Many proponents of public education claim that society is investing in knowledge. Even if we presuppose that the public schools teach only knowledge, this is still economically unsound reasoning. The input for public education is a scarce resource - tax money. The output of public education is knowledge, which is a nonscarce resource.

Material resources cannot be duplicated indefinitely as knowledge can. Freedom of communication (speech, press, etc.) ensures the rapid spread of knowledge at a far lesser cost of scarce resources to society.

The question is:

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?
What justifies not investing scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?

Taxes are always duplicated indefinitely. As long as there are people there is a tax base. While private enterprise can indeed fill the role that public education currently fills, until you can show a good example where it has been effective and meets america's societal needs you won't find much support whatsoever. Just more talk that goes nowhere. That's the biggest problem for libertarians--what examples do you have besides quotes from Murray Rothbard or Friedman.
I'm sure sooner or later someone would eventually link to the Gatto web site for the black helicopter version of the evils of public education. So what?

So, Why shouldn't America invest in public education? Why is trying to provide an decent education to Americans not a good idea? Are we not better off with educated citizens?
Sure some public schools are miserable but many are excellent--I went to public school in Conneticut and would wager they are some of the best anywhere. What about children who are at the poverty level--leave them behind and tough luck for them?
Instead of the inevitable thread that just allows some people to constantly refer to the words of bookworms who rarely ever did anything but comment of the deeds of others, How about an example of how the Libertarian philosophy has been put into actual successful use in the fields of education and how it has benefited the community?

Just some thoughts.

Yeah buddy. I feel the direction your going, and I agree, that one day in the future, we'll probably have a variety of options for education, and perhaps we won't publicly operate, or even fund, education.

A few reasons we don't just cut taxes and let people spend their own money on education as they see fit:

First: It won't work. We have poor people in this country who don't pay taxes, and don't have any extra income. Yes, you can say they pay embedded taxes in the goods they buy, and perhaps a reduction in taxes would ameliorate that some, but the amount would not pay for a private education in this country. Then we have a case of poor families having uneducated children who, with almost certainty, are going to wind up poor themselves.

Second: An educated populace is a common good. While the benefits of an individuals education largely accrue to the individual himself, there are external benefits as well. Certainly a community with good schools is a more attractive place to live, as evidenced by property values: in most places, those values are rightly taxed to pay for education (though, i would agree the building values should not be taxed).

Third: Most importantly, it's not what people want. Despite any evidence to the contrary, this is still a democratic country, and people continue to vote for public education.

I would expect to see the charter school and school choice movement expand over the next few years. I have no problem supporting a voucher system either, and expect a few cities, trying to attract or retain the tax paying yuppie couples with small children, will enact or expand them.

I offer a quote from David Brin's 2002 speech at the LP National Convention:
"Universal education in state schools helped uplift prior generations out of illiterate class systems -- we admit it!

"Only now our higher standards and needs and wants have far outstripped the ability of those old-fashioned public schools to deliver. Yes, we have these higher standards because public education helped get us this high. We admit the irony! Nevertheless, it's obvious that the old model of public education is now dragging at the ankles of our rising ambitions. It won't get us any higher! Lack of choice is preventing further progress by stifling educational innovations that might arise out of competition. speech

I agree that one day we might not need public or even free education anymore. But that day is a pretty long ways away.

This is probably the biggest roadblock in the education system. There are poor and impovershed people in this country that don't have access to education, public or private. This will hinder us the most in the long run. In order to have such a reformed and improved education system requires that everyone be allowed access. Which won't happen because there will always be poverty and for us to have this "utopia" educational system requires everyone to have $$$, which unless Bill Gates is going to start giving handouts, is not going to happen.

Thats an interesting question I have never really thought of before. The idea that knowledge is unbounded, and therefore "cheap" in comparision seems somewhat incorrect, however. The US alone is evidence of this, gathering most of its living off brainpower (or expertise) in skill based industries.

There are two factors I think you are neglecting that make knowledge valuable, and therefore education a wise investment.

The first one deals with time. I do believe anyone who spends enough time studying and training, could potential learn enough to do anything. However, they don't have enough time to learn EVERYTHING, which means that knowledge ties its scarcity to time. Time is limited. Because time is limited, knowledge is also limited. One person must rely on others for knowledge, because they cannot possible learn it all. Therefore, knowledge still retains value because only so many people would have invested the time to acquire it.

So I believe that knowledge is scarce. You can only know so much in your life time. Instead of thinking of knowledge as the resource, imagine time as the resource that you trade for knowledge.

The second one ties into the first one a bit, but remains distinct. Barriers are another thing that imbues knowledge with value. You need teachers, books, labs, experience and time in order to gain knowledge. There are certain things that prevent people from entering fields because of these requirements, putting these skills at a premium.

You can think of this approach as gold guarded by a dragon. Sure, there might be a whole lot of gold, but you have to go to extreme means in order to obtain it. Because extreme means are required, gold from the dragons horde is valuable because its so hard to get. Knowledge is similar in all fields, requiring "dragons" of college, teachers, books etc.

So, knowledge is hard to obtain and scarce. This makes it a valuable commodity that the US should keep investing in.

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?

Well, on the one hand, BecomingHuman has already illustrated why knowledge isn't quite the non-scarce resource you seem to assume it is.

Libertarianism is a great philosophy when it comes to considering the rights and needs of individuals as individuals - like for example in taxation. It's my money, so why should anyone get to take any of it from me, even if a majority of them vote to do it?

Libertarianism is dreadful, however, at considering social networks and society as a whole, and there is a definite social compact here.

Probably the last generation of "Renaissance Men" who could be expert in pretty much every field they expressed an interest in happened, well, during the Renaissance. Since then, ever-expanding knowledge bases mean that being an expert in one field of study - say, electrical engineering - doesn't give you any understanding at all of another field of study - say, law enforcement, water treatment, roadbuilding, and so on.

Our spark-loving friend NEEDS other people to be able to do that for him. Now, in the current education system, most of the specialist training that makes someone into a civil engineer, a chief of police, or a microbiologist is paid for by the people studying those things. However, they have to be able o read, write and count, and understand some of the basics of logic and science, before they can even consider such things as a career.

And we aren't even necessarily talking about special levels of expertise in these other areas. Our electrical engineer wouldn't even necessary know how to change a tap washer or fill a pothole, let alone building a city-wide drainage and freshwater system or a state or nation-wide road and rail network. The roadcrews and plumbers also have to be able to read, write and count, otherwise they may fit the wrong washers, or put poisons in the water suopply because they opened the wrong tin, or whatever. Even the training they get on the job, to know how to dig a hole or fill it, or whatever, assumes a certain level of common educational attainment.

So far, most of the things I've talked about could theoretically be market funded, either by the potential students, their families, by charities, or by the companies who need people with such skills. Let's consider these in turn.

