Full Description
Are we going about education the wrong way? The somewhat shocking demonstration of this book is that "we" simply cannot reform "our" schools "together". We don't actually even know what schools or education really are. Education can only be improved the same way we improve and invent things in other walks of life, through unbridled, unchained trial and error.Assembling a wealth of economic, psychological and historical evidence, Erik Lidstroem paints a coherent and deceptively simple picture of how we went wrong, of why we went wrong and what we can do about it. The disconcerting conclusion is that education must be set free, it must be returned to parents and to pupils. Government should have no, or hardly any role in the financing of education, in the setting of curricula or diploma, or in the supervision of schools and education.At the same time, the book is filled with optimism. By doing things very differently, we can very quickly and almost painlessly restore education and learning to a level previously unheard of.The second expanded edition completes the analysis by extending it to research and higher education, in and of themselves, how they are affected by the crisis in primary and secondary education, and how they would also be restored and set on a path of improvement through a similar return to independence from government.
Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: The Knowledge ProblemChapter 3: The Threats to Improved EducationChapter 4: School, Work, and Growing UpChapter 5: The Ethics of State EducationChapter 6: The Rise of the Government School SystemChapter 7: The Art, Science, and Nonsense of EducationChapter 8: Der Untergang-The Downfall of the Government School SystemChapter 9: The Downward, Self-reinforcing Spiral of DeathChapter 10: The Kind of Education We Never HadChapter 11: The Negative Externalities of Government EducationChapter 12: The Private Origins of Science and Higher EducationChapter 13: An educational, socio-economic motorway pile-upChapter 14: Replanting the Beautiful TreeAppendix A: Estimates of the Fall of Quality in SwedenAppendix B: The Parable of the Citizen VehicleReferences
