Are you seriously proposing we go back to pre-public schooling society - you know, the one where the vast major of the population was completely uneducated since education was strictly reserved for the wealthy?

Laissez-faire brings out some admirable qualities in people, but it is also an extremely unequal system with many detrimental effects on society (including the rich). There's a historical reason why we invented public schools, public libraries, public parks, etc.

I find it difficult to understand how someone with an awareness of history can support a completely laissez-faire society where the default answer to everything is "let the market figure it out". This is not a new idea, and the present state of the world only exists because we had to suffer through centuries of unbridled capitalism and classism.

Now that we have things like affluence, the 'primed pump' of an educated society, the NEED for an educated society, and finally, the Internet, I don't see why we need nearly the government involvement in education that we did 50-100 years ago.

I am not convinced we DO have a sufficiently educated society. I see serious candidates for public office who are rejecting science (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/a-fundamental-r...). I think democracy itself requires an educated populace, and that an egalitarian society requires at least a basic level of equality of opportunity for all.

I think the case can be made more easily for government involvement in education than in almost any other area of life. Purely because in a certain small % of cases, parents simply won't take any steps to see their children educated. That isn't a choice the child is making. Whether that means that the government should also run the schools themselves is of course a separate question.

Some of the world's best school systems are highly decentralised and some are highly centralised.

You forget there are a lot of people who don't have the things you mention.

> "The solution to this problem is clear . . ."

It's not clear that this would solve the problem. Particularly, instead of only being able to send their children to bad schools, the poorest would instead perhaps not be able to send their children to school at all.

<sarcasm> That's right, poor people shouldn't have an education! </sarcasm>

That's what you are advocating with "Government shouldn't be involved in education." Is that really what you mean?

Why would it be in the interest of private schools to hoard their products from me? I only make $18000 (about half the median wage) and food companies don't price me out of the market. Car companies don't either. Given that nearly every human being is in demand of an affordable education it makes no sense for companies to not accept low income students. The only reason private schools are expensive now is because the government monopoly makes it imposible for them to compete on the low income section of the market.

your analogy is apt: in your opinion, a poor person will never be able to afford a Ferrari or a Porsche, so they shouldn't be able to afford top-class education either. Ferrari will never be interested in "competing for the low income section of the market"; they'll happily keep making exclusive and expensive cars, reserved to top dogs, popes and the like.

The "voucher" sort of scheme will inevitably result in the State giving everyone enough money to buy a Nissan Micra, with rich parents "topping-up" to get a Mercedes, Porsche or Ferrari. Which is not much different from what you get now, just a bit worse.

One major problem with vouchers is that they are susceptible to fraud. Current voucher and charter schools are not posting greater successes than public schools. Government services are at risk for innefficiency due to non-incentives, but government-funded private services are at similar risk due to perverse incentives.

For example, higher education IS currently on a loan-integrated voucher system, and it is common knowledge that private colleges are a money pit these days.

Because for at least some, a large part of what they sell is social exclusivity. Those dirty little brown (or Jewish, or Irish, or Catholic, or Italian, or German, or in Fremont, CA, white trash ...) children will be kept away from your precious little gems.

Since school, education, economic potential, etc., are so tightly tied to social status, this is hardly surprising. It's also present in other goods: I'm sure you can think of luxury cars, foods, clothes, clubs, etc., whose appeal and cache is largely their exclusivity and the fact that the great unwashed masses can't access them. No, this doesn't apply to all goods, but for a class of them, yes. (That this is also tied to price discrimination behavior on the part of producers also has something to do with this).

What is the term used for the highest ranked colleges in the US? Oh yeah: "highly selective".

>> Food companies don't price me out of the market. Car companies don't either.

Do you think that you get good nutritious food by paying bottom dollar? You think those nitrates and high fructose sugar and other junk are really good for your health? You think that a low cost diet that lacks "expensive" fruits and vegetables has no impact on your health?

The problem with a cheaper second tier education is that it perpetuates the affordability problem from generation to generation. The poor parents who could not afford to send their kid to the rich school will have a son or daughter with a second tier education who will only be qualified for low paying second tier jobs. This system creates a stratified society with low mobility and represents a waste of human potential -- the brilliant kid whose parents couldn't give him a first rate education cannot reach his full potential, while the lazy dumb kid with rich parents takes up a spot in a class in which he simply does not deserve to be (from an academic perspective).

Thinking that the market is a solution to everything is a popular fallacy nowadays. There are places where the market does not produce good outcomes -- education is one of them. You cannot trade human intelligence and aptitude. You cannot have different high standards for different prices -- there are no low tier high standards and top tier high standards. People who are motivated by greed do not make good educators.

There is only so high in quality a product can get. How much better is a $1,000,000 car vs a $1,000 car? They both get you from A to B. Sure one might be a little faster but in terms of function they both perform at roughly the same base. One is for smart consumers and one is for rich people to show off.

Keeping the government monopoly in place only serves the interests of the employees and unions of the public schools and no one else. Certainly not the students.

"Thinking that the market is a solution to everything is a popular fallacy nowadays."

Yeah because it works.

Wow, the discussion here is really going down the tubes into the land of nonsense.

>> How much better is a $1,000,000 car vs a $1,000 car? They both get you from A to B. in terms of function they both perform at roughly the same base

$1,000 gets me a beat up car from the 1980s that barely works, breaks down all the time and surrounds me in noxious fumes. $2,250,000 gets me a Bugatti Veyron that has a top speed of 250 mph and does 0-60 in under 3 seconds. No difference there at all -- they're quite comparable!

If government is not involved in education "at all", then you have the situation that people pay $$ for schools and then have no say in how the money is spent. This would not go down well...

I suppose the Free Market would make sure that their 'customers' had input into how tuition money is spent. After all, if the government isn't involved and you're free (Free Market, remember) to move your student, then the school needs to cater to your expectations or lose tuition money.

Yeah so it turns out that the education consumer doesn't tend to spend the education dollar on quality education. Consider the current mess in privately-paid higher education.

Education is the vegetables on the dinner plate of life. I is a complicated long term investment to make good choices, but those choices have huge externalities. Parents make choices that affect their children (that is an externality) and those children grow up to affect society (another externality)

Don't forget that the for-profit colleges get 99% of their income from government financial aid. They don't have to serve their customers well; they just have to do the minimum amount of work to get the financial aid money.