School students don't get paid, so if their basic education, current funded by the state, were funded by themselves, they would have to run up debts to do it. As it is, university students run up tens of thousands in debt for three or four years of study. How much might it cost for eleven or twelve years of education to get to high school equivalency entirely in the private sector? It isn't relevant to look at what state spending is here except as a baseline, since were thinking of a theoretically private sector here, and the one thing we know about private sector education today is that it costs more than the state sector - either because it spends more on resources or because it takes a cut as profits, or both. Either way, the chances are the costs of an entirely private education sector would be somewhat larger than they are in the public (tax-funded) sector, perhaps significantly so.

Leaving high school with such large debts would lead most kids to want to get into the highest-paying professions (and who could blame them?). Who, then, would join road gangs? The market would be grossly distorted away from necessary, but low-paying, jobs.

One thing we know about markets is that they correct themselves, eventually, but the long fix could take generations to this scenario (during which time you have a lot of lawyers and dentists but nobody to take out the trash), and the quick fix would be large-scale immigration, which has it's own problems. And, most of the people who would be migrating would have been educated, however scantly, by domestic taxpayers of other countries. Would Mexico or Somalia or wherever not then have a case to call on the US government to pay them back for the education of the people running most to the essential services in the USA?

Parent-funded school education would have these burdens, with the additional ossification of social mobility - the kids from the wealthiest families would get the best educations, as they already do, and would be locked out of downward social movement. The middle classes would be locked out of upward mobility, but also locked out of downward moves, as they could just about afford decent schooling. The bottom end can barely manage now, with both parents working (where there ARE two parents). What makes you think they'd be able to afford to pay for any type of schools?

Charity-funded education is what most of the third world has relied on until recently, and what much of it still does. So that would be a real step forward for America, eh? OK, that's a sly dig, and isn't strcitly fair on most Third World schools, who do at least give basic educations to the kids they can reach (who aren't having to work their farms to keep the family going).

But, let's not forget that much of the Islamic fundamentalism that is causing so much trouble in the world today is caused by Muslim kids getting nothing but indoctrination from madrassas. What would stop them springing up in the USA in your libertarian paradise? More pertinently, what would stop fundamentalist Christians, already actively trying to influence state-funded education, from setting up an agressively Christian equilvalent to these Islamic brainwashing centres?

There may not be much pure libertarian logic to say such things are a bad idea, but one thing we know is that when you try to run a society according to pure logic it tends to go badly wrong (Marxism works on paper).

And corporate funding of education? Current business laws obliges business not to do anything that doesn't pay on the bottom line somewhere. A business is not going to invest in the education of someone from age five through to sixteen or eighteen, and then allow that person to choose to go off and work somewhere else. Business funded university courses typically require the student to contract to work for them for a minimum period afterwards. And university degrees usually last only four years. How long would someone have to work in one place to pay back ten or twelve years of education?

And besides, would you want to be held to the career choice you made when you started formal education?

Going back to the other half of your debate question, however... I think this thread has already indicated that knowledge is not the plentiful and easy-to-come-by non-scarce resource you imagine it to be.

But the other half of your question also has a begged question. What makes you think taxation is such a scarce resource?

On the one hand, the US Department of Defense certainly doesn't seem to be considered a waste of public money, yet it also provides a (for the most part invisible) foundation for society as a whole. The "market benefits" of a libertarian free-for-all would likely apply just as much to defense as to education, so why aren't you railing against the ever-increasing demands of the military for hard-earned taxpayers money, and not the comparatively stable requirements of the education sector? In tems of rate of increase, if not (yet) overall share, military spending is far more of a worry to taxophobes, surely?

On the other, US state and federal taxes, taken together, are still rather less than most of your direct competitor nations. Maybe the answer to the "problem" of education is to double taxes across the board and spend all the extra money making sure No Child gets Left Behind. (Hey - that could be a good name for it. What do you think?)

On balance, then, the justification for the investment of "scarce resources" in the "nonscarce recource of knowledge" is that none of the other easily imaginable resources would likely work as well, and that the question makes false assumptions anyway.

I don't agree with either idea. Tax money is not scarce, it is plentiful, and gets spent as tho it grows on trees. Perhaps if it was scarce, we could get a better payback for our investment?
Knowledge is scarce. Our schools are not teaching knowledge, or thinking, unless it is directly related to the desired end result. Our public schools are mass producing employees for business, and that is not a bad thing. At one time, when labor needed no education, just the ability to learn a few simple things to work in the factories, we had very little public education. It was only when factories became almost completely mechanized that labor removed the children and, later on, women from the work force. Big business needed less workers, but of a higher skill level. Public schools came into being, with the idea that they would provide the education needed to make us all into good workers.
Once we realize that, it is up to us individually to try and get more out of the process than it is designed to give us.
I support taxes for education, but wish that education was what we get, instead of mostly just training designed to make us employable.

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?

The framework of this question itself requires some supporting evidence. It contains the explicit assumption that knowledge is non-scarce. I could argue strongly that it is among the scarcest of resources, particularly in the job market to which this question directly applies. When it comes to creating value for yourself...time everyone has, knowledge only a few people do. Could I be a construction worker with no training? No. Why? I don't know how. Ditto for said construction workers moving into the IT sector. In the job market, knowledge is power. Have enough of it, you can command whatever wage you desire. Have none of it, and you are essentially useless, relegated to only those jobs that those who have knowledge have no desire to perform. Given this....explicitly stating that knowledge is a nonscarce resource requires some supporting evidence, which is completely lacking here (hmmmm...thereby demonstrating my point?)

Trying not to derail here, but there's a bill out there, sponsored by one of Congress's most Conservative members, and aguably the only Socialist, that would give tax benefits to Employee Stock Ownership Programs.

One of the arguments being, that in today's hyperspecialized knowledge industries, workers require a lot of very specialized knowledge, that may not be useful in other companies or other industries. Since, by definition, they must own the human capital, it makes economic and moral sense to allow them some say in the ownership of the physical capital.

I tend to think that education should be funded and run at the lowest levels possible, and would support the Federal government being removed from primary education at least, and perhaps all education.

Common knowledge is non-scarce, but as a proportion of all the potential knowledge, it is infintesimal.

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?

Adding to what Hobbes already wrote, the premise that knowledge is a "resource" in the same sense that coal is a resource is false. The notion that knowledge is unlimited in any sense is also a flawed proposition. The premise presupposes the notion of a "grab bag theory of knowledge". Specifically, knowledge exists in some a priori sense: it is merely a matter of harvesting this "knowledge" from some ethereal database in the sky.

To be blunt: knowledge is not a resource. It is not harvested. It is generated.

The term "knowledge" is an abstraction. It is a category we use to describe highly organized information -- information organized in a way that is at least theoretically assimilable by the human brain.

Knowledge is hierarchical. Knowledge depends upon other knowledge. Knowledge also involves a tangled hierarchy, that is, dependent knowledge may "re-inform" the more fundamental knowledge upon which the dependent knowledge was originally based.

