**** Elections thread *****

[wufwugy]

I'm not sure what you mean by competition here? That's exactly how things are here, you're pretty much assigned a school based on your location the first 9-12 grades of basic education, after that it's all application based. There is no competition between schools, they aren't even compared to each, no measuring of performance or any kind of metrics like that. They actually make it a point to not publish statistics on test scores, and nowadays I don't think kids even receive numerical grades until grade 5 or 6. And that was exactly the point of the article, it doesn't matter which school you go to, they're all basically the same. That equality and lack of competition is a key aspect of why Finnish schools perform so well.

I don't know enough of the Finnish specifics to provide robust input on specifics. This guy argues that the Finnish system has a strong element of choice. Interesting also: he argues that the Finnish system is underperforming in other areas due to its system.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/06...ation-miracle/

Making the system private would ensure they wouldn't be of the same quality. Schools would have to employ every strategy imaginable to attract students, like manipulating performance metrics or at least concentrating solely on standardized test performance, which kills creativity. Studying should be about learning stuff, not about learning to perform well in tests.

I like that you're thinking in terms of cause and effect. Also saying that schools would have to employ strategies to attract students is a good way of putting it. They would. This type of thing works well in other areas of the economy. It should probably be encouraged.

Regarding the idea of "quality," in some ways, yeah, some people might get lower quality education YET get increased quality of life due to their limited resources going to more productive things. I won't go in deep on this, but one element is that I would argue that education is one of the worst things that teenagers can be doing with their time. The incentives for them should revolve around working as much as they can and investing most of their wages. The exponential growth of their investment at that age is an enormous good that nobody talks about. In addition, the most productive way to increase productive skills is to work. Education instead of working for the young carries a colossal opportunity cost that nobody is talking about. If education went private and then it became more beneficial for those on the margins to leave school and enter the workforce, that would be a good thing.



If I could do it all over again, I would drop out of school at 16 (maybe get a GED), work full-time in a restaurant (due to bad regulations, it would probably be two restaurants), start by washing dishes, eventually work up to bartender and maybe management. And the most important thing is that I would, without exception, put 15% of what I earned in each paycheck into a dollar cost averaging investment strategy and 5% into a rainy day fund.

And guess what, my life would be amazing (restaurant work is quite fun), and I would retire a millionaire. We're killing kids when we tell them they need to waste the most productive years of their lives being unproductive. Government policies should revolve around having kids work at as young an age as is reasonable and heavily invest. After a few generations, the amount of millionaires in the country would increase many times over, the level of poverty would diminish to virtual nothingness, the average job would be a pretty decent job that the average person could work, and then school attendance rates would increase due to the new kids having such rich families that there is more incentive for those kids to focus on creative endeavors.

Education was always an aristocracy thing. We can't forget that. Education was never meant as a tool to get people out of lower classes. The modern West has internalized the idea that formal education is a tool for advancement for the poor, and this is causing all sorts of problems. We're leading our kids down the wrong path.