Numbers Guy sent me the following link. It discusses how low levels of competition in the USA Education system is damaging our country, it's people and our prospects.
I haven't finished reading it yet, but I will be when I get a moment.
What are your thoughts?
The Freeman: Competition and Free Thought
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2 comments:
Let's think about this. Mill says:
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body."
What was his evidence for this set of conclusions? Had done he done research which supported these conclusions? Did canvass the government run schools of his day and find that the graduates were all alike? Was his research limited by the fact that there weren't all that many government schools in his day? Or is this an example of some 19th century guy talking off the top of his head?
--Hiram
Is our concern today that public schools mold too much? Or not enough?
John Stuart Mill was famously and somewhat disastrously self educated. It's one of the most important things we know about him today. How do you think Mill's personal experience with education affected his attitude toward schools generally? Does it make a difference in how we understand what Mill has to say about state education, that he lived in a time when state education was in it's infancy? How does the fact that the dominant education system of Mill's day, the public schools which we would understand as private affect his thinking? Was he extrapolating, for example, the public school experience, which was very definitely intended to mold students in a certain way, to the new government schools of his time? Is that extrapolation valid in our own time where private schools play a much less significant role in education? And really where a lot of parents are concerned about a too diverse experience? One which not much molding is done at all?
--Hiram
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