Date: 2014-07-12
Trigger
The Cato Institute just announced a Summer special sale of James Tooley's book titled “The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves” (Book appears to be first published in 2009). I have to admit, I did not read the book, only excerpts and reviews. My impression is that this book was written a bit too much like a travelogue.
I have read about this interesting book years ago or so, but had forgotten about it in the meantime until I saw this announcement in my e-mail.
Here are links to reviews and excerpts of his book:
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/beautiful-tree-part-i (There are three excerpts here)
James Tooley also wrote a short, very readable, related policy paper in 2005 for the Cato Institute titled “Private Schools in the Poorest Countries”.
He also published a related white paper in 2005 titled “Private Education is Good for the Poor: A Study of Private Schools Serving the Poor in Low-Income Countries”
What Happened In The Western Countries?
Essentially government took over on a very large scale the education of our children and students. Private schools or private educators have been largely marginalized.
Was it the pseudo egalitarian thought that good education should not be reserved to the privileged few who could afford it? Or were the powerful few preventing/prohibiting peasants etc. from receiving any education? I would argue that this premise is seriously flawed and history does not back it up. Worse, I would say these are some of the pretexts for governments to overtake schooling.
This is clearly socialism or collectivism at its worst. Western governments control educational content and teachers. Power hungry, nationalistic Governments competed with each other by imposing national educational standards.
The idea to offer so called free education for all children is deeply flawed! Direct accountability of teachers to school owner and to parents is lost. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan “I am paying for this school”.
Why should our children’s education not be provided by free markets? Because, entrepreneurs are greedy and unscrupulous; are difficult to be controlled by government; they challenge the powerful few?
How this unconstitutional development could have ever happened in the U.S. is still subject of my research.
A Brief Glance At History
Unfortunately, I am not an expert of the history of human education. However, I believe e.g. the history of Western civilization is full of examples of how private education was superior and it would have become available to most of the population without government interference.
The ancient Greeks had excellent, affordable private teachers and private schools such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and others. Socrates did not charge anything for his teaching (if I am not wrong). He was sentenced to death as a corrupter of the minds of the youth. This is an early example of how even a democracy treats inconvenient, private teachers.
Many excellent schools of the medieval ages were run by churches or monasteries offered education to rich and poor.
One Size Fits All Solutions
Our children are taught essentially the same. Brainwashing, indoctrination, and adulation for government are automatically built in.
To teach critical thinking is fashionable in the U.S., however with a Big Government department in Washington D.C. down to local school boards in control of high schools in all 50 states this seems to be an enormous contradiction.
Impediment To Human Progress
Contrary what the official narrative is public schools have, in my opinion, greatly reduced the advancement of the human condition. Public schools in Western countries are like straight jackets of the mind. The mind is a terrible thing to waste in a public school!
Public schools is one prime example who people were led to rely on government to solve the concerns of humanity.
Thinking outside the box has been a mantra for several decades without realizing that one of the major boxes is public education (literally and figuratively)!
Private Schools In Developing Countries
“Private schools for the poor are burgeoning across the developing world. In many urban areas they are serving the majority of schoolchildren. Their quality is higher than that of government schools provided for the poor—perhaps not surprisingly given that they are businesses dependent on fees to survive and hence are directly accountable to parental needs.” (Quote from the book taken from above review).
We can only hope that the people in developing countries do not repeat the stupid mistakes of Western countries!
Privatize Public Schools In Western Countries
There would be nothing wrong with the idea to have more choice of and more diversified private schools to educate our children. Why should parents not choose the best school for their children and why should they not pay directly for the education of their children financed among other things by lowering taxation.
The Internet is a great tool to provide high quality, varied education to all children of the world. Homeschooling is already benefitting from it.
This is my conclusion!
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