Knowledge is not "free". It costs both time and energy. One must expend energy to both organize information and to communicate this information. I could go on...but I think that's enough.

Knowledge is not scarce, though. Let us examine the definition of "scarcity" as an economic term:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity





Knowledge is information. It can be copied at almost no cost at all when there is freedom of communication. Knowledge is copied by speech (communiation) and the freer speech is, the less scarce knowledge is. Complete freedom of speech, which America approaches, makes knowledge not scarce at all.

Logophage has argued that knowledge is not harvested, but generated. If this is so, then the generator of knowledge is not the State - it is the minds of the people. This further invalidates public education.

This is a patently ridiculous statement.

Public education serves to provide you with a baseline of knowledge so that you may in turn use that knowledge and apply it to other situations. If you know absolutely nothing of physics, how are you supposed to come through with a breathrough in chaos theory for example?

Your education not only teaches you facts and figures but how to think in the first place, how to anlayze problems, how to apply other things you know to diverse subjects.

Your premise is that we could simply learn everything we needed to know from books and the internet or something, the state doesn't need to be involved. The kind of society that would create is one where the upper classes were educated because those resources were available to them and the lower classes were not. In fact it is a society much like the one we had in centuries past.

Furthermore, your premise assumes that children would of their own free will just sit quietly in their homes and soak in all this knowledge. Or perhaps you are suggesting that every parent should homeschool their children. Both statements are completely unrealistic and divorced from reality.

The reason that the state provides public education is because it is for the common good of our society. We do not benefit by having people who are illiterate or uneducated. We do benefit by building a large base of intellectual capital that can continue to lead and innovate in industry.

Knowledge is much more than mere information. Consider the owner of a set of encylopedia's. The owner of this set has all this information at his fingertips...but does that make him/her any more knowledgeable? No. There is the process of assimilating that information (the generation that Logopage) referred to, usually in relation to other information (which is how the brain assimilates everything). It is putting things in this relation...speeding and enhancing the generation process...that education provides. Ergo...one should learn more faster with education. If this is not the case, then, by all means, that education should be avoided as it not providing any value. But, if it is, then the value of this education is very high, as it is providing more knowledge faster, and, as I stated previously, knowledge is power.

I feel you have skipped basically the meat of what I was saying. The way I was taught scarcity in economics, it was referred to the simple concept of unlimited demand chasing limited resources.
Economics for Dummies

I think a key miscommunication we're having is over what exactly knowledge is. I do not believe knowledge is information. On a simple level ,would we call someone who lives at the library "Knowledgable" because he has access to many books? No, though the books do contain information, the fact that a person has access to information does not make them Knowledgable. Knowledge is, seemingly, information retained independent of other sources. A more accurate definition might look like:
[URL=http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=knowledge]Dictionary
[/URL]

To make this clear, let me tie what I believe knowledge to be into something more physical. A bike requires metal as its resource. Metal is scarce, and because there is only so much metal, there are only so many bikes one can make with that metal.

Now lets take knowledge. We need to study things like physics, chemistry or dancing in order to know how to do those things. We can't just know them, we must study them. In order for one to study, they require a resource, time. By sacrificing time, they can gain knowledge. But time is scarce, we only have so much of it. And because theres only so much time, theres only so much we can know.

Knowledge, I believe, is just like a bike. It requires a resource to create, and those limited resources lead to limited products.

Knowledge is information. It can be copied at almost no cost at all when there is freedom of communication. Knowledge is copied by speech (communiation) and the freer speech is, the less scarce knowledge is. Complete freedom of speech, which America approaches, makes knowledge not scarce at all.

Let me tackle this simplistic view.

Information does not equate to knowledge. Information is raw; knowledge is cooked. Knowledge is processed information.

Information needs to be stored. This has a cost -- storage is never free. For example, information use to be stored on paper/hide in the form of scroles, and these scroles were kept in libraries. None of this was free, nor cheap.

Then you had some pretty famous processors of knowledge (Aristotle, Plato -- those other smart guys). Learning from these folks cost something, and just maintaining their bodies cost something.

So you see, information is never free. The processors of this information today consist of humans and computers, often working together. Humans are not cheap, especially economic types and college professors up there in salary. Computers are not cheap, not the ones capable of storing petabytes of information. Nor is network infrastructure cheap on the current global scale.

And nothing in this is free. Therefore, it isn't abundant in an unlimited way: the costs of storage and processing restrict the supply to a finite amount. The damand for ever more storage and processing capabilities, along with network bandwidth, never goes away.

Even arguing that speech is free is false. The speaker needs to be maintained through food, clothing, housing, transportation, and -- EDUCATION.

The government was good enough to educate me through grade and high school. The state was good enough to supplement my college. That's my state-sponsored education. From there, I taught myself music through a few formal classes, a lot of practice, and supplemental lessons on tape and DVD. This was from gaining the ability to teach myself -- something that could not happen without the technologies and human resources to support such a quest.

Oh, by the way, I learned about big computers and networks on the job and through significantly expensive technical training sessions.

None of this was, nor should it be, free of cost. Education is a big part of our economy, with growth in the online college sector being very strong. But first people need to learn to read/write/calculate/use computers/communicate and a bunch of other things.

Depending only on word-of-mouth for information, knowledge and eventually wisdom (very, very expensive) is the most inefficient way of doing this. We would still be in the Stone Age without writing. And from writing, we evolved to what we have today.

Ergo, public education is absolutely worthy of government investment and necessary in today's world.

To address the topic at hand, schools do not turn taxes into knowledge, they turn taxes into educated individuals. Educated individuals are a scarce resource.

To address other points made:

christopher wanted an example of a charter school achieving better results. See this article.

Regarding private schools and the focus on the "bottom-line": When you go to a hairstylist, are you concerned that they will give you a poor haircut, at an expensive price, because they are only concerned about the bottom line? No, because you know that they way they attract and keep customers is to provide a good service at a reasonable price. This is EXACTLY how private education works.

On private schools, school choice, and the problem of equality of education: We already have this problem, because wealthy people live in wealthy school districts, and poor people live in poor school districts. You can choose your school based on where you live, if you can afford it.

For example, where I grew up, in the eastern Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, most people who could send their kids to private schools did so, because the public schools were not very good. Inside DC, this was even more so... the public schools were horrible. On the other side of the city, in Virgina, and the northern MD suburbs, the public schools were huge, well-funded, and all-around pretty good. In order for me to get a good edcuation, because of where we could afford to live, my mother had to sacrifice her savings to send us kids to private schools. I suppose one could argue she could have spent the money on a higher-priced house in VA and sent us to good public schools. But you see, a good education cost money either way.

So I don't think public school education, as it is currently realized, ensures equitable education at all. At least under a state-wide voucher program, all students, and therefore all schools, would have a baseline of funding, and parents could choose the school that provides the best

As for my private school experience, the first was school set up to provide a Montessori education to those who could not normally afford it, and the second was a very-expensive Catholic prep school (on a need-based scholarship). So I've seen both sides of the private school coin.

