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June 28, 2005
There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Education
Here's a fascinating piece found via a link on LewRockwell.com. It concerns private schooling versus "free" schooling (supported by taxpayers in foreign countries via the World Bank) in Africa and finds, not surprisingly, that the private schools not only outperform the "free" schools academically but that they also serve more children for free than do the so-called "free" schools. In fact, the "free" schools actually force parents to buy expensive uniforms in order to keep the poor kids out.
Naturally, the bureaucrats in charge of doling out the money to run the "free" schools are completely contemptuous of the private schools. For example, "Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa concedes that mushrooming private schools exist, but reports that they 'are without adequate state regulation and are of a low quality'." One education commissioner's representative sniffed that the parents sending their kids to private schools only do so for the status symbol value, "saying this, without irony, standing by her brand new silver Mercedes," the author adds parenthetically.
Asks the author:
But why would parents be foolish enough to pay for schools of such low quality? Exploring further, I spoke to parents, some of whom had taken their children to the “free” government schools, but had been disillusioned and returned to the private schools. Their reasons were straightforward: in government schools, class sizes had increased dramatically and teachers couldn’t cope with 100 or more pupils, five times the number in the private school classes.
Parents compared notes when their children came home from school, and saw that in the state schools, notebooks remained untouched for weeks; in contrast, in the private schools children’s work was always marked. One summed up the situation succinctly: “If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and veg, you have to pay for them.”
How about that? Poor Africans understand the workings of the free market better than rich bureaucrats who spend other people's money for a living. If the bureaucrats have anything to say about it, though, everyone in Africa will be forced to send kids to the "free" schools. That, of course, will help keep the Dark Continent in its place.
Posted by Mike Tennant at June 28, 2005 02:35 PM
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