waveslider Posted August 22, 2016 Posted August 22, 2016 5 hours ago, bcuzbcuz said: The free market...would always do a better job? I'll give you an example where that is not true. Here in Sweden, the past conservative government changed the school system to where venture capitalism could enter into the education market. The idea was, as you stated, to create a free market system that would be better than the government run schools. First it was the "gymnasium" level. That is the grade 10 through 12 levels of education. Privately run schools were set up that broadened the range of programs available to the students who entered the system. The initial steps were positive, because the antiquated school system in Sweden, at that time, offered this higher education to less than the total population and the choices of programs were restricted by old and stiff patterns of organization. Huge numbers of students opted out of the old system. These new schools offered programs like clothing design, computer animation and a free computer to every student. The new schools competed for student attention and attendance. But being venture capitalist organized, the idea was to turn a profit from running a school. If a school failed to markey itself successfully, class numbers fell, teachers were laid off, whole schools collapsed. All through this, the venture capitalists raked home bonuses in the millions (and in two cases, billions). Money that was previously spent on students and their materials and the hiring of qualified teachers, was now packaged and posted out of the country. Now, 15 years later, and not before venture capitalists moved into the primary, middle school and pre-school markets, the system is collapsing. Sweden has gone from one of the top systems in the world (as judged by PISA, Programme for International Student Assessment) to below average. "Swedish pupils' poor results in the latest global Pisa education ranking, released on Tuesday, has pushed Sweden below the OECD average in maths, reading comprehension, and natural sciences. No other country has fallen so abruptly as Sweden in maths over a ten-year span. Overall, not one of the other 32 countries included in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) survey has seen its students take such a beating in their studies. " Finland, Sweden's neighbour across the Baltic Sea, instead of privatizing their schools has moved to increase the demands for quality educators. Teacher requirements are based on a master's degree. Finland during the same time period has moved into 2nd place worldwide. So, does the free market improve everything??? You'll have to show some proof to verify such a wildly opinionated statement. Tell me... What governmental regulations were/are in place for the private sector to qualify to start a school? I haven't studied what went on there, so I want to asses if it was truly a free market type of thing, or if it was only crony capitalism. Usually the laws of supply and demand equal things out, although it's not without it's growing pains at first. Seeing how the greedy venture capitalists are failing so miserably, I'm quite certain that if there were more people being allowed to step up to the plate in offering competing schooling options, that there would by default be some better appealing options as those venture capitalists' schools, who instead of offering quality schooling in lieu of scooping up all the money for themselves, would provide schools that offered quality schooling, with enough profit to allow a nice rate of pay for staff and teachers, that would be cheaper than the amount of tax money that is being siphoned into the governmental schooling. Also since it appears that there is still the option of the old governmental schooling, which I assume is the case based off of you saying that a huge number opted out, instead of it just not being there as an option in the first place, the people are still paying tax dollars that pay for that schooling. This would make it not worth paying extra to go to the private sector, so that isn't really a free market either. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in my assumption, because it is just that an assumption, because I am not familiar with your country's school systems) Here in America it is quite different. The more the federal government takes control over our school systems, ie No Child Left Behind, and Common Core, the worse our education becomes. We used to rank pretty high as well, in the world, now we are ranked really low. I see the direct correlation as to the timing of those governmental overreaches and the quality level falling rapidly. To sum it up, "Free Market," means just that, "free," not government regulated to keep some out, yet favor others. No politics
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