To those who worry about religious education, let me tell you, we made great sport of tearing apart the inconsitencies of Catholic teaching, something that was encouraged by our teachers as the proper way to understand one's faith. The one teacher who spent the whole semester preaching about pro-life instead of teaching us the New Testament was out of a job. And given that I am pretty much agnostic now, they did a bad job of "indoctrinating" me. Are all religious schools this open? Probably not, but I offer it is a counter-point to those who think ALL religious schools seek to proselytize and indoctrinate their students.

Fallacy: I said "knowledge is information" and you attack the claim "information is knowledge."



People can store information in their brains, which doesn't cost anything.



People can learn through hearing other people's speech, which also costs nothing.




Humans are not property.



You speak of speakers as if they are tools. This again is a slave-driver attitude.

We are talking about the action of speech here, which requires very little energy.



Reality check - public education is a relatively recent development (i.e. 19th century.) State schools are not necessary to maintian writing systems by any stretch of the imagination. The roman writing system (i.e. the one we are using right now) has survived even through ages of anti-intellectual despotism.



Again, human beings are not resources.

Money is not a scarce resource. Money is made of paper, which grows on trees, and can be easily harvested and printed. The paper holds value only because of the economy and government which back it. An educated population leads to a prosperous and competitive economy, which instills value into that paper money.

So you are claiming that A = B but that B =! A? Strange.



You're ignoring the cost of living.



Ignoring the cost of living and the limited capacity of the brain. That's why writing was invented -- to remember things.



Oh yes we are, in an employee-employer situation. Under the military, more so.



You disregard my argument. What's a "slave-driver," and what does it have to do with this argument?



The action of speech could very well be worthless drivel without knowledge and wisdom. Besides, once again the cost of living is ignored.



So what? This has nothing to do with my conclusion. This is the 21st century, and we have an Internet to maintain. Plus some secret networks. But thanks for acknowledging the importance of writing



Then why does economics discuss the supply/demand of labor? The human resources of a corporation? Why do companies recruit human beings? Why does the military recruit?

What if they threw a war and nobody showed up? What if the entire nation went on strike?

Human beings are most definitely resources. Nothing would ever get done without human beings -- if we contain this argument into the realm of economics instead of jumping all over the place. The argument that information can be fully contained in the human brain and communicated efficiently enough through human speech acknowledges the observation that human beings are indeed resources -- thanks again

On the contrary... you can't just go printing money to get more of it... doing so devalues the currency. Money functions as a store of work, but the conversion rate is not constant... a man-hour today equals a lot more dollars than it did twenty years ago. Pumping too much free cash into the system decreases the value of the dollar. Even a prosperous economy can be brought down by a monetary crisis.

The federal government recognizes this, and (although it can be argued how well they do so), they seek to control the amount of money in the system in order to protect its value while still allowing for growth in the economy.


As for freedom of speech... if nothing else, there is an opportunity cost in jabbering about an issue instead of accomplishing some other productive task.

Understood, but money itself is made of paper. The only real value to it is based on the strength of the economy and solvency of the government which backs it. IMO, money is to paper what knowledge is to information. One cannot draw any reasonable parallel between the value of a knowledgeable population (which is beyond price) and the value of the information itself (almost free). It's like assessing the value of a work of art based solely on the cost of the paint.

I'll argue this one as well. At present, we have not mastered the reproduction of material resources, but we do know that matter is neither created nor destroyed. We also know that energy and matter can transform one into the other:

E=MC squared

We are also researching how nanites could manufacture materials and whole products in solutions of basic atoms and molecules. The knowledge we have is enough to let our imaginations conceive of these things, but we need more information.

The information we need isn't something that we can just pluck out of the air with no cost. The information has not been discovered as yet. A smart nation invests in the discovery of new information and the development of knowledge in its general population.

We did a lot of this during the Cold War and the space race. The economic benefits go beyond Velcro and the world's largest non-stick frying pan. We also led the world in computer science and development, creating what eventually became the Internet and computers powerful enough to beat grand master chess champions. Unfortunately, we also created Microsoft, but that's a whole different matter. I better not say too much on this -- running XP on this machine, and it might get ticked.

Rather than dismantling public eduction, our nation would be very smart to shore it up and expand it into the bachelor level, possibly master and doctorate as well. The smarter our nation's population is, the stronger the nation is -- both economically and physically (military).

Mrs. P, your analogy with art is very good. Let me add that money is now mostly bits and bytes in the computer electronic landscape. Paper money isn't exchanged as much as before, and eventually it might go away completely. I might circulate maybe $40 paper/coin during the typical week, but a lot more of this moves electronically.

So how much is a bit worth? One isn't worth very much, but head into the billions upon billions of bits traveling at light speeds around the world every second of every day, and we are talking real money. Money is simply information, but it has abstract value connected to real things and people -- as you have elegantly pointed out.

In any case, if public education is a waste, then it is so because we have let it deteriorate. We have been neglectful. I don't agree that it is by economic necessity a waste. The arguments don't hold up.

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?
A very loaded question but I suppose that was only to get responses. Well this is my opinion. Money as you all have pointed out has 'limits' but as recent events have shown us the government has the ability to spend money it doesn't have. So the resources being put into the 'nonscarce resource of knowledge' wont exist for a few more years now it terms of when it is made. Also I feel you can never spend too much on the pursuit of knowledge but sometimes money isn't needed.

My computer science teacher in 10th and 11th grade didn't let us use computers the first semester of 10th grade. This may seem weird but when learning the basics of C++ was mostly logic and theory so computers weren't called for in the education process. He knew this from experience. He had been teaching computer science for 25 years. Then the second semester we used old dos computers with no Internet capabilities because he thought it was superfluous. Then in 12th grade my teacher retired and a new teacher came from a business background and updated that computer lab (there were others already updated) putting in windows xp and a school network in the lab with Internet access. In short they now have much better tools but the teacher isn't as knowledgeable about programing and so I have a far better understanding of C++ then students with better resources. My point is this money doesn't make knowledge only well educated teachers with a passion for teaching can ignite a thirst for knowledge in a student. Once that passion is lite that person will continue to grow but for some, those that never connect with a teacher they see no reason to learn.


Let me explain something using your own example.

The schools that were close to you the ones that weren't very good. Who would use a voucher to go to one of those? NO ONE. So what happens in such a voucher program is this. All the schools in poor areas close down because no one wants to go there and all the other schools are overcrowded. Maybe after a few years of really crappy schooling the surviving schools will expand enough to accept the flood of students but is it worth it?

N,

At the core of this statement, it just isn't true. The teaching example you gave where no computers were used at first when teaching computer science -- did your teacher teach for free? Did your teacher teach in a public park or inside a building? Were text books involved? Pencils and paper? During the course of your studies, did you need food, shelter and clothing? Did your teacher?

