School for poor kids??

Miscellaneous General
, , ,
21

Neither; it is factually correct, with regards to oligarchs existing in a political system such as democracy.

Automatically decrying things you do not fully understand or accept as “Marxist” will get you nowhere.

Even if anything on the forum mentioned is Marxist, there is no shame in understanding or reading into a philosophy that one does not agree with, otherwise you are just engaging in rhetoric without full knowledge of the rhetoric itself (punditry).

I assume that is partially why you are here (aside from brushing up on economics) ?

22

Also: I always thought autodidactism was a great option for “poor” kids.

The Internet has been the best “secondary” (might as well be primary, with what little I learned in school aside from basics) education I will probably ever have access to.

23

I can imagine that projects like the OLPC project benefit from the expansion of the education market.

Just think of all the spare computing cycles that become availiable for scientific research! That is of course, if all the OLPC of the world are preinstalled with a boinc manager or something. (There is no direct monetary benefit but there is no virtually no cost either)

Anyway, the problem is not the lack of education per se. It is the lack of knowledge to explore educational options. We just need more education salemen. That way the poor knows that there is a diverse range of education that he can acquires should he choose to.

After all, you can have the world’s biggest library but it is no uses to anybody if they don’t know about it.

24

I am also enrolled in the Venezuelan socialism of the 21st century forum, for which I also happen to have the time to read and post. It is a great source for Marxist theory and thoughts, and it actually has an English section if you are ever interested in checking it out. So I get to know both extremes of thought first hand without having to completely agree with either of them. It is funny that I am the capitalist for them, and I am the statist for you! Somehow I am able to find a few points in common every once in a while.

25

Libertarianism is not an extreme. It is a natural rational way to live. Communism, marxism, and socialism are unnatural. Which is why they always end in pain and suffering. In gulags and riots. Starvation and genocide.

26

Armand Hammer. He is a paragon. He is perhaps the most perfectly corrupt individual of the last, most corrupt century. Armand Hammer, who was a Bolshevik agent long after the Bolsheviks were dust. Armand Hammer, who bought banks so that he could blackmail congressman and senators, who boasted he kept Al Gore Senior in his wallet. Armand Hammer, admirer of the NKVD for shooting people for not keeping the trains running on time.

Where do you think he got the money to buy his banking and petroleum interests? He was a paid agent of the Bolsheviks. But of course, he used even them.

Even Al ‘A’ Gore’s mother said she wouldn’t leave Junior alone with Armand Hammer, because she knew he was the devil incarnate.

Congratulations on your scholarship.

27

What is unnatural is to be closed to some of the achievements of other ideologies.

It is also unnatural to believe in an absence of government. So, by extension, bees that are governed by their queen are also unnatural, in your opinion? Government is part of human nature. Pain and suffering are part of life. The idea of having no government but instead a bunch of competing libertarian private police or security forces frightens me to the extent that envision further starvation and genocide should those forces start fighting against each other as is the natural action from market competition.

28

It is very easy to denigrate a dead person who cannot defend himself.

What sources do you have for what you said?

Armand Hammer served as a counsellor to FDR, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter & Reagan. Al Gore Sr. introduced him as the 101th Senator of the U.S. How would these people have trusted Dr. Hammer if he had not demonstrated his goodwill? Of course he received money from the Bolsheviks, he did business with them. Instead of avoiding the existence of the USSR, he went there, worked hard and made part of his fortune, the capitalist way, in Russia. Later he reinvested his profits in Occidental, but what really turned that company around was his know-how on global business, not the amount of money he invested. Lots of people have invested far more money and got broke due to unsound business practices.

Please read your sources before making unfortunate, uninformed comments about the honorable legacy of Dr. Armand Hammer.

29

Bull hockey puck.

In a free market society, most people will be in the workforce by age 15.

30

And what is the point of having so many people in the workforce by age 15? That would increase the rate of unemployment, and it would deprive teens from a few years of extra education that would benefit them in the long run. This goes back to the previous topic of a person not having freedom during childhood but gaining it through adulthood.

I agree that marking the difference between childhood and adulthood at 15, 18 or 21 years old is arbitrary.

31

The point is that it would be possible to do so if a 15 year old wishes to move the hell out & make money, instead of being delegated to debt due to school loans & living in their parents house for another decade getting an education which will be outdated by the time he/she gets it.

How would allowing 15 year old’s to work increase unemployment? You mean the same “unemployment” where more worthy candidates for a job are chosen over other, lesser candidates (competition)?

I highly doubt an employer in their right mind is going to pick a 15 year old who read a wikipedia page on nuclear fission over someone who might be as little as a few years older or a decade older, yet has the proper credentials (in the eye of the employer) & experience (again, in the eye of the employer).

32

Right on! Technology is cheap even these days, and would be even cheaper in unrestricted market. The schools would be more efficient because the content of education would be decided on by parents, students and teachers, and not teachers unions and government.Somehow I doubt, for example, that parents would be happy to spend their money on sex education programs :slight_smile:

I’d expect the market to offer many solutions for many needs: from small community driven schools to expensive private schools with all the new bells and whistles and Harvard profs as the teachers and what not. To some extent, it’s already happening now, with religious/charity groups, charter schools and home schooling.

