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The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves?
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4 reviews of this product found across Reddit:
> Wait why should public schools compete schools compete when they're all funded by the same organization, we the people.
Guaranteeing funding for those public schools even when they do a terrible job, and in fact people urging increased funding to bad schools, is exactly why those terrible schools are so terrible.
> Seems like a great way to allow rich people to bus their kids to a better school, leaving poorer kids in the lurch.
The beneficiaries of school choice policies are generally poor students. Rich people can get good schooling for their kids regardless of whatever policies you want to put into place to stop them.
> What I want is a national per capita spending mandate on all public schools. No more of this being tied to property tax bullshit.
The problem in education is not that not enough money is being spent. Many terrible schools already spend more per student than tuition to very good private schools cost. More guaranteed spending would not fix the problem. In fact I think it would just make it worse.
There's a very good book, The Beautiful Tree, that compares public schooling in the third world to a fascinating phenomenon of low cost private schools. These are "low cost" in the sense that they serve people who are near the world poverty line of living on $1.90 per day, not American poverty. In some cases the schools are actually illegal. And yet the education researcher who wrote the book conducted testing of these schools and found that they do better than the better funded, 'free', public alternative. And, hey, the Kindle edition is only ~$1.90 on Amazon.
Thank you for the answer.
>I don't agree that Capitalism is how you organize society. I see capitalism as a set of political and econonomic policies that leave trade and industry controlled by private owners for profit. So to me it is limited to the market and has nothing to do with "freedom from government education".
What would you call "set of political and economic policies" other than organizing society? If it is limited to the market you have to answer a lot of other questions. What is the government supposed to do? Why to even have government? It is useful if people call same things the same name and this is what I hope most people here would call capitalism something close to what I defined it as. These things are inextricably connected and cannot be separated because they are not randomly chosen but designed.
>I know you live on the US and the public school system may suck. However that is not the standard. I live in Mexico and public education has its flaws but it is sufficient. Mexico exports more Engineers than most countries. In several countries (specially in Europe) public education is great and is usually preffered over private education. Also most people can barely afford food for their children, private education for them is unrealistic and removing the only access they have to an education just because it's not the way some people like it is a little barbaric in my opinion. So maybe the issue is not THE state but YOUR state that sucks at public education.
I do live in US but that is not where I was born and educated (I am from Europe). Aside from the surge of woke in USA i still consider education in US significantly better (on average) than in country I was born in. And my country is much wealthier than Mexico.
You use word sufficient and yes, they might be. But I do not want sufficient I want great and the public schools are not great by any stretch of the imagination. And I also want choice. There are real reasons why schools like Stanford are considered the best in the world.
As for money. I recommend to you this book where the author describes in detail how the poorest in poor nations think about education. They definitely do not prefer the public education. Also he makes quite clear that education does not need to be expensive.
>Another point that I don't agree with you is that I believe parents are not qualified to decide what is objectively or subjectively better for their children in regards to their academic education. They don't know (or don't want to know) the trends nor the socioeconomical effects that stem from deciding on the type of education they receive. And more often than not they are manipulated through fearmongering into decisions that ultimately will have a negative effect in their children's lives. They don't have the psycology background to predict the effects such policies may also have in their mental health development. So decisions are ultimately made at best by people with no idea of what they are doing and in the worst case they are being somewhat manipulated against their childrens best interest. It's like if a nasa scientist took advice from a plumber regarding the ignition system or a rocket.
This is a line of argument I hear very often and it is a bad argument. Plus you are distorting the reality in several ways.
First. The argument I am making is not that the parents are educated in schooling/teaching but that they have a right to make the choice. Even a bad one. Government is not here to make you smarter, better person. It is not here to make decisions for you. Arguing for the contrary is a very slippery slope and hopefully even you can see that.
Second the argument is not about parents telling what color of crayons to use. It is about teachers going completely unhinged and teaching kids objective garbage and trying to hide it.
Third your example with NASA is perverting the reality. NASA built rockets based on what the customers wanted. In that case the customer was the government and they wanted to get a rocket built that will go to the moon and that is what NASA built. They did not tell them how to build it but if it did not go to the moon, they would not have wanted it. You do not know how to build a computer (very likely) but you pay people at Apple to build one for you. Despite you not understanding the details of that you are completely capable of telling if the result is what you want. The final difference is that you can decide not to buy what Apple offers. That is what customer does. He has the freedom and right to do so. In the case we are discussion you are the customer but you cannot do that since you are forced by the government to buy. Now you are told that you cannot even complain.
It is good that parents in the USA are standing up. It is high time they do and I fully support them.
how many miserable people are ther in liechtenstein? or switzerland? have you ever heard of this: https://www.amazon.com.br/Beautiful-Tree-personal-educating-themselves-ebook/dp/B00ELPRLC0
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