If a store sells inferior products or a business gives bad service, most customers will not come back and that store or business will eventually go bankrupt. If public schools sell bad education, year after year, why don’t they go bankrupt? Why aren’t they shut down?
The answer is government compulsion. In private schools, if the school does a bad job educating children, parents will soon take their child out of that school. If enough parents take their kids out of the school, that school will go bankrupt. A private school depends on the voluntary consent and tuition payments of its parent-customers to stay in business.
Unlike private schools, public schools are a government-controlled education system that stays in business through naked compulsion. Local governments pass laws that give school authorities near-monopoly powers over our children’s education. Compulsory-attendance laws force children to go to these schools. School taxes force parents to pay for these schools. Unlike private schools, public schools rarely go out of business, no matter how bad they are, because they get their “customers” and their money by force.
Compulsion rears its ugly head in our public schools in many other ways. State teacher licensing laws prevent excellent but unlicensed educators or outside experts from teaching in the schools. Tenure laws make it almost impossible for school boards to fire incompetent or even mediocre teachers or principals.
Local governments force children to go to public schools for six to eight hours a day, five days a week for up to twelve years, even though these children might hate public school. School authorities force children to study subjects that school authorities dictate, even though children might find these subjects boring or meaningless. Public schools also force parents to accept teachers that parents might not like or think are competent.
Many public schools force children to learn math and reading with teaching methods that can cripple children’s math and reading abilities. Public schools often subject children to values or sex-education classes that parents object to. The list goes on and on.
Like tax-supported prisons, public schools don’t shut down because the whole system rests on a foundation of naked force. Take away compulsory-attendance laws and compulsory school taxes and it’s highly likely that most public schools would “go out of business.”
But parents don’t have to wait for the highly unlikely event of public schools going out of business in their lifetime. Luckily, parents in America, unlike those in Germany or many other countries, have the right to homeschool their children. Parents can also take advantage of new, low-cost education options available to them right now, such as low-cost Internet private schools. I go into detail about these new education options in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
By: Joel Turtel
Posts Tagged ‘Children S Education’
iPhone Education – 4 Reasons Why Mobile Devices Will Transform How Our Kids Learn
March 30th, 2010
Say goodbye to textbooks and hello to the next-gen mobile tools that will power our children’s education. Increasing access to high-end mobile devices and an explosion of mobile educational software are leading to pilot programs focused on determining the role this new technology should have in the classroom. These pilot programs are already demonstrating significant impact on student learning. Curious about what else lies ahead? Here are four trends driving the death of the chalkboard and the coming mobile education revolution:
Smart phone penetration will hit 82% by 2013
In order for mobile devices to be the future of education, kids need access to devices that are more sophisticated than yesteryear’s Razr. Text-to-screen, in-class polling exercises are a great component of many forward-thinking teachers’ current curricula, but for mobile devices to take center stage in the classroom, better devices need to achieve ubiquity. This is happening — fast. eMarketer recently reported that by 2013, 82% of all mobile devices in use worldwide will be smart phones.
The App Store is producing an explosion of educational mobile content
In little over a year, the iPhone App Store has taken the world of mobile computing by storm — and educational apps have been a huge part of this. This exponential increase in the availability of mobile educational software parallels the improvement of the hardware devices — and is just as critical for mobile education to be a reality. Translation tools, musical instruments, learning games, and mobile books are just the tip of the iceberg. Every day more than 10 new educational kids apps are added to the App Store. Tens of millions of educational apps have already been downloaded. And while this focuses narrowly on the impact of Apple’s iPhone, the broader trend here is clear — others are following the lead of the App Store, and as soon as there are smart phones in everyone’s hand, there will be first-rate mobile educational software to match.
Existing pilots of mobile education are demonstrating success
Preliminary research from both Australia and the US is finding that when using iPod Touches as part of their class activities, school attendance increases, students are more willing to come to school, and they do more homework. Further quantitative research is needed, but it seems obvious that kids will learn more if they are engaged in the process — and cutting-edge mobile devices like the iPod Touch are brilliant at driving engagement.
Mobile devices offer access to the internet in places where the traditional web doesn’t reach
In Africa, for example, mobile web penetration is six-times higher than the traditional web. This means that for many people using their mobile devices is their only means of accessing the practically infinite sources of scholarship available online. Similar circumstances hold true in India, where video English lessons are delivered via cell phones to rural schools that can afford neither English teachers nor computers for their students.
What’s all that add up to? More powerful mobile devices, in more people’s hands, powered by a growing digital library of educational software. Together these trends make one thing clear — mobile education is poised to have a significant impact on the way our children learn.
By: Christopher R G Taylor
