3 ms·

I agree with your "incompetent bureaucracy" analysis, except I would point out that the government is the biggest and most burdensome of all. It would be intere

I agree with your "incompetent bureaucracy" analysis, except I would point out that the government is the biggest and most burdensome of all. It would be interesting to chart the number of regulations companies have to follow or risk being dismantled as a function of time. My bet would be since 1900, the number of regulations has increased constantly and dramatically. Every new regulation is a new barrier companies have to cross before being able to exist, and thus they greatly limit innovation. Note that the government is largely responsible for our education catastrophe. The government should be removed from education, like all other areas of human life. Allow people to have choices in a free market, and the revolutionary innovations would eventually rise to the surface. But for right now, the revolutionary innovations are muffled before they even have a chance. I'm not so sure I agree with your moral/ethical analysis. People, if anything, are more moral today than 100 years ago. However I'm not really sure how to measure this and I'm open to the possibility that morals actually have declined.

muhfuhkuh 15y ago
"Note that the government is largely responsible for our education catastrophe. The government should be removed from education, like all other areas of human life. Allow people to have choices in a free market, and the revolutionary innovations would eventually rise to the surface." Yet, the "superior" education systems outside the US are also public run and managed (top 5 OECD being S. Korea, Finland, Canada, N. Zealand, and Japan). So, it isn't as if the free market has spoken on behalf of the world against the US public school system. It's a breakdown of priorities and politics in the US, not the system itself. When there are powers that vilify the teacher simply because s/he belongs to a union, that is not a fundamental breakdown of the public school system. When there are systems that act simply as babysitters and prisons to the children of unwed urban teenage mothers, that is not a breakdown of the public system. When there are politicians who decry those with PhDs and ivy educations as "elitists", media figures who scoff at scientific research by poking their head out a window and declaring "it's cold outside, there's no global warming", and a public who determines presidents based on beer-drinking compatibility rather than intellectual capacity or academic achievement, that is not a fundamental flaw of public education.

muhfuhkuh 15y ago

"Note that the government is largely responsible for our education catastrophe. The government should be removed from education, like all other areas of human life. Allow people to have choices in a free market, and the revolutionary innovations would eventually rise to the surface." Yet, the "superior" education systems outside the US are also public run and managed (top 5 OECD being S. Korea, Finland, Canada, N. Zealand, and Japan). So, it isn't as if the free market has spoken on behalf of the world against the US public school system. It's a breakdown of priorities and politics in the US, not the system itself. When there are powers that vilify the teacher simply because s/he belongs to a union, that is not a fundamental breakdown of the public school system. When there are systems that act simply as babysitters and prisons to the children of unwed urban teenage mothers, that is not a breakdown of the public system. When there are politicians who decry those with PhDs and ivy educations as "elitists", media figures who scoff at scientific research by poking their head out a window and declaring "it's cold outside, there's no global warming", and a public who determines presidents based on beer-drinking compatibility rather than intellectual capacity or academic achievement, that is not a fundamental flaw of public education.