It is amazing what competition does for consumers. Those entire businesses scramble to offer us good products at low prices. The power to say "no" to one business and "yes" to another one is awesome.
Unfortunately we can't apply the idea competition to current public schools.
Teacher Unions and bureaucrats are against it. They want to dictate where our kids go to school. The idea of public school as a system of social justice where everyone is harmonized in utopia and where equal opportunities are transferred to every child is actually a big lie that leaves heavy emotional consequences on people's feelings. We're all consumers. We all demand after certain products. If we flow into two stores where retailers offer us Nokia and Ericsson cell phones we analyze the information and let retailers compete and struggle for our attention. The one who offers sound products after low prices the one will win. We're the one who decide which cell-phone we will buy. So do we also demand after good and efficient education for our children? But according to current fiasco of public education we're not so free to choose. If we're not satisfied with courses, lectures and topics our children receive we don't have a choice to send out children into alternative school where we could get better education and better improvement of knowledge our children gain.
However teacher unions and bureaucrats dislike competition in education. Then they are having a monopoly. Subsequently they offer shoddy products at very high prices and the costs are booming as well. It's disgraceful to talk about cost-free education because there's no such thing as free lunch as well as there's no such thing as cost-free education. Taxpayers are paying a big fraction of their incomes to finance government-supported schools. They finance governmental service. They don't finance their children. After each € that is cash-out of their income and transferred to education budget, parents must divide paid euros into thousands of fractions and then they're able to see how little their child gets from their fractional income transfer to the government. There's no such thing as universally cost-free education. You have to pay it either through taxes or directly to educational institution. In fact we all want our money contributed to education to be spent efficiently. And what do we get for this? Public schools with dismal and relatively poor performance is what makes our children uncompetitive with the most productive individuals in countries such as South Korea where the rate of educational enrollment on all levels is the highest in the world and where 65% of all schools are placed in private sector.
Public schools are government monopolies. They are virtual monopolies of the state. They are run pretty much like Cuban or North Korean schools. Public system education operates like planned economy in which everyone's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It is surprise to see how our school system doesn't improve despite an enormous amount of taxpayers' money that is spent in public education. When a government monopoly limits competition, we can't know what ideas would bloom if competition were allowed.
Friedrich August von Hayek, Nobel-Prize winning economist wrote: "Competition is valuable only because and so far as its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which everyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at."
This means that no human being can imagine what improvements a competitive market will bring.
I'll try anyway. I bet we'd see cheap and efficient virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, music schools and sports schools and who knows what?
Every economics textbook tells you that monopolies are bad because they charge high prices and offer shoddy products. It is government who gives monopolies so why do we entrust something as valuable as children to government monopolies. If parents were not taxed to pay for lousy government schools, more might teach their kids at home.
A vast majority of teachers teaching in public schools have never worked in private sector so many of them don't know how to learn kids the hottest productive and global issues and topics in order to equip children for business, growth, challenge and progress. The outcomes of public schools are functionally illiterate children. That's because bureaucrats delegate how schools must teach children. And they teach them unproductively. They teach them by force and nearly everybody finds schools disgusting. Instead of pouring more money into the failed government monopoly let us free parents to control their own education money. Competition is that small but mighty seed of progress. It is a powerful wheel which bureaucrats can't resist on the long-run. Competition is the solution to save our school from governmentally and bureaucratically wasteful tyranny.
There's no need to prolong public schools. The simplest and most efficient plan is to privatize them completely and let them grow in order to impose some heavily needed innovations and productive reforms. Public education is a failure that needs to be removed by being radically privatized. Planned economy and monopolies have caused a lot of harm, burden and waste. Let's not allow the same to be done with children.
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