SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Roots of Public Education Failure

Things have been a little quiet around here lately, and so I thought I would try to shake things up by writing something controversial. Today, I want to talk about how and why public education is failing so many students, despite the many caring and hard-working educators who work in it. My hypothesis is that it's the fault of the centrally-planned nature of public education.

This long-but-fascinating article explores the theories of a Nobel-prize-winning economist most people have never heard of - F. A. Hayek - who argued that central planners' interventions lead towards totalitarianism. If you don't have time to read the whole article, be sure to at least read "The Pretence of Knowledge", "The Synoptic Delusion", and "The Abstract Order". Here's an excerpt:

"Intellectuals were under a dangerous self-delusion that mastery of our social and economic life lay in their grasp. Deeply-troubled by what he saw, Hayek set out to expose the rational-sounding claims of the salivating planners for what they were, the oldest scam in marketing: bait and switch. Planners promised a world in which the public's needs and desires would be satisfied more efficiently and with less waste and human misery than ever before. The reality, Hayek knew, would be that people's lives would be planned to satisfy the needs and desires of the planners, and that ultimately, if left unchecked, the economic waste and the loss of economic freedom would be devastating."

I suggest that the more education systems are centralized, the more unresponsive, wasteful, and ineffective they become.