33

There is no such thing as a fixed number of jobs. Entrepreneurs, for example, do not take away existing jobs, they mostly even create new ones. State-managed public schooling usually beats down the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of kids so much, however, that becoming a self-reliant person on the market appears to be an oddity to them.

In that regard, a very basic and short school education that teaches the fundamentals of efficient reading, writing and arithmetics and doesn’t limit the child’s desire to learn and discover according to its own standards would be much more beneficial to a healthy mental development.

And should the child really show a lot of interest in high-tech devices that would be insanely expensive to buy for educational purposes only, there’s once again the possibility of an apprenticeship.

Education that you are not interested in doesn’t sink into your brain, you are getting increasingly bored by it and it will harm your curiosity regarding other topics as well.

What I learned by studying Austrian economics and praxeological thinking and applying it to real world events, I could sincerely memorize. It helps me understand the world. Petty “general knowledge” details from school, on the other hand, are often incoherent and subordinate. That’s why many students enter standby mode when attending school.

34

I agree. This kind of curriculum is often forced on kids by Education Ministries and its effect is to hate school and to find it cool to be unprepared.

35

How is it that people on the Plains during the settlement of the USA got an education? Well, for one thing, their education was important to their parents - the parents built the one room schools, fed and housed the teacher(s), and pushed their kids. The teacher had to satisfy the parents, or they were no longer supported. There was no TV, professional football, after school sports, or weekends at the drive in. And there was true work ethic and NO SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT.

Let’s face truth - modern education isn’t focused on education as much as on leisure. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed (and enjoy) my leisure! But football isn’t education. Neither is basketball, band, drama, cheerleading, debate, etc. They are fun, and you can learn lessons from them, but they are not education. They are advanced forms of leisure. In fact, many courses are not really education, they are training.

This is a great article, right here on mises.org (written in 1931, BTW).

I didn’t start my “education” until I started reading mises.org and the authors I found here. I had been introduced to many fields of training in school, as well as having some fun. Now I am a “trained” mechanical engineer, and am working on becoming educated.

My point is that being alive does not entitle one to extensive periods of leisure paid for by coercing money from others. What is currently called “public schools” is mostly leisure - and if you can pay to go and want to, then great. But training and education are not entitlements. A really poor parent that truly wants to train or educate their child is not entitled to do so at my expense, and could find many options in a free market (charity, loan, barter, apprenticeship) to fulfill their needs. And I argue that the training or education can be much cheaper per student than it currently is, if the services actually had to be purchased instead of coerced from the (property) tax payers.

36

I disagree. Anyway you cut it, a lab equipment (computer lab, telescope, microscope) will still be expensive because of the costs associated with producing and marketing these products. I am completely for the total privitazation of schools, but lets not get carried away. Schools will be cheaper if they are privatized, but that doesnt mean that they will be cheap . I mentioned it earlier, that I believe under privatized education, a system would emerge that would meet very basic education needs (basic math, basic writing/reading) which would be very cheap, but offer little or no technology, just paper and pencils. Then the kids that could not afford to attend a higher education would attend sorts of trade schools paid for by the company that owns them, or, enter the work force as an unskilled worker with just enough education to get by. I believe that the privatization of education will solve many of its problems, but I think it is a huge over-generalization to say that “education will be cheap” in a free market.

37

Mr. A,

If your premise is that technology will cause education to be expensive, then that hinges on the fact that technology must be very expensive already, or continuing to rise in price.

We already see that as not true in the marketplace, where technology not only becomes cheaper, but it is rapidly improving, providing technological gains which further cut costs in other more labour intensive areas.

The one thing I like to remind people about is that we really don’t know what will happen in a free market from an institutional standpoint, because when the creative energy of millions and billions of independent actors are released, I think man is going to be capable of all sorts of things, faster and better than we ever imagined he would be.

38

If man doesn’t achieve this, then machines would, if you hold any stock into the Singularity theory.

It would be a historical irony if machines were the ones who truly understood the advantages of the free-market, even if from a purely computational & mathematical view point (decentralization being more efficient, etc.)

39

In a free market there would be one important difference with todays system…people would have to be responsible. These really poor kids on scholarships would actually have to succeed at their studies in order to stay in school. If they did not do well they would lose their free schooling and have to make other arrangements or not go to school at all.

40

I don’t understand why people think that a decentralized system would produce results that are so radically different from the ones we see in our current society. People have become accustomed to existing institutions, and would likely be most comfortable with a system that is relatively similar to the one we have now. People would still want their kids to go to school (probably all the way through college, just like they do now), and most kids would probably get an education much like the one they do now. I see no reason to believe that a market for education would fail to provide the kind of education that parents want for their children, or would force children out into the work force before a socially acceptable time in their lives. Markets arrange themselves in response to consumer preferences, and if people didn’t want their kids working by age 15, then the kids probably wouldn’t be working by age 15. The primary virtue of decentralization would be that it would allow people to opt out of solutions deemed optimal by others, forcing competition between schools and producing a plurality of approaches to education (see on this my article for FEE’s In Brief “In Praise of Educational Pluralism”).