None of this stuff is free.

I will agree that highly talented teachers can do a lot with very little, and that money in education can easily be wasted on the whiz-bang sexy junk that does little in the education process. However, this does not mean that information and knowledge are ever free of cost.

For example, my classically-trained sigoth's mother started out learning piano with a cardboard keyboard, cut out of a cardboard box. That's because the mother's family was dirt poor, the Great Depression era. However, the grandmother knew piano and transferred an amount of basic knowledge to my sigoth's mother via the cardboard piano keyboard.

Still, in order to advance in education, a real piano needed to be used. This came from the piano teacher who owned one to play. Cardboard makes no music, nor do non-networked computers make applications in today's world of information processing (once known as "data processing").

So what do we want? Cardboard or pianos? Hello world stand-alone apps or networked? We definitely need highly skilled/talented teachers. Will we pay for them?

Author,

You missed my point and then made it yourself. I was trying to say our money could be better spent making teachers better. Instead of spending it as you put it on "whiz-bang sexy junk that does little in the education process." A great teacher can do with cardboard what a poor teacher can't do with a concert hall full of instruments.

Somebody brought it up, vouchers.

I have to say I do not fear that vouchers would be the end of education for poor people. I've heard the arguments, and don't believe they hold water. What we have, without choice, is young families voting with their feet to live elsewhere, so much of tax base leaves anyway. Jurisdictions are left with the poor, and wealthy people who aren't using the public school system, and have little reason to support public schools. Some of the wealthy might have altruistic or holistic reasons for supporting the public education of others, but that generally is limited to a barely sufficient quality and expense of education.

I think choice, and more specifically, vouchers offer a solution. I prefer vouchers to 'public school choice' in the same reason I prefer a real free-market food court to those found in government institutions. Putting a different face on the same provider isn't much of a choice; in most places charter schools are saddled with much of the same baggage of traditional public schools.

I think, with vouchers, you wind up with a truly diverse population, as individual families are less likely to self-select out of a jurisdiction, as they can generally meet their educational needs on their budget. I predict that families would quickly develop methods for rating and choosing schools, and that schools would quickly learn to spread the word on their strengths: "we've got the highest graduation rate", "we've got the best rate of improvement for children with learning disabilities", "we've got the highest parent satisfaction of schools concentrating on the arts".

I also think, that governments should consider the lost property taxes forgone by public buildings when they make their budgets; and likewise, schools accepting public vouchers should be required to pay the same property taxes.

I think that incremental steps toward intensive voucher programs would allow schools to adapt to the changes, and that knee-jerk fear reactions from teacher's unions are the chief hold up. Inerestingly, most of the teacher's I know, send their children to private school (though I live in the same area described by PudRik, and am myself a product of the Virginia public schools).

The argument that people would flee poorly performing schools is, in a way, a postive thing, but also disregards market forces. First, assuming vouchers were given out at a state-wide level, poor neighboorhoods would now receive the same baseline of funding that richer neighboorhods do. Disregarding that, the number of schools is not a finite, set amount. If people are fleeing poor schools, new ones will open up as well as good eschools expending as they can. Poor schools will come under new management. Its precisely this dynamism I hope would reinvigorate the school system.

The question is:

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?

What justifies it, is that knowledge, as has been pointed out by many others here, is not a non-scarce resource. Now, information itself may not be scarce, but there's a big difference between information and knowledge. I believe this is where you erred.

Information is just that - a fact, or even a collection of facts, related or not, to which you may stumble over in the course of a day. But all of the information in the world does not make someone knowledgeable.

And that's where the schools come in. They teach you how to take those facts and assimilate them, to examine them, to test them, and debate them. That's the knowledge part. And it's invaluable. A couple of examples:

Mathematics - without a basic understanding of what addition, subtraction, and all the rest are, numbers are just a bunch of odd looking figures on a piece of paper. The knowledge comes in learning how to manipulate those figures in a meaningful manner, to keep track of your bank account, or how well your business is doing, or as we did just this week, being able to predict, and then find, a planet revolving around another star.

History - Let's face it, history is little more than a collection of dates and events. But that's pure information. The knowledge is not in the study of when these events happened, but why they happened. The economic and/or political ramifications of what happened. Almost any encyclopedia can give you the important dates with regard to the revolutionary war, for instance. Only a decent historian, or a good history teacher can bring those dates alive, and make you understand why those dates are important to where we eventually ended up.

Also, as BecomingHuman noted, knowledge is only gained through the amount of time you have to devote to any one subject, making that knowlege valuable. Take law for instance. The field of law is so utterly complex these days, that even no one lawyer can be an expert in the totality of law. Specialization has become paramount in becoming knowledgeable in even one area. Criminal law, contracts, tax law, etc. And becoming proficient in one of these areas takes an even longer period of time to understand, making that knowledge all the more valuable.

The same of couse, is true for just about any profession these days. Do you really want a podiatrist performing heart surgery on you? Or do you want a carpenter with no real knowledge of electricity re-wiring your house? If you're brought up on criminal charges, how much help do you think your tax attorney is going to be?

No, information may be cheap and easy to come by, but real knowledge is another thing altogether. It's incredibly expensive, in both time and money, and the more of each we can devote to it, the better off we are as individuals and as a society.

N,

Not really -- the great teacher costs money, that's the point. I don't think the present eductation system attracts great teachers. Also, you can only go so far with cardboard keyboards and stand-alone computers. At some point you need the real piano and network. Those cost money.

I suppose nearly any subject can be taught on a pure theoretical basis, and using the music example, a great teacher can cover the subjects of notes, scales, harmony and so forth. But to really get the sound, you need the instruments. Thus a great teacher can't teach the whole thing without the concert hall full of instruments either -- and musicians to play them.

On the computer science level, without network -- well, forget about developing anything resembling development in the real world. That might not be the point at the high school level, I don't know. At minimum, doing web pages? Conducting online research? Maybe distance learning exercises? I'm more familiar with the college level on this. The last time I did anything with high schools was laying cat-5 cable on a voluntary basis. My time was free to the high schools, but I still had to pay for transportation and my basic survival to do this stuff. My employers ponied up bucks for the training that got me to the ability to lay cat-5. The cable itself came with a price tag.

That sure seems like a long time ago. Now I'd probably be doing wireless LAN, possibly with microwave broadband (like the house setup). Things sure have changed in just ten or so years! Public high schools probably haven't kept up. If so, could it be that keeping up costs too much money? That's my point.

Here is an interesting web site that I think is relevant to to topic of debate.
CollegeBoard AP Tests
Theses test are what colleges expect ADVANCED high school students to be able to do in order to receive BASIC college credit. You will notice that the only tests that require anything other than a written test are the foreign language tests which require a spoken portion too. No computers on the Computer Science test. No instruments on the Music Theory test. Basically our colleges don't expect any actual 'real world' experience from incoming high school students, but they think some will know the theory.

