Freedomain Radio

 A great argument against public education from the Dominican Republic.

So I was speaking with a friend of mine who is doing a master in Education in New York. I was trying to explain to him how inadecuate government regulated education is.

I first put an example about Tailors. I said imagine that tailoring becomes a topic of interest for the people and they decide to regulate it with laws. Imagine that after 20 or 40 years we had big government buildings with many offices filled with people and paperwork of detailing the current variations on how sleeves are to be knit. There’s an entire department dedicated to subdividing pants and another to evaluate the new government approved fabrics.

I told him to imagine that tailors had to take standarized curriculums to work their way up from working on the legs of the pants, up to collars of shirts. And that no tailor was ever allowed to work on the whole shirt. And that a tailor generalizing his methods for all garments was unseen, because of all the different styles and standards of work.

I asked him to imagine two women standing in a line waiting for the buttom speciallist trying to imagine a world without government regulated tailoring.

I then made the best argument. I told him to compare the quality of english learned by students in public schools and our public college with the quality of english learned in small private english institutes like the one I use to atend and give classes at.

He imediately recognized that in just a year and a half you are out of those private institutes and are able to sustain a conversation and email with friends in english. Compared to 12 years of school and highschool with 4 or 5 of college and the level is jus about half.

We concluded that private unregulated education is about 50 times better than its oposite. I asked him to imagine later a math private institute, or a history one. 50 times better, 50 times faster, with 50 times less investment. I asked him to imagine society that way. I then asked him to imagine a world without government regulated education and it was just like the example with the tailors.

Somehow I still could not get him to become an anarchist.

I’m working on it, though.

I'm still trying to grasp the definition of the term "argument from effect", so please correct me if I'm wrong.   

For the most part, would those arguments fall into that category?

 I think a much better arguement against public education is simply asking people why the government has to have a monopoly on education. Even for those people that think that we need to redistribute money to poor people cant really argue that the government has to have a monopoly. give every student a credit and let them go to whatever school they want. But thats never going to happen.

ianlippert:

give every student a credit and let them go to whatever school they want. But thats never going to happen.

Where does the credit come from?

 Yep. I'm arguing here that education without government is better based on the effects. I'm not saying that government education is moraly wrong regardless of the effects.

Free education, based on what I've seen with unregulated technical institutes and language schools is 50 times better.  But it is inmoral to tax people and then force them to your kind of "education". I can make tha argument far more rapidly and with far more power than arguing about effect.

But it's dangerous. Because you may loose the people you deploy that argument with. I try to first ease things by deploying a few arguments from effect, show the logic and then go for the kill.

What do you think?