It's enough to notice that there's near zero economic incentives for providing actual education. The market settled on an equilibrium of baseline operational knowledge + filtering through standardized testing, and then advanced operational knowledge acquired through voluntary higher education and on the job. And it continued to optimize accordingly. The only thing that makes people try to teach beyond this minimum is humanistic values, belief in importance of education. Against it works the entire economy, forcing individual teachers and schools alike to find savings, "cut out fat", make lean.
Free market is enough to explain the disaster education is becoming worldwide (because it's not just an US phenomenon; we start to see the same problems over here in Europe).
So you (hypothetically, as a developer) make six figures? Superb.
How valuable is that when your country goes down in flames because it's easy to make money out of people who believe Bill Gates is seeding Covid via 5G towers?
That's what I keep telling people around me. They're still bewildered that I don't go out of my way to "optimize" my way out of taxes, or that I'm in favor for raising the taxes for my income bracket. And it doesn't even take a civil war - as the income inequality progresses, how long will it take before your close family will start asking you (the hypothetical rich developer) for help? Will you turn them away, to enjoy your six figures in peace?
and how much help will you be able to offer, given your prior lack of optimization for this very scenario?
> Will you turn them away, to enjoy your six figures in peace?
"I gave already, it was taken out of my income before I had a chance to spend it, go away now"
Isis may have taken over parts of Iraq and Syria, but that did not mean that the oil stopped flowing
Where in the world is there a free market in education?
Teachers are overworked and underpaid, they can't afford to go far beyond what curriculum says they should. Parents demand schools prepare kids well for their adult life - which for almost all families means primarily preparing for a decent job. Thus the labor market is indirectly but strongly influencing the curriculum. Labor market demands a way to sort people, so standardized testing and pressure to choose your career at even earlier ages appears. On the other side, governments are embedded in the market reality, they need to manage their budgets and seek savings, so their prioritize, tightening the school system to provide what the market demands.
I could go on and draw some other feedback loops. But the point is that you can't disentangle schooling - or anything government - from the economic reality, and that this economic reality is sufficient in explaining the shape of education system. No conspiracy, or ill will by any rich and powerful agents needed.
If there's no slack in the system then how do you propose to expand the scope of function provided by a system running at its limitations?
> I could go on and draw some other feedback loops. But the point is that you can't disentangle schooling - or anything government - from the economic reality, and that this economic reality is sufficient in explaining the shape of education system. No conspiracy, or ill will by any rich and powerful agents needed.
I agree with this, which is why I questioned you. A free market in education would do a lot to empower educators to offer real, functioning education because they'd be able to charge what they needed and compensate their teachers appropriately.
I don't. I do think that adding slack into the system is an important step in fixing educaction. But my comment was trying to point towards the question of how come there's no slack in the system? What ate it? Answer: market pressures. Not some elites thinking a dumber populace is easier to control and wishing a weaker educational system into existence.
> A free market in education would do a lot to empower educators to offer real, functioning education because they'd be able to charge what they needed and compensate their teachers appropriately.
I'm not disagreeing completely, but I have many concerns about this view. Free market is good at optimizing for behaviors that yield immediate, short-term profit. Good education is very hard to price, with profits following the actions by many decades. I fully expect that making education governed by the market directly would make it settle on even stranger proxies in lieu of delivering proper education. On top of that, free market for commodity labor doesn't equal happy labor, but rather unhappy labor living on minimum wage.
The lack of market pressure allowed the quantity of unnecessary/unwanted services to expand as the quality decreased (because people are still forced to pay for a failing educational system, bad teachers are shielded from accountability, and anyone who wants to pay for private education must pay twice).
> Answer: market pressures.
If you don't respond to the market telling you that you cost too much and provide too little, you shouldn't be surprised when you're unable to produce what you consume on the market and become dependent on additional assistance.
> Not some elites thinking a dumber populace is easier to control and wishing a weaker educational system into existence.
Can you provide some source substantiating your denial of this historical assertion?
> Free market is good at optimizing for behaviors that yield immediate, short-term profit. Good education is very hard to price, with profits following the actions by many decades.
Free market is also good at optimizing for means of production that deliver commodities and goods over the long term. The limitation is that the owner of the capital must have a long term vision he wishes to accomplish with his capital. Coercive systems decouple the vision-seer from the capital-owner by permitting the vision-seer to realize his vision by expropriating the necessary resources from individuals who do not share that vision. This replaces the impediment of needing a coincidence of capital and vision with the perverse incentives and moral hazards associated with expropriation.
> I fully expect that making education governed by the market directly would make it settle on even stranger proxies in lieu of delivering proper education.
Only as far as the people paying for the education approved those proxy results.
> free market for commodity labor doesn't equal happy labor, but rather unhappy labor living on minimum wage.
a free market wouldn't have a minimum wage by definition.
This ignores the point? At a lower than minimum wage, you still don't have happy labour
Yeah, because then the government is telling them they are illegally unskilled to work a job.
And it's still just market pressures. Markets are just bad for people
It should always be one of the top priorities for any populace.