The justification comes from the desires of the tax paying community. They want their children to be educated so that they can get diplomas that will help them get good jobs. It is not the transmission of knowledge that is important, but rather the transmission of money and status.

What I would question is your description of knowledge as a non-scarce resource. If the ability to transmit it is so easy, then let parents do the job. The fact is that parents quite often don't have the time or the ability to do so. That results in a scarcity because both time and ability are limiting factors that result in a scarcity of the oftentimes undesired commodity.

The reason for this is quite simple. The classroom is not the "real world". Since teachers cannot duplicate the real world in their classroom down to the last detail (nor would the students or parents be particularly enthused with that prospect), they can only test what has been taught. And since the "real world" has not been taught, then expectations have to fall in line with realilty. The reality is that the classroom is not the "real world", so expecting real world experience from a mere classroom is not expected.

The goal of education is to acquire sufficient knowledge and develop intellect suitable to a purposeful life. To seek knowledge for its own sake is an idle pursuit, and to cram one’s mind full of useless information is to be worse than a blockhead. Knowledge acquired for purpose is the proper use of intellect and point of education.

No. The "goal" of education has many aspects. You have the student goals, teacher goals, parent goals, and school board goals which loosely follow those of the community's goals.

Goals that students have basically involve suffering through the class until the bell rings. The teachers share this basic goal, but are sometimes driven by notions of idealism and professionalism. Parents want their kids to get good grades so they can get into a decent college, and then a decent job. The school boards just want to do what they would like to do with as little interference from the community as possible. And then you've got country, state, and federal busybodies who think the answer to the nations educational woes are to be found in basic philosophical differences between what goes on in the classroom, and what they think should be going on in the classroom.

The reason why there is prescriptive education is because it is believed by society that education is the answer to societal problems. Society generally believes that by throwing money at the educational process, that it will result in better grades, which will result in more knowledge, which will result in the world being a wonderful place to live.

I have news for you. If the world was filled with nothing but teachers, we'd have a serious problem on our hands because most teachers are basically clueless when it comes to societal problems, let alone how to correct misconceptions of those problems in their classrooms. Believe me, you'd be better off taking a gun to your head than living in a world filled with educators. Not only do they not know much of anything, but because they are teachers, they think they do. That is the worst combination of ignorance and responsibility that you will ever have the misfortune to come across in your lifetime.

Much of what passes for education is a waste of time, albeit that now a college education, which is little more than a high school refresher course, has come to be the ticket to middle-class society. Beyond that, what good is the pursuit of useless studies and advanced academic degrees that only certify learning beyond one’s capacity to think? It seems a tiresome venture with but little prospect for any substantial reward; and yet one sees such masters of arcane knowledge who are no good for anything but a pretentious display of pedantry. There was once a noted ichthyologist who prided himself with knowing the Latin names for the entire genus, and whose students joked that the professor’s head was so full of fish that every time he learned of a newly-discovered species another previously learned would pop out his backside in an expression of unpardonable French. One cannot help but think that more useful things might well be learned outside the halls of academe at the local tavern.

oyaji
I have news for you. If the world was filled with nothing but teachers, we'd have a serious problem on our hands because most teachers are basically clueless when it comes to societal problems, let alone how to correct misconceptions of those problems in their classrooms. Believe me, you'd be better off taking a gun to your head than living in a world filled with educators. Not only do they not know much of anything, but because they are teachers, they think they do. That is the worst combination of ignorance and responsibility that you will ever have the misfortune to come across in your lifetime.

[/quote]
Wow, what a leap! I suppose my mother-in-law, wife, and son are all clueless as to any of the aspects of real life, even tho they live life daily, just like the rest of us. My wife will tell you that SOME teachers are clueless, and even sometimes less mature than the children they are teaching, but believe it or not, teachers are living in society and are aware of societal problems. In fact, try teaching a class of 14 year old children and NOT be aware of societal problems.

I can agree to a limited extent that some of them tend to think that they know more than the rest of us, but spend most of your waking moments teaching children and that attitude tends to creep in to their psyche. My wife knows almost nothing about what I did in my working life, and has no interest in it at all, but that doesn't mean that she knows "not much of anything" about many other things.
Anybody can stand back and criticize, and it seems to be easiest to do so when you have never actually done what you are criticizing.

BTW, NEMO, nice post.

Exactly. And it is not the place of the State to determine what a "purposeful life" is. What is purposeful knowledge to one person is useless information to another.

The simple fact is that the only people who truly know individual preferences are the individuals themselves. Therefore, the only true education is one that is conducted voluntarily. Forced education inevitably results in cramming useless information and thus destroying the quality of life for everybody.

The state is trying to turn us into worse-than-blockheads. No wonder.

Once you get to the late high school level, or college, I would agree with you, Frozny. That's what elective courses in high school are for, and why you get to pick your own major in college, or no major at all, or go to a technical schoool, whatever.

However, if you aren't forced at an earlier age to at least sample a little of everything, ie: Literature, science, history, mathematics, foreign languages, how on earth are you ever going to know what it is that truly interests you? How can you possibly decide you'd like to be a writer, with no training in literature, or a doctor, with no education in science and medicine, or a physicist with no training in science and math?

Everyone has to have a starting point, and the sooner it happens, the better of that person is. That's why we have compulsory elementary education. To give students the grounding needed to make those choices later in life.

I was 14 and I can't really say that my teachers knew much of anything concerning any societal problems I faced.

No offense meant to your family members, but if they're teachers, they are used to teaching what they know as if that is relevant and worthwhile knowledge. And quite frankly, most teachers I had wouldn't know relevancy if it bit them in a sensitive area.



That attitude is their downfall. They are paid to teach certain subjects because it has been determined that they know more about, or have more experience with, those subjects they teach than their students do.

This would be fine if educators stuck to the subject that they are paid to teach. It is when they overstep their intellectal boundaries and attempt to educate people in areas in which they (the teachers) are completely ignorant of, that they prove their own lack of an intellect in the subject.

Ask your teacher friends if they should be allowed to have a say in defining good and bad behavior amongst their charges and you'll see what I mean. To a person, they feel that it is their job to prescribe some sort of ethical behavior to their students, yet I'm pretty sure that none of the pedagogues you interview have even so much attended an ethics class, nor were the vast majority hired based upon their knowledge of that rather difficult subject.

As for prescriptive educational goals, they are based almost entirely upon community desires. The community elects school board representatives which represent the educational desires of the community, and they are paid to ensure that those desires are being met in the classroom. It has nothing to do with ensuring a broad range of educational requirements being met, nor with any notions of what a "purposeful life" might encompass. Teachers are paid by the community, and they either do what they are paid to do by the community that employs them, or they are liable to be fired and forced to find a real job. It doesn't matter if they are asked to teach phrenology or creationism. If they don't want to teach creationism, then they might enjoy pursuing a career in the custodial sciences.

