This is a good read for anyone interested in private education: http://www.newstatesman.com/node/141109
Also
http://candlemind.com/projects/progclub/file/michael/getEducated.php?listID=9
“Since people are concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.""The sweetest of minds can harbor the harshest of men.”
http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.org
you guys are awesome
I think the largest challenge for private education is not the education itself, but getting employers to accept its value.
Nah, the largest challenge is for the public to become convinced that without the state providing X it does not follow that X will not be provided.
ya i think it more convincing the public. I know a lot of business owners/employers and every single one will tell you they dont give a damn about education if you can sell you can sell. Now a harvard employer is going to have a lot in common with a harvard job applicant. So there is a lot of 'good ole boy' going on, but i think outside the 'establishment' its accidental.
i am also excluding the government provided monopoly jobs that require the state education like doctors and lawyers.
Also as it stands today when you have a job applicant with a degree and one that doesnt (completely just guessing) 99.9% of them didnt spend there time getting a private education they are uneducated comparatively (with experience being the same).
I was just thinking about a rebuttal to a common statist objection to privatizing the schools. Let's play along with their argument that somehow the poor will be unable to afford private schools on their own. Obviously what they are trying to imply by this is that the poor will be disadvantaged economically since they will not be able to afford the education that is prerequisite to decent-paying professions. Is this is the case, then when the schools are privatized, employers of professions requiring many years of schooling will realize that the supply of potential employees for professions requiring many years of schooling will shrink in the future since only those that can afford it would be getting an education. If the only thing separating a poor child from one day becoming a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, for instance, is ability to pay for education, then it would make sense for an employer to pay for the education the poor child would require to be successful at his profession in exchange for working for the employer at a reduced rate for a specified number of years. This would allow the poor child to attain the education he needs to reach his full employment potential, and the employer to avoid the additional cost than a reduction of the labor supply from reduced access to education would entail. Thoughts?
I see two problems in getting the private education system going:
1. The line from the great movie "Spaceballs" comes to mind when Lonestar says: "Barf we aren't talking about JUST a load of money, We're talking about a shit load of money!" The same thing here applies to public education. The public schools system is so lavishly funded that except in most extreme of circumstances, entrepreneurs will be hard pressed to get people to switch to their schools when they are already paying for the public ones.
2. Entrepreneurs have no way of separating themselves. Society at large is invested in the Elementary-High School-College concept. Any training outside of that paradigm is fighting a tide and even if the grads can skip the idiocy of highschool and college, these grads will still find it difficult to compete in the job market that is invested in the old paradigm.
I also want to point out that employers are becoming more interested in a portfolio, or a sample of work done in the past, they are more interested in what you are doing then how you are doing it.
Its important to consider that education isn't just school, and that parents help their kids learn, even for kids who are publicly schooled. And that real life provides important opportunities for learning, that only grew with tools like the internet. And people learn things because they are exposed to them in real life and find them interesting/important. Often, school doesn't expose kids to things that they personally want to learn. Ironically, school might demotivate people from learning the subjects in school, because kids might not like how they are presented, and that they have to do "homework" and "classwork" in things they have no interest in.
I want to point out that private school isn't just carbon copies of public schools that are better, which is the conception of private school that many people have (although many private schools are this, due to the whole culture and state subsidies).
Schools are labour camps.