Kudos to Khan Academy and Bill Gates for patronizing and liberating the education.
Rights only make sense when they're defined as legal prohibitions on action. Rights come from our nature as human beings; without the protection that they provide, we wouldn't be able to do all the things that we need to do to flourish (a concept that includes more than just biological survival).
Like a lawyer? Pretty sure I have a right to one of them when charged with a crime.
I understand to go with the clean logic of Ayn Rand's definitely of rights and everything, but that doesn't mean it fits all situations of the word right.
Positive rights have some traction and serve a useful purpose too, even though they do in fact require some taxation/other forms of forced payments to provide them.
Edit: Don't many public defenders think of their jobs as a form of partial charity?
Edit 2: Is it a violation of rights that these public defenders aren't the best lawyers available? I don't think so, and the onus is on people that accept positive rights to show that it is.
Edit 3: You know, I'm not exactly sure that this is Rand's answer at all (I couldn't find it in the cursory glances I took at a couple of books). But it does at least reflect what I think about the right to an attorney, and I think it holds up pretty well!
This stuff isn't just an academic issue: "Shrinking funding and access to resources for public defenders and court-appointed attorneys is only making the problem worse." (See: http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Bad-Lawyering.php)
I support most of what the Innocence Project does, but I think that charity is the answer here (being a selfish person doesn't mean that I don't support charities; it just means that I don't think that such support earns me moral credit). If the government didn't pay for public defendants at all, I think that the Innocence Project might have an easier time raising money for more and better attorneys.
Is this one of those cases where they're more "free" because more of them are in jail?
Imagine the effect of a government program intended to assist stranded motorists (suppose that the program maintained a fleet of trucks which carried common spare tires, gas, compressed air and the like). Fewer people would stop to help, and that program would function about as well as any other government program does, which is another way of saying that it would work a lot worse than any private roadside assistance program known today.
^I know that it's a very poor idea to represent yourself if you have any other option, but it's still better than being on trial in a 100% rigged system, such as the USSR had.
All this complexity regarding law makes me think of Phillip Greenspun's research into computer-aided law: http://philip.greenspun.com/research/area-exam.text
(Holy cow has this gotten off the original topic. Sorry everyone!)
I concede the point that it can't be totally inaccessible, but the it seems like farmers with hunting rifles going after professional soldiers. Sure, sometimes it works out or you get lucky, but that's not the norm.
Although come to think of it, the public defender situation isn't much better, is it.
Something like legal representation isn't so much deeply fundamental as it is a pragmatic and institutional response to the problem of checking arbitrary prosecution. We would drop it if we could find some better way of checking those prosecutors.
Similarly, many states will intervene to prevent their citizens from starving, even if they have to spend everyone else's tax money to do so.
You go build a company around giving things to the education market for free and I'll build a company around selling things to the education market, and we'll see whose company is better off in five years and whose customers are better off in five years.
Also, Apple was, and still is, notorious for donating or offering heavily discounted products to teachers and schools. Why? They would get familiar with and used to using their products and purchase them in the future. It also gives them great publicity.
Many other companies do this as well. My campus computer store sells software at 90% discounts for the same reason. Sometimes giving things away is where the smart money is at.
For example, when I took thermodynamics in college (in 2001), I used a thermo book from the early 70's which cost me $8 on eBay (as opposed to the modern version which cost $100). I also skipped purchasing many books entirely, and just used free materials online, including this newfangled site called wikipedia.
Agency costs and are the issue. The people assigning books don't have to pay the cost of using them, so they have no incentive to select based on price. Further, it's very difficult for students to use substitutes - if the professor assigns problems 1-10 from the book, it doesn't matter how good the material in your cheaper substitute is.
If you want to crack this nut, focus on problem sets, not textbooks.
Anyway, you're absolutely 100% correct about problem sets. Good problem sets go a VERY long way to making a good textbook.
Is there _anything_ in Stewart that isn't covered as well by Khan? You also get advantage of the video tutorial on the topic.
I'm waiting for that point in time when we reach a tipping point and Higher Education Institutions don't just delegate everything to Khan for a lot of their topics.
My Calculus Course (151) at SFU took place in Images Theater at 8:30 in the morning and had 450 Students listening to a lecture on Calculus. The ratio was approximately: 1/8 of the students were bored. 1/8 of the students were lost, 1/8 of the students were attentive, 1/8 of the students were asleep, and 1/2 of the students didn't show up. (8:30 AM!)
I see little need for Stewart in the Face of Khan's Video Collection on Calculus + a bit of wikipedia (Seriously - check out their section on Derivatives and compare it to Stewart)
I will agree with you on the Problem Sets - and perhaps that's the missing ingredient in Khan - He needs to more fully flesh out his test bank - but http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard is moving ahead nicely. (And, in my mind, is far superior to any static test bank)
The issue is that you need the same problem sets as the instructor. If the instructor uses Stewart and homework is graded, you get a 0 on HW. This is why you can't even go back 1 edition of the book, and why the legacy publishers print a new edition every 2 years with minimal changes beyond tweaking the problems.
A startup idea I never pursued, but one I think has a lot of merit: build an online problem cross referencer. It provides a) free problems to any instructors who want to use them and b) crossreferences these problems with existing textbooks (that way students who don't want to buy the book don't have to).
I'm pretty sure that Int[ 1/Sqrt[3+5x^2], {x}] can't be copyrighted.
In many of my college classes I spend more time using wikipedia than my textbook.
Furthermore, I know many teachers who have written widely used (assigned reading in over 1k classes) who want their books to be available for a greatly reduced price if not all together for free. Unfortunately the publishers ban this and the writers must relent since the only way to get their book known is if it comes from a major publisher. They justify this mostly based on promotion costs, but this is not even close to their profit margins.
Books are expensive because there is little competition, particularly with k-12 schools, largely based on political lobbying.
Of course, we aren't likely to dissolve lobbyists anytime soon; but the idea of socially conscious startups is to dream big.
How technology can help government improve the quality, and how technology can keep the education free for the masses, is another thing.
...so wouldn't it be nice if there were some group that would help new education-focused companies to get their innovations into the (free) public schools?
I hope this makes more sense now.