I think the gist of this is that the community should dictate what public school teachers teach, no matter what the subject matter. What is being ignored is how public schools are funded. What's the alternative to the present system? Should communties foot the entire bill for public education? How would that work, and would that improve the situation over the status quo?

Communities do have a good deal of latitude in designing public school systems. For example, Denver folks have the choice betweeen traditional classrooms and open schools. I'm not sure just how this developed, but I know the grandkid is doing better in the open school versus the traditional model.

I suppose a community could opt for phrenology and creationism over science. That sure would be a waste though, as the demand for these knowledge areas are pretty slim in the real world. Although custodial sciences are in demand, teachers tend to leave the profession for higher positions within industry. I've worked with plenty of former public school teachers in the computer industry. They do quite well and make significantly more money. Pretty smart cookies, eh?

Maybe the migration from the low-pay, high-stress teaching positions to other, better paid positions in industry results in a lower quality of public school teachers. I'd definately not put up with an anti-science community. In the computer industry, phrenology and creationism don't matter -- so why put up with a community with its head where the sun don't shine?

I was 14 and I can't really say that my teachers knew much of anything concerning any societal problems I faced.
And what would those problems be? Be specific, and I am sure I can challenge your opinion on that issue. My wife has seen it all, and I am impressed with her ability to take it all in without being depressed all the time.
No offense meant to your family members, but if they're teachers, they are used to teaching what they know as if that is relevant and worthwhile knowledge. And quite frankly, most teachers I had wouldn't know relevancy if it bit them in a sensitive area.
They teach subject matter that is relevant to the majority as determined by the majority. That is the smart thing to do. We can't have an entire school dedicate itself to the whims of anyone who thinks he knows it all, especially if he is still a very young person.
They are paid to teach certain subjects because it has been determined that they know more about, or have more experience with, those subjects they teach than their students do.
Of course, you just defined part of the teacher/student relationship.
This would be fine if educators stuck to the subject that they are paid to teach. It is when they overstep their intellectal boundaries and attempt to educate people in areas in which they (the teachers) are completely ignorant of, that they prove their own lack of an intellect in the subject.
Teachers, for the most part, do stick to the subject, as they don't have much time to stray into other areas. Where do you go to school? What areas are you talking about? I know how much time my wife puts into her job, and it is a lot more than the average student is even remotely aware of.

Ask your teacher friends if they should be allowed to have a say in defining good and bad behavior amongst their charges and you'll see what I mean. To a person, they feel that it is their job to prescribe some sort of ethical behavior to their students, yet I'm pretty sure that none of the pedagogues you interview have even so much attended an ethics class, nor were the vast majority hired based upon their knowledge of that rather difficult subject.
They have a right to expect good behavior, and honesty, from their students. Would you allow cheating?
As for prescriptive educational goals, they are based almost entirely upon community desires. The community elects school board representatives which represent the educational desires of the community, and they are paid to ensure that those desires are being met in the classroom. It has nothing to do with ensuring a broad range of educational requirements being met, nor with any notions of what a "purposeful life" might encompass. Teachers are paid by the community, and they either do what they are paid to do by the community that employs them, or they are liable to be fired and forced to find a real job. It doesn't matter if they are asked to teach phrenology or creationism. If they don't want to teach creationism, then they might enjoy pursuing a career in the custodial sciences.
[/quote]
Correct. except for the last part. Creationism has no place in public schools. Likewise Phrenology. Neither has anything to do with helping a child learn enough to be a useful citizen in society. Neither will serve as a foundation upon which a student can build an ongoing education over his or her lifetime.
Exposure to a broad range of subjects is essential to helping the students to determine what they want to pursue in life.
Ranting against the existing system is futile, unless you have real and viable alternatives to offer to the rest of us. And bear this in mind, it is the majority who decides what is viable , useful, meaningful, etc., not the lone voice in the wilderness.

Ahh..... to be able to enjoy that indignant rush of rage at one's own superiority compared to all those huddled masses of sheep. Who fail daily to see
the true heights of intellect one has reached. The contempt for those blind to see what is to one's own eyes so very obvious.



Somebody call the Waaaambulance!
Hmm actually I think i could find a much better examples of ignorance. The addiction of hubris is astounding at times. Makes it easier to understand the apathy of those who once endeavored to make sure that the trains ran on time.

For all the current flaws that afflict our present education system, it served our needs very well for a long, long time. From these public schools came those who built the bridges, skyscrapers and the planes-- who achieved more in less than a century than the combined works of every known society mankind ever produced. Without it we would never have reached where we are today. Only now are we ready to
step beyond the limits of an aging education system and find one better able to take advantage of what we have learned and what we now need to do to evolve as individuals and a healthy and free society. Thanks to these schools--why it even produced those who denounce it so strongly today-- our standards are now higher because of what our aging system gave us in terms of a foundation of educated and intellectually stable citizens. Where as once educated persons were a rare bird they are now so commonplace as to be invisible in terms of societal importance.

We are only now at the point that we are ready for more independent methods of learning that are not anchored so firmly to the bonds of the State.

As for the slighted educators--many thanks to these people who sacrifice so much of themselves to try and offer a chance to children to realize their dreams later in life.
How they navigate the twisted and treacherous shoals of a beauracracy and the indifference of the parents and public who haven't lifted a finger to assure the best possible offering of education is beyond me.
So easy to criticize the efforts of those in the arena every day. The gall of those who have never themselves tried to equal the feats of those they malign. Never is any actual concrete plan or modification to the system presented to increase its ability to teach. Nor do they offer practical and realistic solutions to the problems they rant so endlessly about.

Just stale rhetoric--barely understood--cribbed from the works of other men who themselves did nothing but criticize from the sidelines.

I would venture that the acheivements might have had less to do with the education system, and more to do with the exponential growth of technological progress. The industrial and informational revolutions each increased what we can create by an order of magnitude. The school system is just one of many variables.

I'd also say that educated and intelligent are not necessarily the same thing. Many people have plenty of data in their brains but aren't so good at using it.


Yes, absolutely.



I believe you are guilty of the same exaggeration in the post you quoted, just in the opposite direction. It's true that there are many excellent teachers in our system. There are also many who thrive in and support the beauracracy. There are indifferent parents, there are overzealous controlling parents, and there are legitimately concerned and involved parents. It is extremely difficult for a parental group to change a resistant beauracracy. What incentive do schools have to change? Not monetary, certainly.

The blame does not rest with the teachers. All humans work best under some pressure, and relatively few put pressure on themselves. Only by putting pressure on schools can they be improved, so as long as they virtually guaranteed funding from our tax money, they will continue the tradition of mediocracy. Yes, there is minor pressure for quality, but it is so far removed from the source (parents) that it is not felt nearly as much as it should be.

Information is of little use but to those intelligent enough to comprehend it. Indeed, it has been said that a merely well-informed man is a useless bore; which is true, for to acquire knowledge for its sake alone is both useless and a bore.

