Hacker News Reader

Don't you think leaving education to the free market would make it harder for kids from poor backgrounds to go up in life? When everyone uses the same system, it's in everyone's best interest to fund it and make it as good as possible. You won't get the best results, but at least everyone gets a decent education.

Except we've seen that this doesn't really work in practice. Kids are not all getting a decent education. Poor kids are still at a huge disadvantage compared to wealthy kids. There isn't a one size fits all education. Different roles which are needed by society require different skills. Everyone doesn't need to go to college. The world still needs ditch diggers and it likely always will. Not everyone is equal when it comes to intellectual or physical capability. When you try to shove everyone through the same system, you get a lot of square pegs going through round holes. This prevents those with high intellectual capabilities from reaching their full potential by reducing education to the lowest common denominator.

My expectation is that a free market of ideas would allow superior modes of education to rapidly emerge, which would then be slowly and poorly copied by the mainstream. If I'm understanding you right, you're saying that by allowing a parallel education system with freedom of choice, all the smart and rich people would abandon the old one to die. (It would be kept alive, of course by taxes, in body, if not in spirit!)

My personal belief is that the death of the old education system is over a century overdue.

We don't need to kill it, just stop making alternatives illegal and the problem will solve it itself.

Letting the people with wealth and power use an alternative system would be the same thing as killing the public system. No one with the ability to improve the system would have the incentive to. It's the reason public schools aren't improving. In a privatized system you'll get a divided population with some being very well educated and while some get no education at all.

There's nothing preventing a public system from being changed and improved. Take Finland as an example. Everyone goes to the same public schools there, rich or poor. The result is one of the best education systems in the world. New methods are regularly tested and teachers have a lot of freedom to choose the ones that suit them.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmcubp2szg

> it's in everyone's best interest to fund it and make it as good as possible.

Often this is addressed through a voucher system. Single Payer (or subsidizer), multiple provider.

Eg: gov't gives a voucher for $10k per head, you're free to shop for the best schooling your money can buy (perhaps even online!)

Aside: this exact concept can apply to healthcare too

I like this idea! In fact I have wondered what effect it would have on government if citizens could literally vote with their dollars, ie. democratically decide how government funds are allocated. So every year each citizen would be allocated ( yearly budget / total population ) dollars and could choose how their dollars are spent.

I live in Denmark, which is in Europe. I’m extremely courious as to where in Europe you are actually from, because if there’s is one thing that is the same across the entirety of Europe from my experience, it is that no-one from a European country would ever talk about “Europe” like it was a uniform thing when talking about laws or public institutions. School in France is extremely different from school in Finland etc. Also I am puzzled to think about which country in Europe doesn’t have private schooling available next to public schools.

So I’m curious because taken on it’s own your comment sounds a lot like a fiction a conservative American would author about what they think ‘Europe’ is like. But this might just be a result of your alternative schooling.

Also your schooling is described as being not available where you are yet still what you went through which seems a bit of a conundrum as well. Was it actually illegal, or do you think you might have been exposed to biased propaganda by the institution coloring your view on what the educational system in your country is actually like?

Not American, but your comment amused me because I just spent the last hour reading about how to migrate there :)

I'm half Croatian, half Australian, and speak with an American accent due to my childhood friends. I went to an international school (IB) followed by a Dutch high school (VWO). (Basically I'm an alien everywhere I go.)

My school called itself a Dalton school, but upon reading the book by the creator of the original Dalton school (Education on the Dalton Plan, Helen Parkhurst, 1905) I was absolutely blown away by how radical and futuristic this school sounded, and how short my own school (which supposedly was the same kind) fell of that mark. I investigated why my school did hardly any of the things Dalton schools are supposed to do, and found out that they were against Dutch law.

As you say, Europe is not (yet) a monolithic entity, and perhaps there is even a country here where letting kids do what they want isn't considered a crime. Hopefully I was wrong to generalize in this regard, I would certainly be happy to hear about it.

As for my bias, I admit freely that I absolutely hated school, consider it an abomination and a crime against the human spirit, and almost certainly would have left if it weren't illegal (they send the police after your parents). I say "almost" because I did rather enjoy the part where you get to see your friends every day—although at the time it wasn't clear to me that this would go away with graduation, or how much I would miss it.

To be clear I have no problem with people willingly submitting themselves to such a thing, it's the coercion part that I can't stand for.

> it is that no-one from a European country would ever talk about “Europe” like it was a uniform thing when

As an immigrant to the US who's been to a dozen or so states, I'd add it's also inaccurate to talk about the US as a uniform thing or group of people

> Not sure how it is in the US but in Europe there's not really a free market with regards to how children are taught.

Homeschooling is the closest to that free market in the US. Your comment prompted me to look up the homeschooling statistics [1] and I was surprised by the results for Europe. The US outstrips the rest of the world by number of children in homeschooling by a large margin.

US homeschooling outcomes are so far promising [2], so one could say it is a pretty competitive alternative market.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261885035_The_Socia...