to competition and competition doesn't need the public to provide a standard. Competition leads to products and services becoming more efficient at a lower cost. I don't see why education should be an exception.
Zenofex: Studies about the subject also cover several African countries. The results are essentially the same. Poor people have access to private schools. They often make a choice not to attend public schools because the private schools generally outperform them and there is a greater feeling of accountability through fees.
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Over himself, over his own
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mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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mvassilev
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posted November 13, 2013 10:42 PM |
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Zenofex said:
You keep dodging the question - how moving exclusively to private schools will help?
I never said that we should move exclusively to private schools. My point is that for all the potential flaws of private schools, they should be compared to actual public schools, keeping all of their flaws in mind, rather than to an ideal public school.
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Zenofex
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posted November 13, 2013 10:43 PM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 22:47, 13 Nov 2013.
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xerox said:
Zenofex: Studies about the subject also cover several African countries. The results are essentially the same. Poor people have access to private schools. They often make a choice not to attend public schools because the private schools generally outperform them and there is a greater feeling of accountability through fees.
The article that you linked to gives a VERY limited information about these countries, these schools, how they perform, how they are funded and why the children (or actually the parents) choose them. You haven't proved your point in the slightest. Besides, making a comparison between the schools in the slums of some backwater countries and the schools in the developed countries is ridiculous to begin with.
Quote:
I never said that we should move exclusively to private schools. My point is that for all the potential flaws of private schools, they should be compared to actual public schools, keeping all of their flaws in mind, rather than to an ideal public school.
When it comes to social sciences, the public and the private schools have the same issues because the social sciences have the same issues no matter where they are taught. So I still don't see your point.
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xerox
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posted November 13, 2013 10:50 PM |
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Edited by xerox at 23:07, 13 Nov 2013.
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The Cato Institute published paper does give an answer to all of those questions.
Why would the relation between private and public schools be different in developed countries than in India and African countries? Cause I don't really believe that the geography matters a lot. It is the competitive nature of private schools that generally make them better than public schools no matter where in the world you are.
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Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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artu
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My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted November 14, 2013 02:29 AM |
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Quote:
Why would the relation between private and public schools be different in developed countries than in India and African countries? Cause I don't really believe that the geography matters a lot.
That is the most naive question I've heard in a while. In what Zenofex calls the backwater countries, the governments are mostly extremely corrupted, the budget for education is a joke, the curriculum is full of most shallow kind of propaganda and because of all that and more, people don't trust the government even a little bit. (You guys trash talk the government in theory but in an everyday situation of encountering the police, you will probably be cooperative. An African or a Middle Eastern on the other hand, will most likely never trust a cop and he wont want to have anything to do with them, just an example).
Also, you must stop referring to competition as some kind of fairy dust. It doesn't solve every problem, even in simpler matters. We can all actually witness that living under capitalist countries. When education is on the table you are talking about indoctrination and social status. It's not just any product.
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mvassilev
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posted November 14, 2013 05:27 AM |
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I would cooperate with the police because I would expect worse things to happen to me if I don't, not because I think they're good. I certainly don't trust them and won't have anything to do with them if I can avoid it.
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