Knowledge is power for those who know how to use it effectively; but, by the same token, it has also been said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, for it is easily misapplied.

Wisdom is knowledge applied to one’s benefit; and the wise know how to apply knowledge to attain their ends and to good purpose. That is the benefit of knowledge and wisdom.

For a fourteen year old, societal problems generally do not go beyond personal experience. While I was forced to eat my vegetables because the Chinese were starving, all I knew was that I was forced to eat my vegetables for people I didn't know, nor care about.

Okay, for a specific example, I'll offer up the trials and tribulations that puberty offers. Can you remember that far back? The pimples, the girls who went from being mere girls on the playground. to breathtaking goddesses from another solar system, and just at this moment when we realize their charms, our bodies protest by making our voices sound like Kermit the frog, and our noses and cheeks start sprouting a bounty of pimples, blackheads, whiteheads, and just a touch of ridiculous fur around our lips. Not enough to hide the pizza-face syndrome, but just enough to emphasize it.

Can your wife relate? She's a woman and you are arguing that she can relate to the problems that boys encounter with the onset of puberty?




By the majority? Hold that thought for a second...


[b]Ask your teacher friends if they should be allowed to have a say in defining good and bad behavior amongst their charges and you'll see what I mean. To a person, they feel that it is their job to prescribe some sort of ethical behavior to their students, yet I'm pretty sure that none of the pedagogues you interview have even so much attended an ethics class, nor were the vast majority hired based upon their knowledge of that rather difficult subject.




Well, there you go. The teacher "expects good behavior", thus they assume they are capable of telling the difference between good and bad behavior. For themselves, this is fine. For others, they do not have the education, and mostly intellect to do so.

I know what I'm talking about because I did study ethics. It is a very dense, and oftentimes convoluted and obfuscatory subject matter that teachers other than those which were hired for their knowledge of ethics are not expected to understand.

Or maybe that's the problem. Maybe they are expected to understand what they haven't studied.



Tsk, tsk, tsk! First you say that the majority (not national, but regional mind you) is well within their rights to define what education entails, and now you are trying to say what the majority are allowed to define as suitable? You do understand the inconsistency of your argument, don't you?


Neither will serve as a foundation upon which a student can build an ongoing education over his or her lifetime.

You've already admitted that this is not for you to define. The "majority" is given this privelage according to your own argument. Since you do not constitute the "majority", then you might want to re-think your position regarding creationism and phrenology as valid subjects fit for young minds.



This assumes that the majority you spoke of earlier consider a broad range of subjects essential to the students.



Resistance is futile? The rest of you don't matter. What matters is what the community of tax paying residents think. The people that actually pay for the education of their offspring hold the purse strings of the educational system. Since these purse strings are connected to the community, it doesn't really matter what anybody thinks except those that pay for the education. If the tax payers think that phrenology is a valid subject matter, then that's what should be taught. (please note the usage of 'should' and the period at the end of that sentence)



Which majority? National, state, county...

Puberty and Pimples? that's it? some teachers are male, you know. And yes, I suffered pizza face, still have the scars. In fact, I still get some pimples at my advanced age. Too bad I don't "suffer" the more desireable teen problem, the over active libido and the near constant state of excitement. Those were the days.
Want to hear some REAL problems? Physical and sexual abuse, fathers in prison, mothers on drugs, brothers killed because they flashed the wrong gang sign, pregnant 14 and 15 year old girls, and the list can go on. Give me a break. Puberty? Are you over it yet? Be grateful if that is the most serious problem you have.
Good vs. bad behavior? You follow the rules, good. Don't follow the rules, bad. How complicated can it be? Don't like the rules? Sorry, children do not get to make the rules. If they don't have the knowledge of consequences, or maturity to follow the rules, they don't get to make the rules.
Ethics? What makes you an expert on ethics. Did you attend a college class on that subject? Or have you graduated high school yet?
How can you assume that all, or most, teachers have no knowledge of ethics?
Have you met them all? Granted, ethics seem to be situational to some people, but what can you do about that?
The answer to your last question is local, as schools are funded primarily by local taxes, and administered by local school districts and school boards. The Feds have some say, and provide some funding, but the real power in education is usually local.
One place I lived the locals had the "farmer" mentality and advanced classes were not offered until late in High School. Resources were available to offer them in Jr. High, but the locals preferred to spend the money on sports equipment instead.
There is the real problem, incorrect usage of resources.

That's quite a presupposition. The implication is that the knowledge is being taught, so the knowledge must be the only thing being learned. But just through the process of being taught, the student learns things other than the knowledge of the lesson. In an ideal situation, the student learns how to learn just through the act of observing someone else teaching. The student can see what works and what doesn't for h/h own learning, and may apply it in a non-school context -- to something like baseball statistics or classic comics or whatever the interest is. This also applies across and between disciplines, where intelligence is gained through the understanding of processes -- sometimes acquired from completely different subject areas, like math and music.

If what you are saying is true, then we should expect that each student comes out of the class, the grade, the school with the same net amount of knowledge, which is hogwash. Due to outside factors like cultural background and prior experience, each student will have a different "take" on what was being taught. And each will probably remember different things from the same experience. This, in itself, is evidence that schools don't teach only knowledge.

Now, the knowledge we are investing in is the new knowledge that these students might eventually contribute to society. Those who don't contribute to the net amount of knowledge available help keep society running alongside, and ultimately for, those who do. Those individuals who do eventually expand the net knowledge of the world are a scarce commodity -- and these are the dividends on the investments we make now. Without the expansion of knowledge, we can kiss progress goodbye.


Knowledge can be duplicated indefinitely, but only insofar as the knowledge makes any sense in every age in which it is retrieved. As knowledge increases so must the infrastructure designed to hold it. For example, someone's going to have to figure out how to incorporate 2 billion more people on this planet by the year 2020. Without the infrastucture to hold them all, knowledge acquisition and transfer will become secondary to mere survival. So even if humans are the only information transfer device, it won't be free.

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?
Assuming the question makes any sense, the self-perpetuation and incremental improvement of society should be a good enough reason.

What justifies the investment of scarce resources in the nonscarce resource of knowledge?

Still just do not agree with the scarce resources argument. Taxes sadly are not scarce--and of all the things they are used for attempting to provide a decent education just has a return greater than the investment.

Asoko

Schools do not decide anything one way or the other. The school itself is irrelevant to the argument. The school system merely reflects what we need. It was great for when it started but doesn't reflect today--It could very easily. The mismanagement doesn't even come from the administration of the schools or the government--Failure on the part of the people who fund the enterprise--the investors ..taxpayers --have allowed it to fall into decay. To place blame anywhere else is as defe4ating as those who invest in 401ks and do not keep up with where their money is invested.
It is not the responsibility of the schools to make one think--they are to impart knowledge. Common snese and ambition are the jobs of the parents.
The failures of the system get blamed on the schools and teachers as a way of scapegoating and passing on the blame.
pressure has been applied to the schools for as long a